Posted on 12/15/2003 12:45:38 PM PST by SJackson
WASHINGTON - It may take four or five months to take shape, but a new scenario could be unfolding, a shifting balance of power within the Bush administration, a reconfiguration in the interests of realism - and aimed at a Bush re-election victory:
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz will have heard the siren song of academia and returned to teach in ivy-covered halls somewhere;
His deputy, Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, will have decided he can't really afford to put his young kids through school on a government salary, and that it's time to return to a lucrative law practice;
John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, will have been advised that the sustained excitement of defending US national sovereignty against all comers - from al-Qaeda, to the French, to Amnesty International - was simply too much for his nervous system, and that it was time to take a long vacation;
And finally, Vice President Dick Cheney will have been sternly warned by his doctors that his chronic heart problems make his participation in a rigorous re-election battle simply out of the question and that he will have to take himself off the ticket for the sake of his own survival, if not for that of his deeply concerned family members.
Fantasy? Mindless speculation? Wishful thinking? Desperation?
Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that such scenarios suddenly appeared far more real when former secretary of state James A Baker returned last week to take up his new office in the White House close to the Oval Office, as President George W Bush's personal envoy for persuading other countries to forgive tens of billions of dollars in Iraq's debt.
The return of Baker - long-time consiglieri to the Bush family whose last mission was to secure all of Florida's electoral votes for George W in 2000 regardless of the state's actual voting laws or how people actually voted - made an already bad week for administration hawks much, much worse.
One unnamed "senior administration official", quoted by The New York Times noted that Baker wields vastly greater influence over the Bushes than Secretary of State Colin Powell, his fellow-realist, could ever hope to have. "Baker is Bush,"the official said. "Other countries know that Powell doesn't win all the [intra-administration] battles. If you deal with Baker, you know you're going to get what you need," said the official source in a line that must have sent chills down the spines of the neo-conservatives and their right-wing fellow-travelers, most notably Cheney himself.
Of course, it is not yet known how much Baker, the master diplomatic puppeteer of the first Gulf War in 1991 and Ronald Reagan's former White House chief of staff and treasury secretary, intends to weigh in on policy decisions that go beyond his specific brief.
But the fact that he is now in the White House and dealing directly with all of Washington's major allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East on the future of Iraq, if not the entire region, places him in the thick of the administration's foreign policy, to put it mildly. From now on, very little is likely to be decided on anything that affects Iraq or US alliances without his "input".
And one can only imagine Baker's input to Bush on Wolfowitz's incredibly ill-timed decision, making Baker's task far more difficult and expensive, to announce that the allies that are owed most of Iraq's debt will not be permitted to bid on some US$18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts.
If Baker interprets Wolfowitz's move as a deliberate effort to sabotage his mission ab initio (as did New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Friday), the consequences could be severe for the former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, whose hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second Bush term were already on the wane.
But the threats posed by Baker's presence to the hawks, especially the neo-conservatives both in and out of the administration, go far beyond personal score-settling in which Baker has historically shown little interest: they are strategic. By all accounts, Baker believes the neo-con domination of US foreign policy since September 11, 2001, especially the Iraq invasion, has been disastrous for the country and, perhaps more important, for Bush Jr's re-election chances.
Before the Iraq invasion, Baker made no secret of his opposition to the US waging unilateral war, although he was more discreet about his dismay than Bush I's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to whom Baker remains close.
Baker, like other realists, has also been deeply skeptical, not to say incredulous, of neo-conservative ambitions to "remake the face of the Middle East" by exporting democracy. Long associated with "big oil", Baker would find the kind of radical regional change promoted by the neo-cons to be unacceptably risky and destabilizing.
Moreover, Baker has always disdained Israel's right-wing Likud Party. It was he who threatened to cut off housing guarantees if then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir did not take part in the 1991 Madrid peace talks that led eventually to the Oslo peace process. This caused great public dismay and anger among neo-conservatives like Feith, the powerful former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, the current Middle East director on the National Security Council.
And he has also sided consistently with those, like Powell and Bush's father, who have favored consistently constructive relations with Beijing, a position which Bush Jr has clearly come to share, as he demonstrated last week during the visit of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Indeed, the younger Bush tilted so far, at least rhetorically, in China's direction at the expense of Taiwan that top neo-cons outside the administration claimed for the first time since he took office that Bush himself was guilty of "appeasement", a charge highly unlikely to generate warm feelings in the White House.
Finally, as secretary of state, Baker gave top priority to close ties to traditional European allies, including Germany and France, or what the neo-cons and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld have referred to disdainfully as "Old Europe". In that respect, Wolfowitz's directive banning German and French contractors from bidding on reconstruction contracts at this time not only has made Baker's job more difficult and more costly for the US taxpayer, but also has confirmed that the hawks have their priorities upside down.
But Baker, Scowcroft, Powell and their fellow realists had already reached that conclusion 12 years ago when some of the neo-cons, like Wolfowitz and Perle, were furious that the Gulf War ended without the US army marching on Baghdad.
Similarly, it was Wolfowitz and his boss at the time, then-secretary of defense Cheney, who kept up a stream of strident warnings that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev remained a committed communist whose designs for global conquest were no different from his predecessors' right up until ... well, right up until the Soviet Union collapsed. Even then, they thought it might be a trick.
And of course it was Wolfowitz and his top deputy, I Lewis Libby - now Cheney's powerful chief of staff - who prepared the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance draft calling for the US to pursue a strategy of global domination and pre-emption, nuclear if necessary, against rogue states and possibly emerging rivals.
Baker, Scowcroft, and then-armed forces chief of staff Powell, not to mention Bush Sr, were so alarmed - as were senior lawmakers and European allies after parts of it leaked to The New York Times - that only Cheney's promises to overhaul the text saved the jobs of its two main authors. Still, the radical proposals of Wolfowitz and Libby would endure and guide US policy after the September 11 attacks a decade later.
In many ways, therefore, the hawks themselves already see Baker as their nemesis, but they have been steadily losing power over the past several months in any case.
Bush's harsh words for Taiwan's leader this week, and the readiness with which neo-cons like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol accuse him of appeasement, attest to the very serious strains between the White House and the neo-con network. Until now that network has assiduously avoided attacking the president himself for any disagreements it has had with the administration.
In addition, the balance now appears to be tilting away from the hawks, who held sway since the Iraq war, and toward the realists in the intra-administration fights over Iran, Syria and North Korea. The decision last week by the Iraqi Governing Council, for example, to disarm and deport the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq marked a signal defeat for Cheney and the neo-conservatives, who have wanted to use those Iranian resistance fighters against the Islamic Republic. Similarly, the acceleration of "Iraqification" in neighboring Iraq without a thoroughgoing "de-Ba'athification" marks a triumph of the realists.
Indeed, Baker's arrival in some ways may crown the successful development of a effective "counter-network" within the administration that has gradually eroded the hawks' authority since September. Aside from Powell and senior officers in the uniformed military and the intelligence community who were always dubious of the hawks, key members of this group include the National Security Council's coordinator for strategic planning, ambassador Robert Blackwill, who came on board in September, and the chief of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, ambassador L Paul Bremer, in Baghdad.
Both are former foreign service officers who are conservative but not ideologues, Bremer and Blackwill have known each other since they both worked for arch-realist Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s. Blackwill is particularly interesting, both because he was Condoleezza Rice's boss as National Security Council director of European and Soviet Affairs under Scowcroft in the first Bush administration. In that capacity Blackwill clashed with Wolfowitz and Cheney over Gorbachev. He reportedly met Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon as a political officer in the US embassy in Tel Aviv and has remained on good terms, although he disdains neo-conservatives.
When hired by Rice, former ambassador to India Blackwill's job was to assert firm White House control over Iraq policy, which had been seen increasingly between August and October as having been botched by the Pentagon, especially Feith's office. By most accounts, he has made so much progress in that regard that he also has begun weighing in on overall Middle East policy, possibly at Abrams' and the neo-conservatives' expense.
Of course, the situation in Iraq is the most important single factor in the changing the balance of power within the administration. But Blackwill was also brought in to ensure that the National Security Council enforces discipline - something which Rice on her own was unwilling or unable to do - over all the policy agencies, particularly the Pentagon. Under Cheney's protection, the Pentagon has often appeared to act on its own. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, who warned several months ago that there should be "no more wars" before the November election, also has weighed in to support these changes.
Indeed, some analysts believe that Baker's return was promoted by Rove as part of a discreet "dump-Cheney" campaign. Philip Giraldi, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and political columnist for The American Conservative, wrote last week that Baker and Scowcroft are "orchestrating" a Rove-backed campaign to blame Cheney and the neo-conservatives around him and in the Pentagon for botching Iraq and, with it, Bush's re-election chances.
But the larger, foreign policy impact of the resurgence of the realists - capped by Baker's return - may already be tangible.
While Israel's Sharon clearly is under growing domestic pressure to reinvigorate peace negotiations with the Palestinians, his recent moves - as well as Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's unexpectedly far-reaching proposals for territorial compromise - suggest that the Israelis themselves perceive a shift in the US administration's internal balance of power that needs to be accommodated.
In this context of shifting balance, added significance may well be ascribed to Powell's recent meetings with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and the cosponsorship of Baker's Houston-based institute of a poll showing majority support among both Israelis and Palestinians for the recently proposed Geneva Accord.
If Baker's European interlocutors suggest this week that real pressure by Washington on Israel - perhaps of the kind Baker exerted back in 1991 - could make them more amenable to reducing Iraq's official debt, then the larger implications of Baker's appointment become more tangible. In any event, Wolfowitz's timing in barring some allies from Iraq's rebuilding contracts has clearly given Mssrs Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, Vladimir Putin and other European leaders more leverage to raise issues of this kind.
And for the hawks, even the recognition that the Europeans enjoy significant leverage over US foreign policy is very bad news indeed.
(Inter Press Service)
Pretty sneaky, even for a Kristol.
OK I made it passed this piece of political stupidity
The return of Baker - long-time consiglieri to the Bush family whose last mission was to secure all of Florida's electoral votes for George W in 2000 regardless of the state's actual voting laws or how people actually voted -
But couldn't stomach anymore after this .....
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that one. Baker, once he was pried away grudgingly from State, presided over the most miserable re-election campaign the world has yet seen.
You got it.
All this neocon, schmeocon stuff is amusing, it's always been discontented Arabists whining. Well all you Arabists out there (and how can there be any since 9/11) you got your boy.
Sshh, let them dream.
Bush: "I will never forget the lessons of September 11th, 2001..."
I know I won't either.
Jim Lobe is a piece of debris. Calling James A. Baker the 3rd a consiglieri? Talk about false monikers......(Bill Clintons sycophantic Sidney Blumenthal OWNS the trademark on the word Consigliere.) Jim Baker and his Law firm were just a hell of alot smarter than The Gore campaign's David "Mr. Anti-trust" Boies was, "in following the rules as stated in Florida Law" Mr. Lobe, and someday you'll get over it. In 2000 The Supreme Court of the USA wrote in a decision that there were "......constitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court......." Case Closed. Have a good day Mr Lobe.
They call him the velvet hammer, don't they? I am amused by those that try to lay odds on whose voice is most influential in the Bush administration. Apparently these people forget what the President said when he named his cabinet, which was something like if he wanted only people who agreed with him there would be no point in having them. In the end it's the President's ear, not the voice, that decides who has influence.
Baker not only has the skills of an ambassador, he has toughness. Most importantly, he will have no agenda except to do what's best for the President's objectives.
His own. Perhaps he has some self-preservation instinct. Perhaps he just isn't flexible enough.
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