Posted on 08/24/2002 4:46:15 PM PDT by aculeus
You can hardly open an American newspaper these days without finding another "senior Republican" "breaking ranks" with President Bush over toppling Saddam: House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Senator Chuck Hagel, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Secretary of State Larry Eagleburger…
To hear The New York Times tell it, the entire Bush Sr administration except for Dad is out in the street chanting: "Hell, no, we won't go!", and it's only be a matter of time before Pop himself joins in ("Bush Says He Cannot Support Bush").
In Baghdad, Saddam is no doubt wondering why the massed ranks of Nixon/Ford/Reagan/Bush grandees are so eager to kick a sitting Republican President over his sole surviving policy on the eve of tight midterm elections in which control of both the House and Senate are at stake.
Presumably, he has written it off as a laughably crude psy-ops disinformation campaign by the Great Satan designed to sucker him into easing up on the anthrax production and getting back to work on his latest romantic novel.
But in America, alas, the naysayers are being taken seriously, even Dick Armey and Chuck Hagel. A couple of months ago, Congressman Armey's latest wheeze was that the entire Palestinian population should be removed from the West Bank, a policy initiative The New York Times thought it kindest not even to mention. But there's nothing like disagreeing with your own President to transform a Republican from a laughing stock into a respected geopolitical thinker.
It even works with Senator Hagel, who recently explained his opposition to Bush's "axis of evil" concept: "I think the reaction the President has gotten from our allies and almost every nation around the world is that words have meaning, meanings mean commitments, and commitments lead to expectations. And sometimes those expectations turn into unintended consequences." It is, in every sense, hard to argue with that.
That leaves the wise old foreign policy owls. When it comes to unsavoury foreigners, Eagleburger, Scowcroft and Kissinger are all famously "realist", though there's a fine line between realism and inertia. A decade ago, Brent Scowcroft advised Bush, Sr to stick with Gorbachev and the preservation of the Soviet Union over Yeltsin and a democratic Russia.
Last autumn, he argued in favour of leaving the Taliban in power. Inevitably Scowcroft now supports letting Saddam be because, if we start a war, "We could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a cauldron."
I agree. The only difference is that I think an explosion is long overdue and turning the whole region into a cauldron is a necessary step toward reforming it. But you can't expect Scowcroft, a stability junkie, to accept such a premise.
Just over a year ago, I sat next to him at dinner and it wasn't so much that he disagreed with this or that Administration initiative as that he was congenitally suspicious about the very concept of initiatives. He believes everything - the Soviets, the Taliban, Saddam - can be "managed".
It was managers like Scowcroft who eschewed decisive victory in the Gulf War in favour of "inspections regimes". Indeed, Saddam's eternal participation in an ongoing field study of dictatorship makes him the reductio ad absurdum of foreign-policy "management".
That's why Henry Kissinger's contribution is the most important. Despite the best efforts of The New York Times, the good doctor is not opposed to war with Iraq. He states explicitly that there's an "imperative for pre-emptive action" and sooner rather than later.
Not only does Kissinger not break ranks with Bush, but, more remarkably, he breaks ranks with himself, acknowledging that Kissingerian "realism" is no longer sufficient in an age of enemies unsusceptible to concepts like "deterrence".
To Henry Kissinger, the President's "pre-emption" doctrine is a repudiation of international relations as understood since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. But in a world where enemies with no negotiable demands can strike without warning, the Treaty of Westphalia no longer seems inviolable. Kissinger wants a "comprehensive strategy" drawn up for this new world, but at least he recognizes he's in one. Scowcroft's in September 10th.
That's the nub of it. Bush and Cheney themselves came to office with a realist, managerial view of affairs, and it's only as the true horrors of the Middle East have revealed themselves after September 11th that "realism" has been revealed to be totally divorced from reality.
Unlike his dad, Bush, Jr has acquired a "vision thing" without going looking for one: it just sort of snuck up on him as the awesomeness of the task post-9/11 became clear. It's a huge vision - to remove the real "root cause" of terrorism by remaking the Middle East - and for the moment it's too huge to be fully spelled out in the face of opposition by Colin Powell's State Department and others.
But one thing's for sure, if a fellow ever needed a sign he was on the right track, the criticisms of "senior Republicans" this past fortnight are surely it.
What Bush has to do is hard enough without all the whinning and braying that's been going on.
The Bolshevik York Times misled people on this as they are doing about most everything else.
Nor can I.
BUMP
NO FAIR! I'M PLAYING THIS GAME UNDER PROTEST! hehe
A belated pinging of the Steyn list.
I think Bush sneaks out of the White House hidden on the back seat floor of his limosine so he can secretly write Steyn columns!
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