The failures of Bush's foreign policy

http://opinionjournal.com/wsj/?id=110009273

[rquoter]Father Knows Best?
Four failures of Bush 41's foreign policy.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Sunday, November 19, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

As president of Texas A&M University, Bob Gates abolished admissions preferences for the children and grandchildren of alumni, reportedly saying it was "unworthy of a great university." Funny, then, that he should be returning to Washington on the strength of his reputation as daddy's boy.

"Daddy," of course, is former President George H. W. Bush, for whom Mr. Gates served as deputy national security adviser and director of Central Intelligence. Today, the elder Mr. Bush is being celebrated as a foreign-policy sage whose adroit stewardship of the world stands in flattering contrast with current management. Mr. Gates, along with Bush 41 hands James Baker and Larry Eagleburger of the Iraq Study Group, are now supposed to play the part of the posse come to the rescue of the wayward son. Newsweek even commissioned a poll that found that "67% favor Bush Senior's internationalist approach to foreign policy over his son's more unilateral course."

Curiously, a similar percentage of Americans voted for someone other than Mr. Bush during his 1992 re-election bid. So it's worth reprising just what his "internationalist approach" achieved, and where it failed. The senior Mr. Bush is justly remembered as the architect of the broad coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait--and of the Coalition of One that took down Manuel Noriega of Panama. Bush 41 also deserves great credit for engineering the North American Free Trade Agreement and supporting German reunification when it was opposed by the likes of Margaret Thatcher.

But consider four other shorthands for the Bush 41 record. One is "1-202-456-1414," the number for the White House switchboard. As secretary of state, Mr. Baker read it aloud in congressional testimony in 1990, ostensibly for the benefit of Israelis once they got "serious about peace." A year later, and for much the same reason, the Bush administration threatened to withhold $10 billion in commercial loan guarantees, which Israel needed to cope with the influx of some one million Russian Jews--fully a fifth of its population.

For its efforts, the Bush administration brought Arabs and Israelis together for the Madrid Peace Conference, which set the groundwork for the Oslo Accords. These were touted as historic achievements, but for Israel it meant more terrorism, culminating in the second intifada, and for the Palestinians it meant repression in the person of Yasser Arafat and mass radicalization in the movement of Hamas. Worse, Mr. Baker fostered the fatal perception that the failure of Arabs and Jews to make peace was the root of the region's problems, not a symptom of them, and that the obstacle to peace was intransigent Israel, not militant Islam. Bob Gates later gave voice to that perception when he wrote, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, that the road to Mideast peace must "not kowtow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's obstructionism."

Or take "Lawrence of Serbia," the moniker Mr. Eagleburger earned for his initial indulgence, as the State Department's point man on Yugoslav affairs during the early 1990s while the country was coming apart, of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic. Mr. Eagleburger, who had longstanding business ties in Belgrade, spent the early period of the war largely ignoring Mr. Milosevic's depredations on his neighbors, including paramilitary slaughters in Vukovar and concentration camps in Omarska. "There was a kind of preference for stability and an attachment to the old Yugoslavia over our interests in human rights," Patrick Glynn of the American Enterprise Institute told Newsday in 1992, adding the administration had "been standing by, waiting while the final solution is played out."

Which brings us to "Chicken Kiev," Mr. Bush's spectacularly misconceived August 1991 speech in what was shortly to become the capital of independent Ukraine. Mr. Bush's reluctance to acknowledge--and better manage--the breakup of Yugoslavia was partly a function of his reluctance to acknowledge the impending breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall from grace of his friend Mikhail Gorbachev. The U.S. was the 39th country to re-establish diplomatic ties with Lithuania, after Iceland and Mongolia had already paved the way. Once Mr. Gorbachev was gone, Mr. Bush was equally reluctant to help the new Russia get on its feet, prompting Richard Nixon to complain about the administration's "pathetically inadequate response in light of the opportunities we face in the crisis in the former Soviet Union."

But surely no Bush 41 failure was as great--or as consequential--as his apparently flip suggestion, following "victory" in the Gulf War, that the "Iraqi people . . . take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step down." Tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds took him seriously, and tens of thousands paid with their lives as Saddam quelled the revolt while the Bush administration stood by, lest it exceed its U.N. mandate.

None of this is to say that Mr. Gates is merely an avatar of Bush the Father, much as his nomination is being played that way in the media, or that he hasn't learned from past mistakes. But critics of the current administration and the "disaster" visited on Iraq by neoconservative ideologues might usefully reflect on the previous disasters visited by the non-ideologues on Iraqis, Croats and Bosnians, among others sacrificed in the name of prudence. A decade from now, they just might find themselves ruing the day Bush 43 abandoned his idealism--and the people that idealism has liberated or inspired--in the service of "realism," suffused by panic.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays. [/rquoter]

 

as usual, Hitchens has a jaundiced, gimlet-eyed view of the current fascination with "realists."

http://www.slate.com/id/2154164/


[rquoter]Look Who's Cutting and Running Now
James Baker is the last guy we should listen to about Iraq.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Nov. 20, 2006, at 4:39 PM ET

According to the Associated Press, Henry Kissinger made it official Sunday morning in London, when he told a BBC interviewer that military victory was not possible in Iraq. Actually, what he said was this:

"If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."

There are a couple of qualifications in there, and what Kissinger is describing is really more the definition of a political victory than a military one, but say what you will about our Henry, he wasn't born yesterday. He must have known that the question would come up, what his answer would be, and what the ensuing AP headline ("Kissinger: Iraq Military Win Impossible") would look like.

Taken together with the dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld, the nomination of Robert Gates, and the holy awe with which the findings of the Iraq Study Group are now expected, this means that the Bush administration, or large parts of it, is now cutting if not actually running, and it is looking for partners in the process. (You have to admit that it was clever of the president to make it appear that Rumsfeld had been fired by the electorate rather than by him.) It seems that Kissinger has been giving his "realist" advice even to the supposedly most hawkish member of the administration, namely the vice president, and at a dinner in honor of the president-elect of Mexico a few nights ago, I saw him mixing easily with such ISG elders as former Rep. Lee Hamilton. Members of this wing or tendency were all over the New York Times on Sunday as well, imputing near-ethereal qualities of leadership to Robert Gates, so a sort of self-reinforcing feedback loop appears to be in place.

The summa of wisdom in these circles is the need for consultation with Iraq's immediate neighbors in Syria and Iran. Given that these two regimes have recently succeeded in destroying the other most hopeful democratic experiment in the region—the brief emergence of a self-determined Lebanon that was free of foreign occupation—and are busily engaged in promoting their own version of sectarian mayhem there, through the trusty medium of Hezbollah, it looks as if a distinctly unsentimental process is under way.

This will present few difficulties to Baker, who supported the Syrian near-annexation of Lebanon. In order to recruit the Baathist regime of Hafez Assad to his coalition of the cynical against Saddam in the Kuwait war, Baker and Bush senior both acquiesced in the obliteration of Lebanese sovereignty. "I believe in talking to your enemies," said Baker last month—invoking what is certainly a principle of diplomacy. In this instance, however, it will surely seem to him to be more like talking to old friends—who just happen to be supplying the sinews of war to those who kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Is it likely that they will stop doing this once they become convinced that an American withdrawal is only a matter of time?

At around the same time he made this statement, Baker was quoted as saying, with great self-satisfaction, that nobody ever asks him any more about the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power in 1991. It's interesting to know that he still feels himself invested in that grand bargain of realpolitik, which, contrary to what he may think, has not by any means been forgotten. It's also interesting in shedding light on the sort of conversations he has been having in Baghdad. For millions of Iraqis, the betrayal of their uprising against Saddam in 1991 is something that they can never forget. They tend to bring it up, too, and to fear a repetition of it. This apprehension about another sellout is especially strong among the Shiite and Kurdish elements who together make up a majority of the population, but it seems from its public reports so far that the ISG has not visited the Kurdish north of the country. If Baker thinks that the episode is a closed subject, it shows us something of what the quality of his "listening" must be like.

In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant Allied soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let's give Baker his due—"on side." The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to "address the root cause" and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the "root causes" of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.[/rquoter]

 

how many of those women in burkas and head scarves would have been allowed to attend a similar meeting saudi arabia, iran, or syria?

 

that'a a bit of a leap, but i'd be fine with a democratic regime in SA that granted women equal rights. you're not?