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POLITICS-US: Slowly, Slowly, the Ship of State Turns Realist
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 4, 2007 (IPS) - With just over 18 months left in office, the
administration of U.S. President George W. Bush appears once again to be
moving in a more "realist" direction in its dealings with the rest of the
world, including the Middle East.
The most obvious sign came during this week's regional meeting in Sharm El
Sheikh, Egypt, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent a 30-minute
tete-a-tete with her Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem, reportedly
focused on securing greater cooperation from Damascus on sealing its
border with Iraq.
It was the first bilateral cabinet-level encounter between the U.S. and
Syria since the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri, in protest of which Washington recalled its
ambassador from Damascus.
While Rice later insisted that her meeting differed from last month's
controversial visit to Damascus by Democratic Speaker of the House of
Representatives Nancy Pelosi because the discussion was both confined to
Iraq and no photographers were present to record the occasion, most
analysts here saw it one as the latest - and potentially most
significant - in a series of tentative steps toward implementing key
recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by super-realist
James Baker.
"Gee, all of a sudden meeting with the Syrian government is not an act of
high treason," wrote Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University
of Michigan on his influential blog, who noted that Rice had even sought
Pelosi's advice before setting out on her trip.
"I can only think that Condi's meeting with Mouallem is a sign that (Vice
President) Dick Cheney's grip on power inside the White House is slipping
badly, and that Condi has Bush's ear on the need to engage."
Cheney, the leader of the administration's hawks, had publicly condemned
Pelosi's visit to Damascus as "bad behaviour", while some of his
neo-conservative allies outside the administration even called for her
prosecution under a 200-year-old law that makes it a crime for individual
citizens to communicate with hostile foreign governments to influence
their behaviour.
Cheney, who is still smarting from Bush's approval - following a personal
appeal by Rice - of a controversial nuclear deal with North Korea in
February, suffered another setback this week when the White House
announced the resignation of Deputy National Security Adviser J.D. Crouch,
II, a veteran hard-liner who has overseen the day-to-day management of the
National Security Council (NSC) during Bush's second term.
Crouch, who served first as assistant secretary of defence for
international security affairs and then as ambassador to Romania, during
Bush's first term, chaired the inter-agency deliberations that led to the
adoption of Bush's "Surge" strategy to send some 30,000 more troops to
Baghdad beginning in February.
He first worked for the vice president when Cheney headed the Pentagon
under former President George H.W. Bush. In that capacity, Crouch, long a
proponent of developing new nuclear weapons and missile defence systems,
helped prepare the 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) overseen by
then-Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and the vice president's
future chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, both of whom played key roles in
Bush's first term.
The DPG draft, which was leaked to the New York Times and subsequently
repudiated by the elder Bush administration, called, among other things,
for Washington to pursue military dominance in and around Eurasia, carry
out pre-emptive attacks against potential treats, and rely on ad hoc
alliances rather than multilateral mechanisms, such as the U.N. or NATO,
to promote U.S. interests - ideas which were incorporated 10 years later
in the younger Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy.
The announcement of Crouch's departure was particularly remarkable given
the widely reported - and as yet unsuccessful - search by his boss,
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, for a so-called "war czar". This
would be someone with sufficient stature and clout to ensure that White
House directives on the conduct of the U.S. "war on terror", especially in
Iraq and Afghanistan, are implemented so that Hadley himself, who
colleagues say is already over-worked, can address himself to other
problems. His deputy's imminent departure can only add to his burdens.
Indeed, Hadley's failure to recruit a candidate - at least four top
retired military generals have reportedly rejected his entreaties to
date - has added to the growing impression that the White House
policy-makers are increasingly in disarray, an impression compounded by
the public observation by one of the generals, Gen. Jack Sheehan, that
"they don't know where the hell they're going."
That situation is particularly harmful for the hawks, who have watched
their numbers within the administration decline steadily since the
beginning of the second term.
They began losing their all-important Pentagon base with the departures in
early 2005 of Wolfowitz and the neo-conservative under-secretary for
policy, Douglas Feith. The replacement last November of Donald Rumsfeld by
Robert Gates, a realist and Baker confidant, at the top of the Department
of Defence eliminated yet another critical Cheney ally, while Rumsfeld's
powerful undersecretary for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, and the
assistant secretary for international security affairs, Peter Rodman, have
also taken their leave.
Libby, Cheney's savvy former chief of staff, resigned after his indictment
in October 2006 for lying to federal investigators (for which he was tried
and found guilty earlier this year), and most veteran Cheney watchers
believe that the vice president's influence over other agencies has
declined as a result.
At the State Department, meanwhile, the departures this year of former
U.N. Amb. John Bolton and former undersecretary for arms control and
international security Robert Joseph have removed key members of the
hawks' network. This leaves Cheney's office and the National Security
Council (NSC), where neo-conservative Elliott Abrams, who reportedly
encouraged Israel to attack Syria during the last summer's war with
Hezbollah, rules over Middle East policy, as the last redoubt of the
hawks.
It is in that context that the State Department has been moving - if
timidly, according to some analysts - to assert its more "realist" views
on crisis areas, first North Korea, and increasingly in the Middle East,
pursuant to the recommendations of the ISG of which Gates himself was a
member until his nomination to take over the Pentagon.
Those moves have been encouraged as well by the aggressiveness of the new
Democratic majorities in Congress since last November's elections and the
growing uneasiness of Republican lawmakers, particularly on Iraq, as the
2008 elections approach.
While Republicans have remained remarkably disciplined during the most
recent legislative battle over the imposition of a deadline for the
withdrawal of U.S. combat troops, most analysts here appear to agree that,
absent measurable progress on the ground in stabilising Iraq, they will
begin deserting Bush in droves by September.
The regional environment in the Middle East is also forcing the
administration to move in a more realist direction, particularly as Saudi
Arabia has increasingly made clear its distaste for the hawks' strategy of
tensions in the region, particularly their hopes of further stoking
tensions in Lebanon, and provoking a new round of civil conflict between
Hamas and Fatah in Palestine.
Indeed, Cheney himself is expected to get an earful when he travels to the
region this weekend to meet with, among others, Saudi King Abdullah, who
shocked the administration last month when he denounced the U.S. military
presence in Iraq as an "illegitimate foreign occupation".
(END)
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