HE PUT US IN A HOLE
Codevilla, Angelo M.
-T O _9 He Put L,':-. i n Ho ' The making of a foreign p~[[cy stero BY ANGELO41/I. ODEVILLA , ~ C j EORGE IV. BUSH WILL LEAVE AMERICA LESS COMMITTED to its own cause than he found it, and...
...Meanwhile however his special envoy, James Wolfensohn, was making sure that the money would get there indirectly...
...war: force against enemies whose death or surrender brings peace...
...Then it was about "Iraqi ~i Freedom.--When the internal balance within his :~ team shifted toward State and CIA, Iraqi freedom came to mean recasting Iraqi society as a "democracy...
...But the transmissions ran in the other direction...
...Secrecy covers pretense...
...According to Bush, the decisive U.S...
...forces are Sunni Arabs trying to restore the hegemony over the rest of the country that they had enjoyed under Saddam...
...Bush & Co...
...Instead, Bush chose Condoleezza Rice--a daughter figure, a pleasing mediatrix, intellectually insecure, whose career consisted of Bush family favors...
...CIA wanted to keep the focus on individuals rather than regimes...
...Too cunning by half...
...His intellectual history of U.S...
...Defense argued for "regime change" in general and detailed what military units were ready to move...
...But his actions speak for themsel~,es...
...The Sunnis' February 2006 destruction of the Shi'ites' holiest mosque, and the subsequent wave of retaliations, showed that U.S...
...Like Nixon, Bush covered abandonment of missile defense for America by committing to a token deployment of a system conceived as a dead end...
...No one has tried...
...imagined that the problem of terrorism was coterminous with al Qaeda and other "rogue groups," that these arise from cultures, much as folks once thought maggots came from dirt...
...Bush policy has been to entice them into a "government of national unity" by bribing the other groups to give them disproportionate power...
...But the majority of Iraqis voted against the State-CIA vision for their country...
...imagined that the problem of terrorism was coterminous with al Qaeda and other "rogue groups," that these arise from cultures, much as folks once thought maggots came from dirt...
...If he had been, his national security adviser would have been, like Henry Kissinger, an inventor of agendas--the type that bullies senior cabinet officers...
...His presidency has taught the wrong lessons about war, peace, and the world...
...APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25 HE PUT US IN A HOLE According to meeting notes published by Bob Woodward, he asked for opinions on who or what the problem was...
...When Syria retaliated by murdering locals who might have taken Bush's words seriously, he retreated with tail between legs and Secretary of State Rice posed smiling with Syria's Lebanese puppet, Emile Lahoud...
...Embarrassed, Bush publicly demanded that the Palestinian Authority return U.S...
...Still, the Bush team was deeply split...
...Continue to hector the Saudi regime on the need to have more elections, more democracy...
...In these countries, money to fuel anti-American activities is easy to find...
...As Nixon sold the Soviet Union the machinery for making key parts for the missiles aimed at America, Bush agreed to sell the management of U.S...
...Iran, jointly with Syria, runs Hezbollah...
...The governments, eager to deflect popular resentment for their kleptocracy, focus hate on America...
...So, orders did not flow from a framework of ends and means...
...Occupation policy was closer to the New York Times than to The American Spectator...
...Was he deluded that CIA was no problem...
...Then he authorized a military campaign to topple the Taliban government while avoiding the victory of its Northern Alliance rivals...
...Bush really showed his mettle with Iran...
...With regards to them, Bush's "war" translates directly as "peace processes...
...Bush went to the mat...
...foreign relations will be published by Yale University Press...
...This is war...
...Most operations have sought intelligence on persons somehow "associated" with suspected terrorists, in the hope of catching them should they actually decide to strike...
...In the countries where most Arabs live, the state-controlled media inspire hate for America...
...Knowing U.S...
...Many speculate, but few know what roles Cheney has or has not played...
...But what agenda would fit all of the above...
...War gives only two grades: A and F. George W. Bush did not earn the A. The F will haunt us all...
...These are the people who embody the causes on behalf of which terrorists terrorize...
...This will convince America's enemies that they are dealing with idiots, and will lead the American people to the dangerous error that war is not useful...
...allies Israel and Turkey, liable to a shutoff of water, fearful of a Western supported Lebanese rising--the Bush team just spoke loudly, its stick visibly limp...
...Later yet, maybe...
...Who could imagine intellectual leadership from this team...
...Hoping loudly that the Sunnis would produce someone like Northern Ireland's Gerry Adams, to whom they could make concessions and from whom they could receive promises, Bush officials have not tried to defeat them...
...Because of him foreigners will fear us less and resent us more...
...America's problem with Saudi Arabia is that its official religion, the Wahhabi sect, enabled by Saudi money to terrorize its competitors within Islam and overwhelm them financially, is the intellectual source of much of the world's terrorism...
...Nor is it at peace...
...Later yet he defined the Iraq war as the proving ground in the struggle for global democracy...
...It was Nixon who first authorized U.S...
...Bush did not seem to notice the different agendas, or that none was relevant to any common sense notion of victory...
...The governments describe themselves as the living embodiment of differences with America...
...2) Phony war...
...The U.S...
...troops in Iraq rather than feasting on America's soft suburbs...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006...
...Then yes, then no...
...What both these presidents did, however, as opposed to their rhetoric, came from the left...
...Nor has he explained his failures-probably not even to himself...
...But to seek a "government of national unity" as a remedy for civil war is to put the cart before the horse...
...dealings with the terrorist PLO, and it was Bush who officially financed it with U.S...
...In Iraq, perhaps 95 percent of the insurgents 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 ANGELO M. CODEVILLA fighting U.S...
...Living down his legacy will take a long, bloody time...
...But people who have already blown themselves up cannot be Bush & Co...
...La Donna d Mobile (The Lady Is Flighty) ~'!~ OW DO WE CHARACTERIZE a president who camii ;:'~ paigns against trying to remake foreign i) ,3~ nations, and then reduces his foreign policy to "nation building...
...What War...
...If any were to fit, the President would have had to impose it...
...Arab regimes and media continued to stoke hate for America...
...Instead, he asked for options, boxes he could check...
...3) "Peace with insult...
...The Iranian people elected as president one of the 1979 kidnappers of U.S...
...Nor, probably, did he choose to put him atop a bureaucracy known for leftism because Powell was from left of center...
...policy is to kill some gunmen while leaving their leaders free to talk--and to run the insurrection...
...Nor is he at peace...
...Bush will not make war on Iran...
...just went...
...Bush based his on the triple blind bet that all the world's demos will achieve cracy, that all will be peace loving, and that this will sweep America's troubles from the earth...
...try to talk peace...
...have not the foggiest idea what to do about it...
...A Roosevelt might impose a big agenda on diverse advisers with little ones or none...
...Did he think this most pliant of Bill Clinton's officials would lead the U.S...
...Nor has he officially revoked the policy that made 9/11 possible: the directive to passengers not to resist hijackers...
...George W. Bush gave the most telling explanation of what he was doing: "I'm the commander-see, I don't need to explain why I say things...
...By 2006 Bush was hemming and hawing about "democracy" and had fallen back on forceful reiterations of his commitment to the "War on terror...
...It accustomed Americans to lives more regimented for security's sake, and less secure...
...Saudi support of anti-American governments and movements is another major source...
...With this profound understanding of politics and leadership, he declared war-but against nobody in particular...
...forces cannot protect anyone against anyone...
...This consists of identifying the people who have the power to stop (and start) violence and then, instead of killing them, conceding part of their demands in exchange for their promises to talk to us about peace...
...As Nixon responded to Castro-backed aircraft hijackers and criminals by filling the country with metal detectors and disarming ordinary citizens in public places, Bush's domestic answer to 9/11 was to treat America's grandmas and babies as equally worthy of anti-terrorist attention as Arab young menwhile exoneratingArab governments...
...Hence Nixonian foreign policy let Jimmy Carter look the truer patriot, while Bush ended up enabling Hillary Clinton to pose as America's defender...
...Conservatives ate that up, but are at a loss to explain why it should be so...
...Bush's early appointments hinted there was no theme to his pudding...
...America will get the worst of both...
...There was least resistance to doing it against Saddam's Iraq...
...On 9/11 George W. Bush was tabula rasa...
...government has fostered and paid for "peace processes" in Northern Ireland, Colombia, and Israel...
...T O _9 He Put L...
...are on the side of the brave Lebanese and of Egyptian democrats now dead or in jail...
...money, to lobby other nations to fund it, to press Israel hard to make concessions to its leaders, in the hope that this "peace process" would "moderate" them, that this would produce democracy, that democracy would produce more moderation, that the issues of the war would go away, and that there would be peace...
...State tried to make whatever America did least disruptive to Arab regimes...
...No one around him will try...
...Send Condoleezza Rice with a powerful message that we must have a "Strategic Dialogue...
...It is not at war with as ) Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, though these countries' obvious involvement with anti-American terror arguably means they are at war with us...
...the enemy...
...As a congressman, he mirrored Wyoming's conservatism...
...Secrets of the Wizard of Oz EORGE W. BUSH CLAIMS that the nonrecurrence of attacks on the scale of 9/11 is due to his team's competent security measures, especially intelligence...
...But, in answer to an attack on America by Arabs for Arab causes, what had a skirmish in the Indian subcontinent won...
...Competence in war and peace, however, is plain for friend and foe...
...Just like Bush & Co...
...George Bush, instead of choosing among contending options, or setting a course himself, mixed the contenders with proportions and under labels that shifted with the rise and fall of favor among his courtiers...
...Then he chose to bomb Afghan mud huts until the futility of it became unbearable politically...
...Bush's Secretary of State...
...i ' O ONE CAN CONFUSE the Bush team's behavior ~:ii~ ~ since 9/11with the ordinary understanding of...
...Consider that the Bush team, starving for evidence of competence, has not, in four years, submitted to impartial scrutiny even one bit of proof concerning the involvement of any of the persons it has convicted in the media of all sorts of things...
...While the Pentagon wanted to destroy our enemy Saddam and leave Iraqis to rearrange themselves as they saw fit, State and CIA always wanted to foster a kinder, gentler version of Saddam's regime, led by its second rank officials, preferably without attack...
...But until September 10, 2001, the shifting balance of power within it was irrelevant...
...Bush & Co.'s response, to promote a political revolt within the government, merely stirred the pot further...
...As more millions become inclined to strike us, it becomes obvious that Bush & Co...
...Iraq's major groups are fighting for safety from one another...
...Hence Bush's charter for Homeland Security defines terrorism as a permanent part of the modern world--until Democracy creates new cultures that make terrorism impossible...
...Bush's actual policies have involved chasing the few persons reported to have had some connection with groups identified to us as enemies, mostly by the intelligence services of "friendly" Arab regimes...
...He threatens America with high oil prices, and cooperates with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to channel oil profits into anti-U.S, activities in Latin America...
...Whereas the Nixon national security team included redoubtable persons and argued a coherent, falsifiable case, the Bush team consisted of Harriet Miers equivalents...
...Nixon's planned surrender of Vietnam was the policy of the extreme left, which the Democratic Party had defeated at its 1968 convention...
...diplomats...
...Here as elsewhere, APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 HE PUT US IN A HOLE Bush policy sharpened the teeth that bite the hands by which he feeds them...
...weapon in Iraq is the State Department's and CIA's "nation building...
...taxpayer funds...
...They have no idea because their point of departure is that regimes are not the enemy...
...Despite Syria's military support of Iraq's antiU.S...
...We cannot know his heart and mind...
...Since both Nixon and Bush successfully marketed their wares to America's center-right majority as hard-headed patriotism, their failures tended to discredit that quality, and left conservatives holding the proverbial bag...
...But though a substantial percentage of persons associated with al Qaeda have been caught or killed, nevertheless the world has become less safe for Americans...
...For State-CIA that meant their old dream of kinder, gentler, Ba'ath party rule...
...This is another Nixon legacy...
...money...
...forces in Iraq, U.S...
...The multitude of flesh and blood enemies who are coming at us live somewhere...
...Elected, like Nixon, to defeat America's enemies, Bush tOO used the American people's mandate instead to surrender to them...
...resting purportedly on evidence of which no one is aware, bolstered by truisms, and falsifiable only by disaster...
...First, Bush came up with the excuse that the invasion would save the world from Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction...
...Elsewhere, Palestinian voters elected the most militant Islamists available...
...Nixon's foreign policy climaxed in a directive to discourage the captive nations' resistance to Soviet hegemony (the "Sonnenfeldt Doctrine...
...intelligence intimately from eight years on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee and having had clearances since the 1960s, I bet no...
...What should we do to whom...
...Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation...
...He kept George Tenet as director of Central Intelligence...
...By the same token, after having encouraged Egypt's opposition to its dictator to raise its head, after the dictator had jailed the opposition, after pleading for the dictator's mercy and being told to go...
...BUSH WILL LEAVE AMERICA LESS COMMITTED to its own cause than he found it, and beset by greater dangers...
...Bush's actions in Iraq were guided by the leftist bureaucracies of State and CIA...
...Since the Bush policy is based on the obviously counterfaetual proposition that none of the world's regimes is responsible for terrorism, counter-terrorism is not a war with a beginning and an end, but a permanent effort to "bring the terrorists to justice...
...Bush's military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, like Nixon's in Indochina, masked retreat-though with less transparency and competence...
...Averse to coupling ends and means, they made policy as variable as it was secret...
...Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University, a Claremont Institute fellow, and a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...Or did Tenet just flatter him senseless by putting the Bush name on the CIA building...
...The Nixon-Kissinger National Security Council (NSC) even included such stalwart leftists as Anthony Lake and Morton Halperin...
...They get their livelihoods, their inspirations, their money, from persons in power-the very people with whom Bush & Co...
...Donald Rumsfeld he chose as secretary of defense because Rumsfeld was personally close to the Vice President and might please conservatives...
...But Bush was not a Nixon, never mind a Roosevelt...
...Instead, in Iraq and with regard to all the countries and movements from which terrorists come, the Bush team is pursuing what has come to be known as a "peace process...
...Instead, Israel's U.S.-sponsored retreats accredited, encouraged, and democratically anointed the most violent of the violent Palestinians as their people's representatives...
...Unlike Nixon's "Safeguard" system, Bush's is not inherently expandable...
...He called on Iran's government to stop, stop, and said that America would be on the side of Iranians who seek freedom from that government...
...That, plus the billions we pay the Saudi royalty collectors for oil that they do not find and do not extract, buys a combination of hate and contempt...
...Bush's war of ill-conceived half-measures will end with Iraq's democratic majority asking America to butt out...
...Implausibly, he alleged that would-be killers of Americans preferred spending themselves against heavily armed U.S...
...Something big had to be done in the Arab world to avoid derision...
...This misunderstanding of war produces not peace but the slow motion surrender of the feckless to the bloody minded...
...Cunning...
...Sunnis before and since 2003, despite the fact that most of the world's major terrorist organizations have open headquarters in Damascus, the Bush team said nothing even about Syria's occupation of neighboring Lebanon until after Syria's assassination of Rafik Hariri had led even France to speak up...
...These governments have names: Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, to name just some...
...He did not resolve the differences nor allow their protagonists to argue them through...
...Peace With Insult BUSH TRAM MISUNDERSTANDS PEACE as badly it misunderstands war...
...Herein I point to three of the Bush team's incompetences: (1) No policy, too many policies at once, and drifting with the winds...
...government's most anti-Republican, most politicized bureaucracy to be anything else...
...It is unlikely he sent Colin Powell to the State Department because Powell had been the foremost opponent of the 1990 Gulf War...
...Insiders call it "Clinton lite at twice the price...
...It has a hand in the Palestinian Hamas...
...First, Bush said no to that...
...My experience is that the curtain of secrecy does not hide effective sources and methods but shoddy ones...
...Bush's policy, provocative rhetoric aside, amounted to general appeasement of Arabs, Chinese, North 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 Koreans, Iranians, Russians, what have you...
...Above all, Secretary Rice has almost decided to take Iran to the UN Security Council...
...That's the interesting thing about being President...
...ports to an Arab company and labeled "racist" those who objected...
...Her impotent insult had been answered by a potent one...
...Then, despite Syria's vulnerabilities--surrounded as it is by U.S...
...The political spin doctors counseled that whatever we did would have to be done on the world's behalf...
...Perhaps he intended just to purchase political cover by appointing a black while using him as a mere transmission belt...
...When that became ridiculous, he ordered coordination with those rivals and basked in the victory...
...He was pleased to lean now one way and now another-but seldom for long...
...Each of the team's parts made its case in abbreviated form...
...He promised to annihilate Israel, and is well on the way to developing nuclear weapons...
...His only contribution to his war cabinet's discussion was that he wanted to do something serious...
...As the first Bush administration's seeretary of defense he did not object to its blunders...
...The Bush team's solutions were as follows: Send former campaign spokesman Karen Hughes to tell Saudi women to shape up...
...Meanwhile CIA leaked a flood of opinions to the effect that Saddam was not involved in anti-U.S, terrorism...
...Nixon based his national security policy on the illusion that Communists could be appeased, and called it "d~tente...
...Meanwhile Bush called the occupation "the central front of our war on terror...
...His decisions about proximate actions always included some of all the positions within his team...
...Instead, it is a mixture of what it prefers to think of as cooperation, of turuing a blind eye to their contributions to our troubles, of impotent urgings to do or to refrain from certain things, and of insulting suggestions that they change their regimes...
...In the prototypical case, that of the Palestinian Authority, Bush policy has been to give it U.S...
...The facts do not suggest "intelligent design...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
