Do the Bureaucrats like what Bush is up to? Hey, it interferes with their time to figure out their vacation schedule!
washingtonpost.com
Doubt in the Ranks
By David Ignatius
Friday, November 1, 2002; Page A35
Mobilizing the United States for war is hard enough, but it becomes truly difficult when the State Department, the Pentagon brass and the intelligence agencies are all, for somewhat different reasons, expressing doubts about the mission.
Congress is running scared on Iraq, for fear of seeming unpatriotic on the eve of midterm elections. But that political silence has masked the increasingly vocal grumbling throughout the Washington bureaucracy.
That's the dilemma President Bush faces over Iraq, and it's no surprise that he has been trimming his own rhetoric over the past month. That doesn't mean the United States won't march on Baghdad in the end. As the president said in his Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati, "I hope that this will not require military action, but it may."
The policy debate that surrounded the Cincinnati speech marked a sharper turn in U.S. policy than has generally been recognized. For it committed the Bush administration to consult with its allies and seek a new United Nations resolution on inspections as a prelude to war.
Today, nearly a month later, that U.N. process is still dragging on, with its mix of sanctimonious public statements and devious backroom bargaining.
Perhaps Bush imagines that a France-approved U.N. inspection regime will be intrusive enough to contain Iraq's biological weapons threat -- and thereby buy more time for "regime change." Perhaps he will decide to ignore U.N. resolutions and do what he likes in Iraq, sooner rather than later. But whatever the rationale, this diplomatic interlude is having the perverse effect of worsening the split between America and its allies rather than alleviating it.
Six months ago, when analysts such as Robert Kagan were celebrating America's cult of military strength, the common view was that the Europeans were powerless to stop Washington. It turns out that's not exactly true. The Europeans are discovering that they can use institutions such as the United Nations as a brake against what they consider America's "hyper-power."
In the "soft power" arena of these international organizations, the United States is vulnerable. So is Bush's only reliable ally, Britain's Tony Blair, who was dissed this week by a newly emboldened French President Jacques Chirac. The French leader said Blair had been "very rude" for daring to question a Franco-German deal to maintain the farm subsidies that underlie the European Union's "free" market. But the deeper message of the spat was that France and Germany can be just as "unilateralist" in pursuing their national interests as the United States.
Bush's real problem is that his Iraq policy has few passionate allies at home, either. That's increasingly true within the great bureaucracies that shape U.S. foreign policy.
The skepticism starts with Secretary of State Colin Powell, who remains as skittish about fighting a war in the streets of Baghdad as he was in 1991. His wariness extends to hundreds of U.S. diplomats around the world who spend their days listening to foreign governments complain about U.S. Iraq policy.
Washington's dissent extends further, into the ranks of the military. The extent of Pentagon mistrust of the leading Iraq hawk, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was revealed in a remarkable article last month by Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks of The Post. They reported that military anger over Rumseld's "frequently abusive and indecisive" style was "influencing the Pentagon's internal debate over a possible invasion of Iraq, with some officers questioning whether their concerns about the dangers of urban warfare and other aspects of a potential conflict are being sufficiently weighed."
Another skeptical bureaucracy is the Central Intelligence Agency. At a time when the CIA is waging a global anti-terrorism war against al Qaeda, the Iraq talk strikes many intelligence officers as a dangerous distraction. CIA analysts fear that in its eagerness to find an Iraqi "smoking gun," the Bush administration may be "cooking" the intelligence -- that is, implying connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that have not been established.
Rank-and-file CIA officers "don't want to do this war," says one former agency official of his former colleagues. They fear, in part, that an Iraq war will jeopardize the "liaison" relationships with other intelligence services that are crucial in fighting al Qaeda.
If President Bush is going to lead the country into battle, he needs to begin by convincing his own national security bureaucracy. The effects of Iraq, like Vietnam, could last a generation. It's crucial to get it right -- and to have a united country that will stay the course behind the president, even when things turn nasty and optimistic assumptions prove wrong.
One of the most poignant aspects of Vietnam was that Lyndon Johnson was pushed into a war he suspected would go badly. The pressure to fight came from hawks in the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the State Department. Bush won't have that excuse. He may choose war, but if he does so today it will be despite widespread, if largely silent, dissent. |
