Hey, Hey, how many kids did you kill today?
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October 19, 2003
THE BUCK STOPS WHERE?
For Better or Worse, It's Becoming 'Bush's War'
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON — All may not be well at the White House if the president feels compelled to assert, as George W. Bush did in a television interview last week, that "the person who is in charge is me." If a president has to state the obvious — in 1995, Bill Clinton memorably announced that he was still relevant — it is even more likely that something, somewhere, is wrong.
In this case, it was the management of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy, or at least the public's perception of it. The president's comment was meant to drive home the message that the American occupation would now be overseen by the White House, not the Pentagon. Specifically, Iraq policy would be run by the new "Iraq Stabilization Group," led by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, who works down the West Wing corridor from Mr. Bush and is one of his closest aides.
To a lot of the president's critics and some of his supporters, the change was an overdue attempt by the White House to gain control of what the chattering class calls "Rummy's war," but which history will remember as Mr. Bush's war.
Others, though, say the shift represents a significant risk for Mr. Bush. The decision-making, they argue, is now even closer to the Oval Office, with no one but the president to blame when things go badly.
"It raises the political stakes considerably," said David M. Kennedy, a professor of history at Stanford. "The president has essentially denuded himself of possible political cover, should he need it. It strikes me as a sign of real political urgency, and possible political desperation, that he is ready to take this into the White House and expose himself in that way."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Mr. Kennedy added, can no longer be the administration's public warlord. "Rumsfeld is essentially off the hook," Mr. Kennedy said. "It's Condi and the White House who now have control. Bush has really given up the option of having someone to throw to the wolves."
American history is full of examples of presidents who brought contentious policies into the Oval Office and paid a price. Lyndon B. Johnson picked bombing targets in Vietnam, and had a close-at-hand national security adviser, Walt W. Rostow, who was a relentless supporter of military intervention in Southeast Asia.
Similarly, Jimmy Carter brought his energy policy directly to the White House, under the command of his energy secretary, James R. Schlesinger, at a time of rationing and gas lines. Mr. Carter's deep involvement ensured that the public saw the policy as his. "When it flopped, he got 100 percent of the blame," said Bruce J. Schulman, a professor of history at Boston University.
A counterexample is Ronald Reagan, who escaped much of the blame for the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 in Lebanon, when 239 Americans were killed. Mr. Schulman says the White House shifted the task of managing the aftermath, and withdrawing the marines, to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.
"Reagan very deftly had the handling of that policy put in the Pentagon, so that he could continue his muscle-flexing Evil Empire rhetoric," Mr. Schulman said. "It also deflected some of the responsibility for this operation that left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. It would have been a much more conspicuous failure had it been left in the White House."
In the current administration, there may be other dangers in bringing an issue like Iraq directly under White House control. "The White House can fall into the trap of micromanaging these large, sprawling projects," said David R. Gergen, a White House adviser in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations. "One irony is that back in the 70's, it was Dick Cheney himself, after serving as the White House chief of staff, who spoke publicly about the dangers of a White House trying to overmanage security policy."
To others, the dangers are worth the benefits of having the policy controlled by Ms. Rice, whose job, after all, is to sort out competing directives among the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. "The White House is the only organization, through the N.S.C., that can handle an issue of this complexity," said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was on the National Security Council staff under Mr. Clinton. The other practical implication, he added, was that Mr. Rumsfeld would have less power over daily operations in Iraq, including the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by L. Paul Bremer III.
"We will never again have Rumsfeld vetoing people for the C.P.A. because he doesn't like them," said Mr. Daalder, the author, with James M. Lindsay of "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy."
These sharply opposing views may exist because no one right now has a clear idea of what the Iraq Stabilization Group will do — or whether it was Oval Office window dressing at a time of declining public support for the president's Iraq policy. The White House, which has sought to pacify Mr. Rumsfeld after he complained publicly over his loss of power to Ms. Rice, has been of little help in describing its function.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said last week that the Pentagon "continues to be the one overseeing the reconstruction in Iraq," while Ms. Rice's operation was "just another coordinating group within the National Security Council structure," operating in "four separate cells."
Whatever the role of the Iraq Stabilization Group, or the implications of moving it next to the Oval Office, the reality is that the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the occupation will be tied to the commander in chief who gave the orders. "There's always a thin veneer of political protection when the management of problems is farmed out to the agencies," Mr. Gergen said. "But when a policy goes horribly bad, the president gets the blame anyway."
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