~04Dec03-Michael Hirsh-D.C. Upside Down
IRAQ EFFECT: It’s undermining the role of the ideologues in the biggest foreign- policy election since 1968
By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Issues 2004 — There’s a natural order to things in Washington. When bad things happen in the world as a result of U.S. policy—especially if that policy is as obviously botched as postwar Iraq—heads are supposed to roll. So for months it was a mystery why no senior official in the administration played the scapegoat for George W. Bush, even as the Iraq problem turned out to be vastly more difficult than the Pentagon’s planners said it would be. Bush is both famously loyal and famously stubborn, and he seemed to believe the line his senior officials were peddling to the world: things were going just fine in Iraq.
BUT REALITY is also a very stubborn thing. As the cost in American blood and treasure in Iraq grew, Bush’s approval ratings began dipping below 50 percent for the first time. Democrats heaped scorn on his policies heading into the 2004 election campaign, and reality finally caught up with Bush. In October he announced that his national-security adviser and alter ego, Condoleezza Rice, would now oversee Iraq policy. It was a brush back to his ornery Defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and a tacit admission that the morass of postwar Iraq had become perhaps his No. 1 election issue. At about the same time, the administration shifted from a cavalier disregard for a new U.N. resolution—hinting that it might drop the idea altogether—to an eager pursuit of a resolution on the eve of a major donors’ conference. And the administration gave the United Nations far more control over the use of reconstruction funds. Meanwhile Bush’s own Republicans began questioning the $87 billion he had requested for Iraq (though they delivered most of it). Some Senate Republicans like Kay Bailey Hutchison insisted on loans over grants. Even his zealous defenders in the House sliced $1.7 billion from his plans.
Taken together, all these changes have signaled a power shift in Washington. Today there is a rebalancing of influence between the new transformationalists and the old traditionalists, between those who cry freedom and those who fret about its burdens, between the ideologues and the policy professionals. Power, in other words, is shifting away from the hawks who believe that America can do as it pleases, who embrace American hegemony, even empire, as a righteous cause and see Iraq as the first step toward a grand democratic transformation of the Arab world. That power seems to be increasingly falling to moderates who stress American limitations—carefully matching commitments to resources—and cultivating allies, and who worry that by getting bogged down in grand designs for Iraq, America is failing to deal with other dire threats like North Korea.
It is a clash between unabashed champions of U.S. power, like Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney—as well as influential neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, all of them latter-day Reaganites—and the realists who grew up embracing containment during Vietnam and the cold war. The latter include wavering realists like Rice and powerful GOP senators such as Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and John Warner, who runs the Armed Services Committee. Even within Rice’s NSC, the ideologues are losing altitude. “Traditional realists are more energized in presenting their view assertively,” says Dimitri Simes of the Nixon Center. “A lot of people are becoming quite angry with the ideologues. The feeling is they are just indifferent to facts.”
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