What the President meant to say...
Get with the program, Win! These guys know the guy in the Whitehouse is a yahoo. Does anyone remember "the bombs will be falling in 5 minutes." Ha, ha, ha. Now what the hell is "Peance and Freeance", a famous Shrubism?
junkyschoolbus.passingtrees.com
This guy thinks people who do this as a career should shut up and let the President do what he wants. Never mind that the constitution prevents the Prez from making or breaking treaties.
Media Elites Drive Wedge Between Bush, Powell
Posted Nov. 30, 2001
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
Every skilled government official knows these magic words: "What the president meant to say is … ." And with good reason: This turn of phrase allows any presidential-policy pronouncement with which the unelected, unaccountable and generally faceless bureaucracy disagrees to be subverted if not undone.
Over the years, this practice has been raised to an art form at the State Department, particularly when the president in question was of a relatively conservative stripe, such as Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. The permanent-government types at Foggy Bottom are much given to explaining to their foreign interlocutors statements and policies of which they disapprove in terms that contradict the clear meaning of the president's words.
Rarely has that tendency been on more regular, public and troubling display than under Colin Powell's tenure at State. This case of what might be considered chronic insubordination is put in the most flattering, indeed fawning, light in an 8,000-plus word paean to the secretary of state published in the New York Times Magazine on Nov. 25.
The essay by columnist Bill Keller was headlined "The World According to Colin Powell" and based on several lengthy interviews with the secretary of state. The main thrust of the piece is that Powell's view of the world is a lot more to the liking of the Times than is Bush's. It is described as one "comfortable with alliances, treaties and international institutions, less assertive in the promotion of American values abroad, more realpolitik in its judgments, more 'sandpapered' in its language as one aide put it. Powell is the standard-bearer for this camp, which includes most of the upper ranks of the State Department and some sympathizers in the White House, along with an outside chorus that notably includes the president's father."
This "camp" unmistakably applauds Powell's efforts to recast and, in some cases at least, to redirect the president's policies. Consider the following illustrative examples:
Missile defense. When Bush says the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty is "outdated," "obsolete," "dangerous" and something we need to "move beyond," what he means (according to Powell) is that it should be preserved for the foreseeable future. As the Keller article reports, "The important thing [Powell] said was to avoid abandoning the treaty altogether, with the probable high price in Russian, European and congressional goodwill. He argued that a concession to the Russians on the formalities of the ABM Treaty would be more than repaid in other ways."
Of course Bush is not the first occupant of the Oval Office to find Powell a determined opponent of missile defense and an advocate for preserving the ABM Treaty. Keller recounts how Powell mockingly "rolled his eyes" as he recounted how Reagan — for whom then-Gen. Powell worked as the national-security adviser — actually believed that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) could transform the nature of the security threat we faced from the former Soviet Union. Never mind that Reagan actually succeeded in doing just that, despite Powell, by using his SDI to accelerate the demise of the "Evil Empire."
The war on terrorism. When Bush declares that if you "harbor … train or arm … or feed or fund a terrorist, you're a terrorist," what he meant to say (once again according to Powell) is that you are not a terrorist if you are on our side. Thus, nations that the State Department itself lists as state sponsors of terrorism — such as Sudan, Syria and Iran — are not terrorists; at the very least they must be "good terrorists" (a status the president also clearly didn't mean to establish).
As with missile defense, Powell continues to exhibit the bad judgment with respect to Iraq that caused him to be on the "wrong side of history" in an earlier administration. Though former president George H.W. Bush has denied it, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Powell — was influential in arguing against going to war with Saddam Hussein in 1990 and in leaving him in place at the end of hostilities in 1991. Now he assiduously is sowing confusion about whether warnings from current President Bush to take the war to each and every terrorist-sponsoring nation actually applies to one of the most dangerous, namely Saddam's Iraq.
"Solving" the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Powell is working hard to arrange a similar pass for Yasser Arafat. If Powell succeeds in transforming the protostate Palestinian Authority — which harbors, trains, arms, feeds and funds terrorists every day — into an actual terrorist-sponsoring state of Palestine, Bush will be surprised to discover that his commitment to an Israel living as a Jewish state in peace and security in the Middle East will be rendered meaningless.
The irony is that Bush has been, by and large, saying all the right things and engendering the popular support he needs and deserves for doing so. While the Foggy Bottom bureaucrats, the media elite and the so-called "international community" might prefer Powell's interpretations, the nation's interests — to say nothing of the president's credibility — demand that what Bush says and what he means be the same thing.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington and is a columnist for Insight's sister daily, the Washington Times. |
