The Bush Doctrine, R.I.P.
The New York Times
April 13, 2002
By FRANK RICH
As a statement of principle set
forth by an American chief
executive, the now defunct Bush
Doctrine may have had a shelf life
even shorter than Kenny Boy's Enron
code of ethics. As a statement of
presidential intent, it may land in the
history books alongside such
magisterial moments as Lyndon
Johnson's 1964 pledge not to send
American boys to Vietnam and
Richard Nixon's 1968 promise to "bring us together."
It was in September that the president told Congress that "from this day forward
any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the
United States as a hostile regime." It was in November that he told the United
Nations that "there is no such thing as a good terrorist." Now the president is being
assailed even within his own political camp for not only refusing to label Yasir
Arafat a terrorist but judging him good enough to be a potential partner in our
desperate effort to tamp down the flames of the Middle East.
Yet the administration's double standard for Mr. Arafat is hardly the first, or only,
breach of the Bush Doctrine.
As Tina Fey explained with only faint comic exaggeration on "Saturday Night Live"
last weekend, the U.S. also does business of state with nations that both "fund all
the terrorism in the world" (Saudi Arabia, where the royal family on Thursday
joined in a telethon supporting Palestinian "martyrs") and are "100 percent with
the terrorists except for one little guy in charge" (Pakistan). President Bush, who
once spoke of rigid lines drawn between "good" men and "evildoers," has now been
so overrun by fresh hellish events and situational geopolitical bargaining that his
old formulations - "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" - have
been rendered meaningless.
But even as he fudges his good/evil categorizations when
it comes to Mr. Arafat and other players he suddenly may
need in the Middle East, it's not clear that Mr. Bush
knows that he can no longer look at the world as if it were
Major League Baseball, with every team clearly delineated
in its particular division. "Look, my job isn't to try to
nuance," he told a British interviewer a week after the
Passover massacre in Netanya. "My job is to tell people
what I think. . . . I think moral clarity is important."
Mr. Bush doesn't seem to realize that nuances are what
his own administration is belatedly trying to master - and
must - if Colin Powell is going to hasten a cease-fire in
the Middle East. Mr. Bush doesn't seem to know that
since the routing of the Taliban his moral clarity has
atrophied into simplistic, often hypocritical sloganeering.
He has let his infatuation with his own rectitude
metastasize into hubris.
The result - the catastrophe of the administration's
handling of the Middle East - is clear: 15 months of
procrastination and conflict avoidance followed by a
baffling barrage of mixed messages that have made Mr.
Bush's use of the phrase "without delay" the most
elastically parsed presidential words since his
predecessor's definition of sex. It takes some kind of
perverse genius to simultaneously earn the defiance of the
Israelis, the Palestinians and our Arab "allies" alike and
turn the United States into an impotent bystander.
The ensuing mess should be a wake-up call for Mr. Bush
to examine his own failings and those of his administration rather than try (as he
did a week ago) to shift the blame to Bill Clinton's failed Camp David summit talks
(and then backpedal after being called on it). While the conventional wisdom has
always had it that this president can be bailed out of foreign-policy jams by his
seasoned brain trust, the competing axes of power in the left (State) and right
(Defense) halves of that surrogate brain have instead sent him bouncing between
conflicting policies like a yo-yo, sometimes within the same day.
Speaking to The Los Angeles Times this week about Mr. Bush's floundering, the
REAGAN administration policy honcho for the Mideast, Geoffrey Kemp, said: "A
two-year-old could have seen this crisis coming. And the idea that it could be
brushed under the carpet as the administration focused on either Afghanistan or
Iraq reflects either appalling arrogance or ignorance."
The administration of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell is hardly ignorant. But
arrogance is another matter. "We shouldn't think of American involvement for the
sake of American involvement" is how Condoleezza Rice defined the
administration's intention to butt out of the Middle East only a couple of weeks
after her boss's inauguration, thereby codifying the early Bush decision not to
send a negotiator to a last-ditch peace summit in Egypt. Since then, even as Sept.
11 came and went, we've been at best reluctantly and passingly engaged,
culminating with our recall of the envoy Anthony Zinni in December, after which
we sat idly by during three months of horror. Not until Dick Cheney returned from
his humiliating tour of the Arab world in late March did he state the obvious:
"There isn't anybody but us" to bring about a hiatus in the worst war the region
has seen in 20 years.
Even then, the 180-degree reversal from the administration's previous inertia was
not motivated by the bloody imperatives of the conflict between the Israelis and the
Palestinians but by their inconvenient disruption of Mr. Bush's plans to finish his
father's job in Iraq. A cynic might go so far as to say that "Saddam Hussein is
driving U.S. foreign policy" - which, as it happens, is what Benjamin Netanyahu
did tell The New York Post on Tuesday.
The goal of stopping Saddam, worthy as it is, cannot be separated from the conflict
of the Jews and the Palestinians and never could be. But even now Mr. Bush
seems less than engaged in the Middle East. It took him a week after the Passover
massacre to decide to send Colin Powell to the region. The president has yet to
speak publicly about the spillover of the hostilities into Europe, where each day
brings news of some of the ugliest anti-Semitic violence seen there since World War
II. He continues to resist the idea that American peacekeepers will be needed to
keep the Middle East (not to mention Afghanistan) from tumbling back into the
chaos that could once again upend his plans to take on Saddam.
Peacekeepers, of course, are to Mr. Bush a synonym for nation-building, which he
regards as a no-no. If there's a consistent pattern to the administration's
arrogance, it's that when the president has an idée fixe of almost any sort on any
subject - from the Bush Doctrine on down - it remains fixed in perpetuity, not
open to question, even as a world as complex and fast-changing as ours calls out
for rethinking.
Never mind that Sept. 11 was the most graphic demonstration imaginable that a
missile shield may not be the most useful vessel for our ever more precious defense
dollars; it's still full speed ahead. Nor has the bursting of the stock-market bubble
dampened Mr. Bush's conviction that Americans should entrust their Social
Security savings to his campaign contributors from Wall Street's investment
houses. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, once pitched as a quick fix
to the (fleeting) California energy crisis, is now being sold as an antidote to our
Middle Eastern woes (because some 10 years from now it may reduce our oil
imports by 4 or 5 percent). The Bush tax cut, conceived at a time of endless
surpluses and peace, is still touted as the perfect economic plan even now that the
surpluses are shot and we are at war. In this administration, one size idea, however
slender or dubious, fits all.
To Mr. Bush, these immutable policies are no doubt all doctrines, principles,
testaments to his moral clarity. In fact, many of them have more to do with ideology
than morality. Only history can determine whether they will be any more lasting
than the Bush doctrine on terrorism. Meanwhile, we should be grateful that the
administration did abandon its stubborn 15-month disengagement from the
Middle East to make an effort, however confused, hasty and perilous, to halt the
bloodshed and (one imagines) lead the search for a political solution.
"This is a world with a lot of gray," said Chuck Hagel, the Republican from
Nebraska, to The Washington Post late this week. "We can choose either to live in
an abstract world or choose to engage in the real world. . . . The reality of that has
started to set in with this administration." We must hope that Senator Hagel is
right. While it is far too late for an Arafat or a Sharon to change, it is not too late for
a young president still in a young administration to get over himself. At this tragic
juncture, the world depends on it, because, as his own vice president put it, there
isn't anybody else to do the job.
The New York Times OP-ED , Saturday, April 13, 2002 Page A29 |
