Hawks, Doves and Dubya
To move forward on Iraq, the president must first end the war between his troops
By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK
msnbc.com
Sept. 2 issue — It was all in the body language. The temperature was 100 degrees in the shade as President George W. Bush met reporters at his Texas ranch last week. Cows were dying. Buzzards were circling. And there standing next to Bush, squinty-eyed and square-jawed, was the nation’s hawk-in-chief, Donald Rumsfeld, barely sweating in a gray business suit (Bush was in sportswear).
AS THE PRESIDENT took questions, the Defense secretary chimed in confidently, and Bush treated him like the “matinee idol” he once joked Rumsfeld had become. “Mr. Secretary, would you like to say a few words?” Bush asked. “I want to learn how you answer questions. They tell me you’re quite good at it.” Since the U.S. military victory over the Taliban in December, Rumsfeld has become—”the big stud in town,” as one Washington official describes him, famed for his frank talk at the podium about killing Al Qaeda and imperious but jocular manner. Even some White House press aides are said to study Rumsfeld’s briefing transcripts for tips. So rampant is Rummy worship at the White House that one insider says, “I think they’re kind of afraid of him.”
The scene in Texas was also about the man who wasn’t there—and who represents the opposite pole in a foreign-policy team ever-riven by infighting, especially over Iraq. Colin Powell was off vacationing with friends in the Hamptons, and in an atmosphere of war talk, the absence of the Bush team’s leading moderate was widely noted. Bush went out of his way to stress that the Crawford meeting was about missile defense and “contingency plans,” not Iraq. But it was yet another reminder of Rummy’s ascendancy and the partial eclipse of Powell, especially since the war on terror began. After all, it was only 18 months ago, at another dusty Texas stop, that Bush had emotionally introduced his new secretary of State as “an American hero,” saying Powell “believes as I do that we must work closely with our allies and friends [and] project our strength and our purpose with humility.”
TOO-EAGER SUPERHAWKS?
Today humility seems in short supply in the Bush administration, critics say. This time the complaints aren’t coming from Europeans, or most Democrats, but Bush’s fellow Republicans, many of them frustrated moderate allies of Powell’s. Their chief worry: the spreading war fever. GOP stalwarts such as Brent Scowcroft—the national-security adviser to Bush’s father—fear a unilateral rush into pre-emptive war in Iraq that could undercut worldwide support for the war on terror and cast America as an aggressor nation for the first time in its history. They complain that the GOP’s old policy of moderate “internationalism” has been trashed by an influential cabal of superhawks who are a little too eager to assert America’s vast power, unconcerned by the qualms of its longtime allies.
The get-Saddam hard-liners are said to be led by Rumsfeld himself and his old deputy and comrade-in-arms from the Ford administration days, Vice President Dick Cheney (who joked in a dinner speech not long ago that Rummy “still treats me like a deputy”). They are backed up by a klatch of hawkish deputies and allies, among them Cheney’s powerful chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, and Rumsfeld’s top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But per—haps the key pro-war agitator is Richard Perle, known as the prince of darkness during the Reagan era for his harsh stand against arms control, who heads the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, an influential advisory panel. Perle and Rumsfeld consult regularly and “have been very close on most of these issues over this rather long period of time,” Perle told NEWSWEEK.
Last week, as Iraq stayed on the front burner, Bush complained about “a churning” in the media—a “frenzy,” Rumsfeld interjected, stepping to the mike—over when an attack might take place. (The latest CW: not until next year.) The president’s spokesman, Ari Fleischer, declared that the media had “reached an absurd point of self-inflicted silliness.” But the complaints were about a problem largely of their own making. Perle and Wolfowitz have pushed hard for an Iraq war almost since September 11, and Bush has said flatly several times in recent months that his policy is to remove Saddam. Rumsfeld told reporters earlier last week that Al Qaeda was being given harbor in Iraq, though that may have been hyped: intelligence officials tell NEWSWEEK that high-ranking operatives have not, in fact, turned Iraq into ” a new sanctuary.”
REPUBLICAN VS. REPUBLICAN
In truth, the “frenzy” of the moment is less over Iraq alone than the internecine war in the Republican Party, which is reigniting old issues about U.S. engagement in the world that have simmered for 50 years. Some Republicans are eager to cast the debate over Iraq as a larger battle both for Bush’s soul and for that of his party. “We haven’t yet had a debate about America’s role in the world. Maybe what Iraq is doing is bringing that all into sharp focus,” says Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter and president of the Eisenhower Institute. She likens the emerging debate to the one the nation failed to have before Vietnam. “If we learned anything from Vietnam, it’s that you’d better have the American people behind you if you send troops into harm’s way.”
August 16 — A number of prominent Republicans are now publicly coming out against President Bush’s plans for Iraq. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports.
Eisenhower says the Iraq debate has also reopened a very old rift in the GOP. She notes that this year is the 50th anniversary of her grandfather’s election, which marked the end of the GOP’s traditional isolationist stance. The Bush hawks, who declared their desire to scale down U.S. commitments to peacekeeping and nation-building during the 2000 campaign, have brought isolationism back “in a different form,” she says. True, post-9-11 they are more globally minded, but their mixed message of forceful engagement, si, diplomacy, no, is a way of eating their cake and having it too—exercising global leadership, as America’s dominant position demands, but remaining a nation apart, as old-style American conservatives have always sought. In terms of Iraq, she and other GOP moderates say, that means the Bush team has neglected to build an allied consensus for action—as Bush suggested he would do last week in Crawford more forcefully than he has in the past.
Bush’s conciliatory comments—”Not only will we consult with friends and allies, we’ll consult with members of Congress”—were the surest sign that the comments of Scowcroft and others had wounded him. And they marked a minor defeat for the “chicken hawks,” as some of the moderates call those like Perle who’ve never served in uniform. “It is interesting to me that many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don’t know anything about war,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel (a longtime Powell friend and fellow Vietnam vet). “They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off. I try to speak for those ghosts of the past a little bit.” Cheney, Wolf-owitz and Perle all avoided Vietnam—Rumsfeld was a Navy pilot between wars—and Bush was one of the “sons of the powerful” whom Powell, in his 1995 memoirs, condemned as a group for managing “to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units.”
GOP PEACENIKS?
The new GOP opposition is a loose group and, Hagel insists, “not coordinated at all.” Scowcroft fired a single shot across the bow, an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 15 that said an attack on Iraq “would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken.” Then, ever the family loyalist, he fell silent. An article a few days earlier by Henry Kissinger, while more hawkish in arguing for Saddam’s ouster, also called for more diplomatic groundwork. The same week, none other than true-blue conservative Dick Armey, the outgoing House majority leader, came out against a war as well.
Many of these GOP skeptics also favor removing Saddam. But they worry about launching a war without provocation: they would prefer to wait until Saddam refuses a U.N. offer of a “no-notice inspection regime,” as Scowcroft says. One former official with the first Bush administration says: “We’re not talking about pre-emption in the way we talked about it in the cold war,” namely a response to an imminent attack. “With Iraq, we’re talking about a premeditated attack.” The danger is that every country could decide pre-emption is a good idea. Even Kissinger says, “I think we cannot have a doctrine of pre-emption for all eternity.”
The hawks insist Saddam Hussein is already a proven aggressor. And they have made a compelling case that the Iraqi tyrant’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction can no longer be tolerated in a post-9-11 world. Some, like Ken Adelman, Reagan’s former disarmament chief, argue that “chicken little” moderates have consistently underrated the use of U.S. power. Back in the ’70s, Kissinger pushed for detente with Moscow—until Reagan came in, dubbed the Soviet Union an evil empire, spent billions more on defense and, lo, the U.S.S.R. collapsed. During the gulf war, moderates like Powell, burdened by the failures of Vietnam, counseled caution and sanctions (he and Cheney, then Defense secretary, clashed over that view). Yet the war was won, ushering in the “smart bomb” era and awing the world (though the hawks complain it was ended too early, another sin sometimes blamed on Powell).
WHO’S THE REAL ‘STRONG PERSON’?
It was during the gulf war that the first fissures appeared between those who saw the post-cold-war period as a time for asserting U.S. power to ward off potential rivals and those who said that was impossible. The hawks believe “that in a region where the strong person has an almost mythical role, we have to restore” American credibility, says the former Bush I official. “If we just crush Saddam like an ant, they’ll see we’re really strong and determined.” Perle and other hard-liners insisted to NEWSWEEK that they are not seeking to build a global empire. But Perle aligns himself with those who “believe that U.S. power is always potentially a source for good in the world,” and that the lone superpower has a special obligation to snuff out threats to global security. “The contrast is with people who fear American power.”
Moderate Republicans are quick to point out that neoconservatives like Perle hail from the Democratic Party originally, and often seem to display the excessive zeal of the converted. “They all came over as a result of Vietnam in one form or another,” snipes one senior party official. “And they have captured the conservative wing of the Republican Party.”
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In the middle of all this squalling is Bush, who seems genuinely torn. Last week in Crawford he insisted he was “a patient man” and suggested that war was not the only alternative: “We will look at all options and we will consider all technologies available to us and diplomacy and intelligence.” But in a major speech at West Point in June, Bush suggested he couldn’t afford to be patient. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long,” he said. In some ways the president has been blindsided, says Hagel. Bush “came into office not knowing much about foreign policy, seeing the world in pretty simple terms. I don’t think he ever intended to have a big foreign-policy debate in his party, but September 11 forced it upon him.” A National Security Council official says the clashing ideologies are driving the Iraq debate “a great deal.”
Most Republicans believe Bush will ultimately go to war. But some also think he has awakened to the idea that he needs broad consensus, not least because he doesn’t want to be blamed for an Iraq quagmire—one that may involve a long-term peacekeeping presence in an Arab country—when the 2004 election rolls around. The president got a little taste of the politics to come last week when a protester in a screened crowd in Stockton, Calif., tried to unfurl an antiwar banner and was whisked away as the pro-Bush crowd yelled “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Mary Matalin, a Cheney aide and conservative, notes that the debate also “crosses party lines,” adding, “I think that in the end, when the president makes the case,” the nation will unite. But before he can unite the country, he’d better bring his own party together.
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With Martha Brant, Tamara Lipper and Mark Hosenball in Washington |
