Team A or Team B? : Part V
The debacle at the U.N. of recent weeks would seem to confirm Team B's views about the need for the U.S. to stand alone. But admirers of George H.W. Bush don't think failure at the United Nations was a foregone conclusion. The former president "finessed the diplomacy with the United Nations much better than his son," Parmet says. "He put much greater stock in the importance of alliances" and thus was able to accomplish much more.
"This second Bush administration is less skilled at building coalitions and it's going to haunt them," Greene agrees. The father's dealings with the "United Nations were handled skillfully, not abruptly." But in the current crisis, "the U.N. was told by this president that it was a dead letter if it didn't play ball. You don't treat the U.N. like that if you expect to get something out of it."
Even some Team B supporters agree Bush could have handled the U.N. more skillfully. Pipes, the Reagan national security advisor who favors the son over the father, says that the current President Bush is "a clumsy diplomat. I agree with the need to remove Saddam Hussein, but I don't think he's laid the groundwork."
At the very least, Pipes says, last fall Bush and his team "should have explored the attitudes of various members of the Security Council about what they intended to do, and if they found that there was such tremendous opposition, they should not have gone before the Security Council." Now the administration will be launching a military action against the wishes of the Security Council, which is far worse than having simply refrained from asking for approval at all -- as President Clinton did before launching NATO air strikes in the Balkans.
Still, Pipes says the fault lies with the elder Bush for not having taken Saddam out 12 years ago. "Now his son is stuck with the job of finishing it," he says.
But the previous president's reluctance is worth exploring, too. "The last thing [the elder Bush] wanted was to see the United States get into Iraq or that part of the world, and then stay there in force," says Eagleburger. The U.S. would have had to commit to staying in the region for some time, to "find a replacement for Saddam Hussein, help them set up a new government, and that could have kept us there for some period of time."
His son, however, is committing to precisely that sort of long-term presence. On Feb. 11, Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. was "going to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and likewise the terrorist infrastructure, safeguard Iraq's territorial integrity, and begin the process of economic and political reconstruction." U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, would be the first administrator of postwar Iraq, Feith said. Asked how long the U.S. would be there, Feith said, "We can't now even venture a sensible guess." At the end of February, Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told the Senate that the occupying U.S. force would total "several hundred thousand soldiers," which Wolfowitz called "wildly off the mark."
Why the difference between father and son? One reason might be that the elder Bush comes from the "greatest generation," one familiar with fighting in the streets of Berlin during World War II. "They were terrified that they were going to get bogged down," Greene says. "And the people around him had Vietnam syndrome, and they didn't want to get into a quagmire."
Other issues relevant to the Team A/Team B divide came up in the elder Bush's Tufts speech. The former president is seen as the U.S. president most critical of Israel in modern history, while his son has perhaps been more supportive than any other president -- particularly since Sept. 11. "I remember refusing to give Israel loan guarantees for settlements if they continued to build settlements in the occupied territories," the elder Bush recalled at Tufts. "I said, 'We're not going to do it.' And I paid a hell of a price for it." He also spoke graciously about Clinton's efforts to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, while his son has faulted those efforts for being the cause of "a significant intifada."
The elder Bush alluded in the Tufts speech to one other crucial difference between his approach to diplomacy and his son's. It was indirect, and not meant to slap Bush 43, but the contrast between their approaches to diplomacy couldn't be missed. The former president talked about the way he worked to heal relations with King Hussein I of Jordan who, along with the Yemenis and Palestinians, supported Saddam Hussein during his last face-off with the U.S. After the war, however, both the president and King Hussein were determined to "get the relationship between Jordan and the United States back on track." Which they did, and the elder Bush cited it as an example of how the U.S. can move on from its current strains with so many other nations throughout the globe. "You've got to reach out to the other person," he said. "You've got to convince them that long-term friendship should trump short-term adversity."
The son's administration hasn't demonstrated evidence of its forgiveness skills yet. After German Chancellor Schroeder was reelected last September 2002 on a platform of opposing the U.S. war against Iraq, Bush refused to call and congratulate him. At a meeting of NATO defense ministers soon afterward, Rumsfeld -- who said Schroeder's campaign "had the effect of poisoning a relationship" -- refused to meet with Germany's Peter Struck. "I made it clear to the world, that either you're with us or you're with the enemy, and that doctrine still stands," Bush said then. But his father restored relations with Hussein, who was literally with the enemy. Whether his son is capable of such a step in the name of the greater good remains to be seen.
As President Bush continues charting his Team B path, bringing the Cheney/Wolfowitz/Libby 1992 draft plan to fruition, there will likely be many more times where the son diverges far from where his dad would take the nation. In the March 10 issue of Time, the former president Bush recalls that "the night before [the Gulf War] I could not move my neck or arms. The tension had taken hold, the responsibility for those lives, even though I had been in combat myself." His son, who has never been in combat and even has a somewhat disconcerting (if seldom discussed) missing year in his service with the Air National Guard, recently told reporters that he's been sleeping well at night, sustained by people's prayers, which he called "the kindest act a fellow citizen can do for anybody, much less the president." The two have extremely different personalities and temperaments; and now they represent divergent schools of Republican foreign policy.
The president and Powell, his loyal Team A secretary of state, are still working with the U.N., of course, trying to get Security Council approval for action against Iraq. Bush spent Monday morning on the phone with President Jiang Zemin of China, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi, and President Mbeki of South Africa. Powell phoned up three Security Council swing votes -- Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez -- and lunched with a fourth, the foreign minister of Guinea, François Ousseynou Fall. But the international community is hardly Bush's highest priority. Also on Monday White House spokesman Ari Fleischer seemed to be preparing the nation for the possibility that the U.S. will have to go it alone, arguing that "as the world witnessed in Rwanda, and as the world witnessed in Kosovo," the United Nations Security Council "is, from a moral point of view, leaving the people of these regions on the sidelines. And from the president's point of view, that's a regrettable development if it happens."
Yet moments like those cry out for international leadership, which the elder Bush was able to provide. On Iraq, his son, so far, has not.
But the former president insists he won't meddle in his son's job. "Now I stay out of the president's way and try not to complicate his life," he said at Tufts. "I have an appreciation for the big job he has to do. And so I don't go around giving advice to the 43rd president of the United States."
For better or for worse. |
