Discord in Bush team distressing allies, Congress
By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren Strobel and William Douglas
Knight Ridder News Service
WASHINGTON - In the days before he assumed the presidency in 2001, George W. Bush liked to boast about the foreign policy "dream team" he had assembled.
Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were all "smart people" who would compensate for the former Texas governor's lack of international experience.
"General Powell's a strong figure, and Dick Cheney's no shrinking violet, nor Condi Rice," Bush said in December 2000. "I view the four as being able to complement each other."
But after nearly three years in office, Bush's dream team is beset by infighting, back stabbing and maneuvering on major foreign policy issues involving North Korea, Syria, Iran and postwar Iraq. The result has been paralysis, inconsistency and a zigzagging U.S. policy that confuses lawmakers on Capitol Hill and disturbs America's friends, allies and would-be partners.
The infighting has hampered U.S. policies in the Middle East, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to rage; caused anxiety in Asia, where the administration's refusal to deal directly with North Korea has dismayed allies; and has soured relations with some North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, say U.S. and foreign officials.
One U.S. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled Chinese officials' exasperation over the administration's stance on North Korea. "We actually don't care what your point of view is. Just have one," he quoted his Chinese counterparts as saying.
White House officials declined to comment for this story. But a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that there have been severe rifts among members of Bush's foreign policy brain trust. At the same time, he insisted, those disagreements are in the past.
"Everybody realizes that there are a number of jobs that have got to get done," the official said. "We're in Iraq. That's got to go right. We're in the Middle East peace process. That's got to go right. I think on some of those issues, there are lots of points of view. But right now, over the last few weeks, are we debating those things in a useful, civilized manner? Yes."
The battles among Bush's foreign policy principals have largely been fought in private, but they spilled into public view after Bush announced that Rice would oversee a new group designed to reduce violence and speed reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld, whose Pentagon has taken charge in postwar Iraq, publicly bristled at the news and hinted that he had not been consulted. Rumsfeld suggested that with the move the president was finally having the National Security Council do its job of coordinating the government agencies involved in rebuilding Iraq.
The Bush foreign affairs team can't seem to agree even when it embarks on a mission in unison. Tired of what it felt were negative media reports from Iraq, the White House launched a public relations blitz two weeks ago to put a positive face on rebuilding efforts. The president, Cheney and Rice laid out the administration's case in speeches.
The addresses varied so much in tone and message that some leading lawmakers, such as Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., were dismayed.
"I'm not certain who assigns these or whether people just say 'I've got to say something' and just blurt it out," said Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bush "really has to indicate a unified voice, his voice, to the American people and people abroad. They respect the president, and that's diluted somewhat by these other voices."
The conflict pits administration "neo-conservatives," led by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, against the "pragmatists," led by Secretary of State Powell, say officials.
"This time it's not about tactics; it's about ideology," said one senior official who served in several Republican administrations. "There's no compromise possible between two opposing views of how this country should deal with the rest of the world."
The Cheney-Rumsfeld camp looks at the terrorist threat much as communism was viewed during the Cold War: a global network of evildoers whose links to one another are real even if they aren't visible. They oppose negotiating with governments in Syria, Iran and North Korea that they say support terrorism.
The pragmatists, who also include CIA Director George Tenet and some members of the armed services, are ideological descendants of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They continue to seek some form of detente with Syria, Iran and North Korea, believing that a combination of international sanctions, carrots and sticks can moderate their behavior.
The divisions between the two camps were muted at the outset of the administration, but they hardened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, several top officials said.
"What happened was that Cheney and Rumsfeld essentially went on a crusade against terrorism, starting with Iraq, and Powell kept trying, mostly without success, to rein them in," said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Cheney is always in Bush's ear whispering 'terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.' He's obsessed."
Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he's hearing more complaints about Cheney's influence on foreign policy matters.
"If you look at Afghanistan, if you look at the [Israeli-Palestinian peace] roadmap, if you look at Iraq, if you look at bilateral and multilateral dealings with the Europeans, just as Powell looks like he will stitch the garment back together again, Cheney goes to the Heritage Foundation [a conservative think tank] and re-enunciates the policy of pre-emption," Biden said. "It's just what they did in Iraq. They outsmarted the centrist or the internationalists in this administration, and the neo-cons carried the day."
One of the major internal battles is about who will lead Iraq. Civilian leaders in the Pentagon have pushed for Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial Iraqi leader who for years lived in exile in London, to replace former President Saddam Hussein.
Chalabi, head of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress and a member of Iraq's Governing Council, had spent years winning over Washington figures such as Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz by pledging support for democracy.
But the State Department, CIA and many senior U.S. military commanders distrust Chalabi, who was convicted of bank fraud in absentia in Jordan in 1992 and was sentenced to 22 years in prison. They view him as a self-serving and unreliable source of intelligence on whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction programs and links to al Qaeda. They also doubt his claims to having secret supporters across Iraq who were ready to rise against the former dictator when U.S. troops arrived.
State Department officials last year withheld about $8 million in funding for the Iraqi National Congress in a dispute over accounting irregularities. Shortly after that, the Defense Department agreed to pick up the funding for its operations.
The internal turf battles have not been limited to Iraq.
In one early skirmish, the Pentagon defied a White House decision in early 2002 to conclude a legally binding treaty with Moscow that placed new limits on the number of nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia could possess.
Bush had agreed to Russian President Vladimir Putin's insistence on a formal accord to help the Russian leader win support from parliamentarians and senior military officers who did not trust the United States to hold up its end of the agreement.
As U.S. and Russian diplomats hammered out the document, however, Pentagon officials, in separate negotiations with their Russian counterparts, continued to push for a nonbinding agreement. As the negotiations moved forward, Pentagon officials unsuccessfully tried to change portions of the draft agreed to by diplomats, according to a senior U.S. official.
Eventually, Bush had to intercede and remind Rumsfeld that he wanted a legally binding treaty, which Putin and Bush signed on May 24, 2002.
The longest-running battle among the administration's foreign policy titans has been waged over North Korea. Fissures and disagreements surfaced early when Bush surprised Powell by temporarily abandoning a Clinton administration policy of seeking an end to North Korea's missile program through negotiation.
The State Department insisted on talks to solve the problem; the Pentagon opposed any negotiations. That argument was still going on as multination talks involving North Korea got under way, first in April and then in August, in Beijing.
The talks have been stymied by North Korea's demand for a nonaggression pact from the United States. Powell has called Pyongyang's demands a nonstarter but added that there could be another way to give North Korea a written assurance that the United States won't attack. That idea has met stiff resistance from the administration's hard-liners.
Biden says he believes the neo-conservatives' rejection of a nonaggression pledge has hurt the prospects of resolving the North Korea nuclear crisis.
The administration has "screwed it up so badly so far that it may not be redeemable," Biden said.
Bush has apparently grown tired of the internal bickering spilling into public view. He has implored his senior administration officials to cooperate with each other and last week ordered them to stop leaking their complaints to the media.
"Sometimes, you realize that too much time is being spent on the wrong things," one senior administration official said.
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