Junto Boys

QUIT KILLING THE BAD GUYS SO WE CAN NEGOTIATE

The New York Review of Books looked at three anti-Bush books over the summer. The consensus? Bush is a dumb cluck.

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker.

Near consensus is great. There may be people who don’t hate Bush but we can’t name any. Don’t you like how Baker’s office is well upholstered? Even as a temporary ally they had to get in the Republican fat cat thing.

This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated.

I'm not sure what friends we have alienated. Germany and France who originally opposed the invasion have both since elected leaders friendlier to Bush. And the only thing proven to embolden our enemies are articles like this one.

Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators.

Paid-up members? It sounds an awful lot like the fools that appeased Hitler in the 1930s. Remember how the State Department crossed out “Mr. Gorby, tear down this wall”? It was too provocative. Boy they really had the pulse of the world. Reagan wrote it back anyway and I’m sure that Kissinger looked up from his memoirs and cringed when he heard it.

They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

If the writer knew what the world “rail” meant he would know that James Baker has never railed against anything in public life. His negotiations behind the scenes are legendary, but he always faces the microphones straightforward and respectfully.

Last December's Baker-Hamilton report, drawn up by a bipartisan panel of ten Washington eminences with perhaps a couple of centuries of national security experience between them and not a radical bone in their collective body, described the mess the Bush team had left in Iraq as "grave and deteriorating." The seventy-nine recommendations they made amounted to a demand that the administration repudiate its entire policy and start again.

He’s certainly never read Dr. Feynman’s experience with being on a Washington committee. Wisdom does not come from such a beast.

In the words of former congressman Lee Hamilton, James Baker's co-chair and a rock-solid establishment figure, "Our ship of state has hit rough waters. It must now chart a new way forward."

I thought the problem with electing Bush was that he was a rock-solid establishment figure. Remember how he was going to be cradled by all of daddy's advisors because him too dumb to run country by self. Now he's a rogue for breaking with them.

So it comes as less of a surprise than once it might have to see Dennis Ross and Zbigniew Brzezinski—two further fixtures of the national security elite—step forward to slam the administration in terms that would, in an earlier era, have seemed uncouth for men of their rank. Neither Ross, who served as Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, nor Brzezinski, a conservative Democrat and cold war hawk, could be dismissed as Nation-reading, Howard Dean types.

Why don’t we instead dismiss Brzezinski as the guy who was unable to understand the level of unrest in Iran as Carter’s National Security Advisor. An old pro like him totally misread the situation and once our embassy hostages were taken, he had no viable “rock-solid establishment” plan as to how to get them out.

Ross sounds like a career State Department guy. What’s the biggest State Department achievement in the last 25 years?

Yet in withering new books they both eviscerate the Bush record, writing in the tone of exasperated elders who handed over the family business to a new generation, only to see their successors drive the firm into bankruptcy. Both books offer rescue plans for a US foreign policy they consider to be in tatters.

If Brzezinski and Ross were as influential and effective as the writer claims, Bush wouldn’t have inherited the problems he did in 2001. Gilligan could write a better rescue plan.

Bush’s “rock-solid establishment” critics are men who thought in baby steps and pieces of signed paper instead of action. Any kind of success in the Middle East based on force discredits the diplomatic corps and it renders these men meaningless in the overall process. I'm sure with glee they look for this to be a failure so that their nuanced and ultimately ineffective approach will look at like statesmanship.