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Cheney's grip tight on
foreign policy reins
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - The image was not an edifying one:
the president of the United States a horse, his vice
president, the rider.
But that
is the picture Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking member
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used to
describe the 
power
relationship between US President George W Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney in a recent interview with the
National Journal.
Secretary of State Colin
Powell, according to Biden's account, sometimes talks
Bush into pursuing a more conciliatory foreign policy
line, as he has done with North Korea or the United
Nations from time to time.
"Like with a horse,
Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water. But
just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in
the saddle says, 'Un-uh', and yanks up the reins before
Bush can drink the water. That's my image of how it
goes," Biden said.
That is also the image which
is gaining currency in power circles in Washington. When
it comes to foreign policy, Cheney is increasingly seen
as holding the reins.
While the mainstream media
continue to refer to Bush as the captain of his own
foreign policy ship, hints that Cheney - a Republican
right-winger surrounded by neo-conservatives, many with
close ties to Israel's Likud Party - is the dominant
figure in Washington's diplomacy have become too
plentiful to ignore.
The most stunning example
was disclosed in a recent Washington Post article that
assessed Condoleezza Rice's performance as national
security adviser. The authors reported that Bush had
ordered cabinet officials not to give any preferential
treatment to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress
(INC) as US forces moved into Iraq in the spring.
Imagine the shock felt by the State Department
when, shortly after Bush gave the order, the Pentagon
flew Chalabi and 600 of his armed followers into
southern Iraq in early April "with the approval of the
vice president".
Enforcing policy discipline,
especially in a divided administration, is ordinarily
the task of the national security adviser. But Rice, an
academic whose substantive knowledge of foreign policy
is largely confined to her expertise, the Soviet Union
and Russia, has not been equal to the task.
Her
failure in that regard, as well as Bush's own passivity
and inexperience, is precisely what has enabled Cheney
to dominate the policy process, particularly with
respect to the Middle East, where Cheney's views are
almost entirely consistent with those of the neo-cons
close to Likud and Israeli premier Ariel Sharon.
Even before September 11, Cheney had endorsed
Israel's selective assassination policy, even as the
State Department was denouncing it. One year later,
Cheney told Israel's defense minister, albeit privately,
that he thought Palestinian President Yasser Arafat
"should be hanged".
That Cheney should assume
such a dominant role is not surprising given the degree
to which Bush depended on him during his presidential
campaign and in the administration's early days. And the
fact that Cheney, who was asked by Bush to recommend his
running mate in 2000, chose himself suggested that he
felt confident that Bush would give him extraordinary
powers if he won.
Similarly, Cheney played a
much more important role than Rice, despite Rice's much
closer personal relationship with Bush, in the
appointment of both cabinet and sub-cabinet national
security officials, beginning with Donald Rumsfeld at
the Pentagon helm.
Not only did Cheney
personally intervene to ensure that Powell's best
friend, Richard Armitage, was denied the deputy defense
secretary position, but he also played a key role in
securing the post for Paul Wolfowitz.
Moreover,
it was Cheney who insisted that ultra-unilateralist John
Bolton be placed in a top State Department arms
position, from which he has pursued policies that run
counter to Powell's own preferences.
Cheney's
own chief of staff and national security adviser, I
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Washington lawyer and Wolfowitz
protege, is considered a far more skilled and
experienced bureaucratic and political operator than
Rice.
Moreover, his own national security staff,
the largest ever employed by a vice president, has
largely been chosen for both their ideological affinity
with their boss and proven Washington experience. "They
play to win," said one State Department official.
With several of his political allies, including
deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and
Middle East director Elliott Abrams, on Rice's larger
but more diverse staff, Libby "is able to run circles
around Condi", a former senior official told IPS earlier
this year.
Thus, Cheney played a key role in
assigning responsibility for post-war reconstruction to
the Pentagon, a major departure from past experience
when the State Department was given the lead.
Similarly, Cheney backed the Pentagon's
exclusion of State Department officials, including Tom
Warrick, a highly regarded Iraq specialist who oversaw
the mammoth "Future of Iraq Project" that involved
hundreds of Iraqi expatriates and other experts, in the
post-war administration.
It was also Cheney and
Libby whose frequent trips to the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) in the runup to the Iraq war played the
decisive role in distorting the intelligence process, in
part by pressing on CIA analysts questionable evidence
supplied by the INC and Pentagon hawks under Rumsfeld,
according to retired intelligence officers.
More
recently, it was Cheney who led the effort to deny
Powell the authority to negotiate a new UN Security
Council resolution that could have reduced the
Pentagon's control over the political transition in
Iraq, even after the president had initially approved
such a deal.
Even now, according to some
sources, Cheney is actively trying to blunt
Congressional pressure to reduce the Pentagon's control
over Iraq policy and fire several senior Pentagon hawks,
beginning with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith, who are believed to have misled Congress
about both the evidence used to justify the war and the
post-war situation.
Senate Foreign Relations
Committee chairman Richard Lugar and Biden, the
committee's ranking Democrat, explicitly mentioned
Cheney in what amounted to a bipartisan appeal on NBC's
"Meet the Press" television program on October 12 for
Bush to assert his control over foreign policy.
Biden said, "I would say, 'Mr President, take
charge. Take charge - let your secretary of defense,
state, and your vice president know this is my policy,
any one of you that divert from the policy is off the
team'."
Lugar, a staunch, albeit moderate
Republican, said he agreed with Biden, adding, "The
president has to be president. That means the president
over the vice president and over these secretaries."
The past month's announcements that Rice had
hired Robert Blackwill, Bush's former ambassador to
India and reputedly a skilled bureaucratic and
Republican infighter himself, as a top deputy and that
she is heading up a new, inter-agency Iraq stabilization
group appeared designed to create the appearance that
she was at last taking the reins.
So far,
however, there is little evidence that Cheney is
prepared to dismount.
(Inter Press Service)
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