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Baker's return spells
Cheney's heartburn
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - It may take four or five months to
take shape, but a new scenario could be unfolding, a
shifting balance of power within the Bush
administration, a reconfiguration in the interests of
realism - and aimed at a Bush re-election victory:
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz will have
heard the siren song of academia and returned to teach
in ivy-covered halls somewhere;
His deputy, Under Secretary for Policy Douglas
Feith, will have decided he can't really afford to put
his young kids through school on a government salary,
and that it's time to return to a lucrative law
practice;
John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security, will have been
advised that the sustained excitement of defending US
national sovereignty against all comers - from al-Qaeda,
to the French, to Amnesty International - was simply too
much for his nervous system, and that it was time to
take a long vacation;
And finally, Vice President Dick Cheney will have
been sternly warned by his doctors that his chronic
heart problems make his participation in a rigorous
re-election battle simply out of the question and that
he will have to take himself off the ticket for the sake
of his own survival, if not for that of his deeply
concerned family members.
Fantasy? Mindless
speculation? Wishful thinking? Desperation?
Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that
such scenarios suddenly appeared far more real when
former secretary of state James A Baker returned last
week to take up his new office in the White House close
to the Oval Office, as President George W Bush's
personal envoy for persuading other countries to forgive
tens of billions of dollars in Iraq's debt.
The
return of Baker - long-time consiglieri to the Bush
family whose last mission was to secure all of Florida's
electoral votes for George W in 2000 regardless of the
state's actual voting laws or how people actually voted
- made an already bad week for administration hawks
much, much worse.
One unnamed "senior
administration official", quoted by The New York Times
noted that Baker wields vastly greater influence over
the Bushes than Secretary of State Colin Powell, his
fellow-realist, could ever hope to have. "Baker is
Bush,"the official said. "Other countries know that
Powell doesn't win all the [intra-administration]
battles. If you deal with Baker, you know you're going
to get what you need," said the official source in a
line that must have sent chills down the spines of the
neo-conservatives and their right-wing fellow-travelers,
most notably Cheney himself.
Of course, it is
not yet known how much Baker, the master diplomatic
puppeteer of the first Gulf War in 1991 and Ronald
Reagan's former White House chief of staff and treasury
secretary, intends to weigh in on policy decisions that
go beyond his specific brief.
But the fact that
he is now in the White House and dealing directly with
all of Washington's major allies in Europe, Asia and the
Middle East on the future of Iraq, if not the entire
region, places him in the thick of the administration's
foreign policy, to put it mildly. From now on, very
little is likely to be decided on anything that affects
Iraq or US alliances without his "input".
And
one can only imagine Baker's input to Bush on
Wolfowitz's incredibly ill-timed decision, making
Baker's task far more difficult and expensive, to
announce that the allies that are owed most of Iraq's
debt will not be permitted to bid on some US$18.6
billion in reconstruction contracts.
If Baker
interprets Wolfowitz's move as a deliberate effort to
sabotage his mission ab initio (as did New York
Times columnist Paul Krugman on Friday), the
consequences could be severe for the former dean of the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies,
whose hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second
Bush term were already on the wane.
But the
threats posed by Baker's presence to the hawks,
especially the neo-conservatives both in and out of the
administration, go far beyond personal score-settling in
which Baker has historically shown little interest: they
are strategic. By all accounts, Baker believes the
neo-con domination of US foreign policy since September
11, 2001, especially the Iraq invasion, has been
disastrous for the country and, perhaps more important,
for Bush Jr's re-election chances.
Before the
Iraq invasion, Baker made no secret of his opposition to
the US waging unilateral war, although he was more
discreet about his dismay than Bush I's national
security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to whom Baker remains
close.
Baker, like other realists, has also been
deeply skeptical, not to say incredulous, of
neo-conservative ambitions to "remake the face of the
Middle East" by exporting democracy. Long associated
with "big oil", Baker would find the kind of radical
regional change promoted by the neo-cons to be
unacceptably risky and destabilizing.
Moreover,
Baker has always disdained Israel's right-wing Likud
Party. It was he who threatened to cut off housing
guarantees if then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir did not
take part in the 1991 Madrid peace talks that led
eventually to the Oslo peace process. This caused great
public dismay and anger among neo-conservatives like
Feith, the powerful former chairman of the Defense
Policy Board, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, the
current Middle East director on the National Security
Council.
And he has also sided consistently with
those, like Powell and Bush's father, who have favored
consistently constructive relations with Beijing, a
position which Bush Jr has clearly come to share, as he
demonstrated last week during the visit of Chinese Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao. Indeed, the younger Bush tilted so
far, at least rhetorically, in China's direction at the
expense of Taiwan that top neo-cons outside the
administration claimed for the first time since he took
office that Bush himself was guilty of "appeasement", a
charge highly unlikely to generate warm feelings in the
White House.
Finally, as secretary of state,
Baker gave top priority to close ties to traditional
European allies, including Germany and France, or what
the neo-cons and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld have
referred to disdainfully as "Old Europe". In that
respect, Wolfowitz's directive banning German and French
contractors from bidding on reconstruction contracts at
this time not only has made Baker's job more difficult
and more costly for the US taxpayer, but also has
confirmed that the hawks have their priorities upside
down.
But Baker, Scowcroft, Powell and their
fellow realists had already reached that conclusion 12
years ago when some of the neo-cons, like Wolfowitz and
Perle, were furious that the Gulf War ended without the
US army marching on Baghdad.
Similarly, it was
Wolfowitz and his boss at the time, then-secretary of
defense Cheney, who kept up a stream of strident
warnings that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev
remained a committed communist whose designs for global
conquest were no different from his predecessors' right
up until ... well, right up until the Soviet Union
collapsed. Even then, they thought it might be a trick.
And of course it was Wolfowitz and his top
deputy, I Lewis Libby - now Cheney's powerful chief of
staff - who prepared the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance
draft calling for the US to pursue a strategy of global
domination and pre-emption, nuclear if necessary,
against rogue states and possibly emerging rivals.
Baker, Scowcroft, and then-armed forces chief of
staff Powell, not to mention Bush Sr, were so alarmed -
as were senior lawmakers and European allies after parts
of it leaked to The New York Times - that only Cheney's
promises to overhaul the text saved the jobs of its two
main authors. Still, the radical proposals of Wolfowitz
and Libby would endure and guide US policy after the
September 11 attacks a decade later.
In many
ways, therefore, the hawks themselves already see Baker
as their nemesis, but they have been steadily losing
power over the past several months in any case.
Bush's harsh words for Taiwan's leader this
week, and the readiness with which neo-cons like Weekly
Standard editor Bill Kristol accuse him of appeasement,
attest to the very serious strains between the White
House and the neo-con network. Until now that network
has assiduously avoided attacking the president himself
for any disagreements it has had with the
administration.
In addition, the balance now
appears to be tilting away from the hawks, who held sway
since the Iraq war, and toward the realists in the
intra-administration fights over Iran, Syria and North
Korea. The decision last week by the Iraqi Governing
Council, for example, to disarm and deport the Iranian
Mujahideen-e-Khalq marked a signal defeat for Cheney and
the neo-conservatives, who have wanted to use those
Iranian resistance fighters against the Islamic
Republic. Similarly, the acceleration of "Iraqification"
in neighboring Iraq without a thoroughgoing
"de-Ba'athification" marks a triumph of the realists.
Indeed, Baker's arrival in some ways may crown
the successful development of a effective
"counter-network" within the administration that has
gradually eroded the hawks' authority since September.
Aside from Powell and senior officers in the uniformed
military and the intelligence community who were always
dubious of the hawks, key members of this group include
the National Security Council's coordinator for
strategic planning, ambassador Robert Blackwill, who
came on board in September, and the chief of Iraq's
Coalition Provisional Authority, ambassador L Paul
Bremer, in Baghdad.
Both are former foreign
service officers who are conservative but not
ideologues, Bremer and Blackwill have known each other
since they both worked for arch-realist Henry Kissinger
in the early 1970s. Blackwill is particularly
interesting, both because he was Condoleezza Rice's boss
as National Security Council director of European and
Soviet Affairs under Scowcroft in the first Bush
administration. In that capacity Blackwill clashed with
Wolfowitz and Cheney over Gorbachev. He reportedly met
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon as a political
officer in the US embassy in Tel Aviv and has remained
on good terms, although he disdains neo-conservatives.
When hired by Rice, former ambassador to India
Blackwill's job was to assert firm White House control
over Iraq policy, which had been seen increasingly
between August and October as having been botched by the
Pentagon, especially Feith's office. By most accounts,
he has made so much progress in that regard that he also
has begun weighing in on overall Middle East policy,
possibly at Abrams' and the neo-conservatives' expense.
Of course, the situation in Iraq is the most
important single factor in the changing the balance of
power within the administration. But Blackwill was also
brought in to ensure that the National Security Council
enforces discipline - something which Rice on her own
was unwilling or unable to do - over all the policy
agencies, particularly the Pentagon. Under Cheney's
protection, the Pentagon has often appeared to act on
its own. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, who
warned several months ago that there should be "no more
wars" before the November election, also has weighed in
to support these changes.
Indeed, some analysts
believe that Baker's return was promoted by Rove as part
of a discreet "dump-Cheney" campaign. Philip Giraldi, a
former Central Intelligence Agency officer and political
columnist for The American Conservative, wrote last week
that Baker and Scowcroft are "orchestrating" a
Rove-backed campaign to blame Cheney and the
neo-conservatives around him and in the Pentagon for
botching Iraq and, with it, Bush's re-election chances.
But the larger, foreign policy impact of the
resurgence of the realists - capped by Baker's return -
may already be tangible.
While Israel's Sharon
clearly is under growing domestic pressure to
reinvigorate peace negotiations with the Palestinians,
his recent moves - as well as Deputy Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert's unexpectedly far-reaching proposals for
territorial compromise - suggest that the Israelis
themselves perceive a shift in the US administration's
internal balance of power that needs to be accommodated.
In this context of shifting balance, added
significance may well be ascribed to Powell's recent
meetings with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists
and the cosponsorship of Baker's Houston-based institute
of a poll showing majority support among both Israelis
and Palestinians for the recently proposed Geneva
Accord.
If Baker's European interlocutors
suggest this week that real pressure by Washington on
Israel - perhaps of the kind Baker exerted back in 1991
- could make them more amenable to reducing Iraq's
official debt, then the larger implications of Baker's
appointment become more tangible. In any event,
Wolfowitz's timing in barring some allies from Iraq's
rebuilding contracts has clearly given Mssrs Jacques
Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, Vladimir Putin and other
European leaders more leverage to raise issues of this
kind.
And for the hawks, even the
recognition that the Europeans enjoy significant leverage over
US foreign policy is very bad news indeed.
(Inter Press Service)
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