WASHINGTON - The abrupt replacement of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld by
former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Robert Gates, combined with
the Democratic sweep in Tuesday's mid-term elections, appears to signal major
changes in US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.
A career CIA analyst until his retirement in the early 1990s, Gates, a favorite
of both former president George H W Bush and
his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, has shared their "realistic"
approach to US foreign policy and shown little patience with the
neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists such as Vice President Dick
Cheney. Or with Rumsfeld, who dominated President George W Bush's first term
after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon and
led the march to war in Iraq.
As recently as two years ago, for example, Gates co-chaired a task force
sponsored by the influential Council on Foreign Relations with former president
Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, which called for
a policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with Iran, a policy that was
denounced as "appeasement" by a number of prominent neo-conservatives.
Indeed, in the aftermath of Tuesday's electoral landslide, in which the
Democrats gained at least 29 seats to win a secure majority in the House of
Representatives and appear poised to win a narrower majority in the Senate as
well, and Rumsfeld's departure, both Cheney and his neo-conservative supporters
now appear more marginalized than ever.
"If the trend in the Bush second term is viewed as what a friend of mine once
called 'an imperceptible 180-degree turn' from neo-con ideology to political
realism, then this would be a crowning achievement," said Gary Sick, an Iran
specialist at Columbia University who worked with Gates in the National
Security Council under Carter.
"Viewed from my own knowledge and perspective, I think this is one of the most
significant US policy shifts in the past six years," he said, adding that,
among other things, Rumsfeld's departure and Gates' ascension would, at the
very least, give Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - like Gates, a Soviet
specialist from the realist school - more diplomatic maneuvering room than in
the past when she had to contend with both a hostile vice president and
secretary of defense.
Although apparently discussed for some time, Rumsfeld's resignation on the
heels of the election was no doubt designed at least in part as a sacrificial
offering to victorious Democrats, whose performance at the polls appears to
have lived up to their greatest hopes. The quagmire in Iraq for which Rumsfeld
was, of course, one of the most visible faces was, according to both the
pre-election and exit polls, probably the single most important factor in what
Bush himself called a "thumping" for his Republican Party.
"At a minimum, Rumsfeld's departure buys the president time to adjust Iraq and
other policies without the newly empowered Democrats screaming for blood,"
opined Chris Nelson, editor of the private insider newsletter The Nelson
Report. "But they will start to do that pretty soon, if nothing coherent seems
to be happening."
In his first post-election statement, Bush vowed to find "common ground" with
the Democrats on Iraq, as well as other issues - a promise that seemed
inconceivable just a month ago when he and Cheney were accusing the opposition
party of wanting to "cut and run" from Iraq and handing the "terrorists" there
a great victory.
For their part, the new Democratic leadership - the House Speaker-to-be Nancy
Pelosi and the likely new majority leader, Senator Harry Reid - called for a
national summit on Iraq policy.
While the Democrats are united on Iraq, many, if not most, including Pelosi,
believe that Washington should begin "redeploying" the 140,000-plus troops from
Iraq and setting timetables for an eventual withdrawal over the next one to two
years to reduce the mounting costs in blood and treasure of the US
intervention, extricate Washington from what appears to be a growing sectarian
civil war, and put pressure on the Iraqi government and its various factions to
prevent one.
Both parties are likely now to defer to the recommendations of the Iraq Study
Group (ISG), a bipartisan, congressionally appointed task force co-chaired by
former secretary of state James Baker and former House Foreign Affairs
Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, which is supposed to release its report
between now and early next year.
Significantly, Gates is a Republican member of the ISG, which, under Baker's
guidance, met in September with senior representatives of Iran and Syria,
governments that have been boycotted diplomatically by the Bush administration.
Those meetings prompted strong speculation that the ISG was almost certain to
recommend engaging both Tehran and Damascus as well as Iraq's other neighbors,
as part of a strategy to facilitate a US withdrawal and prevent the sectarian
conflict from spreading beyond Iraq's borders.
Such an approach has been anathema to Rumsfeld, Cheney and the
neo-conservatives, who successfully vetoed Rice's suggestion during summer's
Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon that Washington communicate at least
indirectly with Damascus and earlier efforts by her to persuade Bush to be
prepared to offer Tehran security guarantees as part of any package that would
emerge from successful negotiations between the European Union and Iran on
freezing its nuclear program.
But both approaches are likely to be advocated by Gates, and therein lies the
possibility of a major overhaul of US policy, particularly in the Middle East
but also with respect to Asia, particularly China, where tension with
Rumsfeld's Pentagon has been the main irritant in an otherwise relatively
constructive relationship under Bush. Nelson points out that Gates is currently
a leading member of the Baker policy advisory group.
Indeed, some right-wing commentators see Rumsfeld's replacement by Gates as a
virtual coup d'etat by the old, realist crowd around Bush's father against the
remnants of the hawkish coalition of aggressive nationalists, neo-conservatives
and the Christian right that seized control of Middle East policy, in
particular, after September 11.
"Bottom line, the Gates nomination has Jim Baker's fingerprints all over it,"
said J William Lauderback, executive vice president of the American
Conservative Union. That analysis will likely be echoed in the coming days by a
host of neo-conservatives howling about a realist takeover.
In fairness to the neo-conservatives, many of them have been calling for
Rumsfeld's ouster, some even as early as the Iraq invasion, when they
determined that he was unprepared to devote the kind of resources and manpower
"in ground forces and security" into the kind of "model" they had envisaged for
the rest of the Arab world. In recent months, even neo-conservatives who have
stood by Rumsfeld have publicly criticized him for botching the Iraq
occupation.
They had urged Bush to choose Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat with strong
neo-conservative views on the Middle East, to replace Rumsfeld. Lieberman, who
was defeated two months ago in the Democratic primary election by a virtually
unknown anti-war candidate, Ned Lamont, was re-elected with Republican votes
and money to the Senate as an Independent in one of the few pieces of good news
that the hawks have received over the past 48 hours.
But Lieberman's re-election could not overcome the tide of bad news for the
neo-conservatives and their main sponsor and protector within the
administration, Cheney, who, now deprived of both his former chief of staff, I
Lewis Libby (indicted for lying to a federal grand jury in October 2005), and
Rumsfeld, now lies isolated and exposed.
"Rumsfeld is his guy," journalist Bob Woodward told the TV public-affairs
program 60 Minutes last month. "And Cheney confided to an aide that if
Rumsfeld goes, next they'll be after Cheney."
