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2 Father, son and Holy
Ghost By Ehsan Ahrari
In the days before the release of the Iraq
Study Group (ISG) report, the widespread
speculation around Washington was that former
president George H W Bush's foreign- and
defense-policy experts were coming to the rescue
of George W Bush at the private urging of his
father regarding Iraq.
It was thought that
the neo-conservatives' ideological stranglehold
was about to be loosened from the current
administration's foreign policy. But only a few
days after the release of that report, it
appears to have alienated
President Bush. One can only imagine that Vice
President Dick Cheney, Bush's chief foreign-policy
adviser, is equally unhappy with the report's
conclusions.
And speaking of Bush Sr's
influence, it should be recalled that in answer to
journalist Bob Woodward's question about how much
advice on foreign policy Bush Jr seeks from his
father, he famously stated that Bush Sr "is the
wrong father to appeal to for advice; the wrong
father to go to, to appeal to in terms of
strength". Then he added: 'There is a higher
Father that I appeal to."
It appears that
there is little reason to think that Bush Sr's
advisers would be of much assistance to the
current president, for at least two reasons.
First, those advisers are driven by political
pragmatism (aka "realism") and multilateralism
that were the sine qua non of Bush Sr's
presidency.
President Bush, on the
contrary, has demonstrated for the past six years
that ideology, not pragmatism, drives his
administration. And in that ideological thinking,
there is little room for hard-nosed realism or
pragmatism.
Even when pragmatism is given
a chance, so much fuss is usually made over such
an approach that it clearly signals to the other
involved party that it is being done halfheartedly
and would be abandoned the first chance the
current administration gets. Two well-known
examples ought to be mentioned here to make a
point.
The first was the Bush
administration's decision finally to start
multilateral negotiations with North Korea. But
when North Korea approached the administration to
conduct important aspects of those negotiations on
a bilateral basis, Washington's response was a
categorical "no". A pragmatic approach would have
necessitated conducting informal talks on a
bilateral basis, just to show good faith toward
and to win the confidence of the insecure North
Koreans of America's good intentions and
flexibility.
The second example is that of
Iran. That country approached the United States
with a promise to cooperate prior to the latter's
invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, Iran offered to
cooperate with the Bush administration in case of
any air mishaps and offered to conduct
search-and-rescue operations for US pilots under
such circumstances.
Within a matter of
weeks after that attempted rapprochement by the
Iranians, President Bush made his infamous State
of the Union speech that lumped Iran, North Korea
and Iraq together as part of an "axis of evil",
thereby conclusively alienating Iran.
The
second reason Bush Sr's advisers are not of much
help to President Bush is the very premise of the
ISG's report. Bush is chiefly motivated by a wish
to succeed in Iraq, while in the thinking of that
report's authors - even though they came from the
Republican as well as the Democratic Party - the
chances of America's success in Iraq are virtually
non-existent. Consequently, the report is chiefly
aimed at minimizing US losses in its attempts to
withdraw its forces from Iraq.
The focus
of Bush Sr's foreign policy was the building of a
world order where America's primacy was to be
envisaged in the great tradition of
internationalism, which major stalwarts of that
party - most significantly presidents Dwight
Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and even Ronald Reagan -
championed.
Of course, when Eisenhower was
in office, the United States had just emerged from
World War II as a victor and as a champion builder
of a brand-new global order. It was a system that
was to institutionalize America's primacy of the
non-communist world in the realm of economics in a
highly unprecedented way. It was also a system
where America's military supremacy was to remain
uncontested.
When Nixon entered the White
House, a highly nuanced approach to foreign policy
was added, whereby the United States was to use
its China card in conducting its complicated and,
as it
