Page 1 of
2 The end of cowboy diplomacy, Part
2? By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Just nine months ago,
Newsweek spoke for the conventional wisdom at that
moment when it pronounced "The end of cowboy
diplomacy" in the United States.
The
phrase signaled the apparent victory - at last -
of the State Department-led "realist" wing over
hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney and
then-Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld in gaining
control over the foreign policy of President
George W Bush.
One month later, however,
war broke out between Lebanon's
Hezbollah and Israel, and the
hawks, particularly neo-conservatives around
Cheney and Rumsfeld, enjoyed a strong resurgence.
Bush not only spurned the pleas of
Washington's European and Arab allies to press the
Jewish state for a ceasefire, but his top Middle
East aide, Elliott Abrams, reportedly encouraged
Israel, to the horror of both his State Department
colleagues and his Israeli interlocutors, to
expand the war into Syria.
Now, one
Democratic election landslide later, Rumsfeld's
departure, and the longest-running record of
sustained low public approval ratings for any US
president in more than 50 years, conventional
wisdom has again concluded that the realists have
indeed taken the reins of power.
That such
an assessment coincided with last Tuesday's felony
conviction by a jury of Cheney's former chief of
staff and the most powerful neo-conservative in
Bush's first term, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for
lying to federal investigators was probably not
entirely coincidental given the "cloud", as chief
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald described it, that
it cast once again over the vice president's
office.
That the case - which, at its
heart, involved the lengths to which Cheney's
office and the White House went to discredit
critics who charged that the administration's
hawks had manipulated intelligence to rally the
country behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq - seems
likely soon to become the subject of congressional
hearings will almost certainly deepen that cloud.
Even before Libby's conviction, however,
the notion that the realists had finally triumphed
was growing in Washington. "Diplomacy could define
end of Bush's terms: Pragmatism colors policy,
experts say", headlined a story this month in USA
Today, while on the same day, the New York Times
ran an analysis titled "Pragmatism in diplomacy"
about recent moves by Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice to engage North Korea, Iran and
Syria.
"White House foreign policy has
shifted", noted a front-page Los Angeles Times
article last week that asserted that recent moves
reflect "the ascendancy of Rice and her State
Department team over hawks" once led by Cheney and
Rumsfeld.
"Bush shows new willingness to
reverse course" ran another headline last week in
the Washington Post, while one of the newspaper's
columnists, David Ignatius, argued that Bush has
apparently embraced the recommendations of the
bipartisan, realist-led Iraq Study Group (ISG) in
a piece titled "After the rock, diplomacy".
Meanwhile, Jim Hoagland, in a column
titled "What has happened to Dick Cheney?"
suggested that the vice president has in effect
been marginalized by Rice, who "has won full
agreement and support from the president on
strategic goals and methods she and her diplomats
are pursuing".
While Hoagland himself
indicated that this view remains to be confirmed
by events, the evidence that power has shifted in
the realists' favor has indeed grown increasingly
persuasive in just the past month, if only because
the hawks, such as Cheney favorite and former
ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and
his colleagues at the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), have become increasingly
distressed by changing balance of power.
The most dramatic sign of the realist
ascendancy to date was last month's accord between
North Korea and the US under which Washington
agreed to begin normalizing relations and resume
the supply of fuel oil in exchange for Pyongyang's
shutting down its plutonium-processing plant and
the admission of international inspectors.
The deal, which resembles the 1994
bilateral accord repudiated by Bush early in his
term - albeit this one within the framework of a
regional agreement involving South Korea, Japan,
China and Russia - marked a sharp reversal of the
US administration's stance and was cleared by Bush
after a direct appeal from Rice, who reportedly
circumvented the normal inter-agency process that
would have guaranteed a stronger voice for Cheney
and the hawks.
At the same time, the State
Department's persistent if mostly tacit support
for Saudi Arabia's efforts to midwife a
Palestinian government of national unity in which
both Hamas and President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah
would participate last month in Mecca - in
defiance of the hawks, in this case led by Abrams
- has been seen by some analysts here as
demonstrating a new flexibility that would have
been inconceivable just a few months ago and that
was consistent with the ISG's recommendations.
What has gotten the most attention to
date, however, is Rice's announcement at the end
of last month that Washington would participate in
at least two regional meetings convened by the
government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The first took place this weekend in Baghdad, and
the second, at the ministerial level, is set for
early next month. Rice herself is to take part in
the April meeting, which will also include Syria
and Iran.
Her announcement confirmed the
growing impression that Rice was indeed trying
move the administration toward implementation of
the recommendations of the ISG, which was chaired
by former secretary of state and neo-conservative
nemesis James Baker and former congressman Lee
Hamilton, and which called explicitly for
Washington to engage Tehran and Damascus as part
of a larger regional strategy.
Significantly, her announcement came while
Cheney was out of the country and, on the day
after his return, White House spokesman Tony Snow
denied that Rice's announcement constituted a
change of policy and said that, in any event,
"there
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