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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
Experts struggle to explain the Bush administration's off-and-on Mideast policy.
Apr 2, 2002 | Trying to understand the gyrations of the Bush administration's hands-off, then hands-on, then hands-off again Middle East policy has been a challenge over the past month.
Salon asked foreign policy analysts and experts to interpret.
Richard Curtiss, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:
It certainly appears that Bush is unable to make up his own mind. At times, when Colin Powell gets control of his head, he does the right thing. But he's also squelched often, so we go into moments of total confusion. Then Powell comes again and attempts to make it less deleterious.
But I really don't know when Bush is going to decide who he is. As you know, there are only two countries in world, Israel and the U.S., who feel one way, and the rest of the world feels another way.
It's a miraculous form of political blindness. I cannot figure out for the life of me why he's entering these periods of confusion. Zbigniew Brzezinksi [national security advisor to President Carter], in the last couple of days, has spoken with amazing clarity, trying to explain that there is no choice -- that the U.S. has to make up its mind and side with the rest of the world.
It's extremely dangerous not to, because the U.S. is like a giant child. It doesn't understand what the disastrous situation will be for the U.S. if we go down this road too long. I fear it's going to hurt us very badly. I hope it's just political consequences that we'll suffer, but there are other options.
The Arab countries may eventually have no choice but to initiate an embargo, which will only hurt us. Or what if the Saudis say we have to leave? We have a huge defense strategy that could be in shambles in minutes if the Saudis simply close down what we've tried to do there. And if that happens, you can be sure that no other Arab country would pick up the gauntlet, because they'd be ostracized.
I hate to even get into this because talking about this makes me feel that the U.S. is extremely vulnerable. But if the U.S. keeps doing things in such a heedless way, you could have human bombs all over the world, including in the U.S.
Also, I've spent many years in the Middle East and elsewhere so I know the advantages of good relations, in terms of things like getting the police to share information. And we could lose all that in an instant. This is an extremely dangerous time. I find George Bush terribly confused and the fact that Ariel Sharon is calling the shots in Washington is a terrible development.
Ivo Daalder, senior fellow at Brookings Institute, and a staffer in Clinton's National Security Council from 1995-1996:
They have a particular view about the nature of world politics. They view world politics as a billiard-ball table in which balls are states of different sizes, and the U.S. is the cue ball. The way you get things done is by bumping up to other balls and getting them to move because of your size and force.
The idea is that America is so powerful that it can do what it wants. So because the world is really about balls, states and mass, that's all you need to know. Whoever is the most powerful state does what it wants. That's basically the view that the Dick Cheneys and Rumsfelds have; you can cooperate but only to the extent that it gets you what you want.
Where this comes from is the absolute power that the U.S. has, and an absolute conviction that whatever the U.S. stands for ought to be acceptable to others. We don't have to examine whether we're good. We are. Either everyone will accept that, or they won't because they're misguided.
The problem is that the reality of the world is more complicated. And when reality hits them in the face, they're stuck with sticking their head in the sand or adjusting. And so far, they've been good at adjusting. An example is foreign aid. This was an administration that came into office believing that foreign aid was social welfare for poor countries. But the president doubled the aid budget this month in Mexico.
As for the Middle East, it seemed a week ago -- when you had the combination of Cheney's visit, Zinni's redeployment and the president's strong words that it's not helpful [for Israel] to be in Ramallah -- you had a sense that the administration was engaging in the Middle East conflict in a way that all administrations have done since 1973.
But in the last 72 hours, they have reverted to type. If you take the statements of Powell Friday and Bush's statements to the press today, they're characterizing what's going on in Israel as if it was the World Trade Center. They've adopted the same language as Sharon; it's all about terrorism. There's no regard for the causes of terrorism, or the idea that the way you deal with terrorism is through political process.
It is a reversion to type. If you want to characterize the administration's soul as a fight between ideology and pragmatism, it seems that there was a short period -- from Cheney's visit until last week -- where pragmatism won out. But since the Passover massacre, they've reverted to ideology and moralism. It's good vs. evil, the Western world versus terror. They've reduced a highly complicated 50-year-old conflict to good vs. evil.
Their approach is not going to last because it can't. It's only going to get worse. We will have a suicide bomber every day. People already cannot walk on the streets in Israel for fear that they'll be attacked. Eventually, the world and the Israelis will turn to us and tell us to resolve the conflict, and Mr. Bush will get involved. We'll have to recognize that, while trying to get a cease-fire, you also need to engage in the political process.
Or, if the conflict were to hit home here [in the form of suicide bombers on U.S. soil], it could go one of two ways. We could see the Sept. 11 reaction -- fury, designed to destroy those who did this. The other option is to question why we're importing another country's problems.
If I were a betting man, and I'm not, I'd bet that the Bush administration would go with cold fury. I'm struck, reading what Bush said on Saturday, that the way he analyzed this conflict is antiseptic. There is no political context. It's remarkable. And it underscores a larger point; it exposes the hollowness of their war on terror. They've identified terror as a kind of behavior and they either have ignored or downplayed or denied that this behavior can be caused by different contexts.
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