A White House divided against itself cannot stand
You had to know this was coming. As I’ve mentioned from time to time, there are substantive, qualitative differences within the Bush administration about foreign policy. I don’t mean disagreements about how many troops to send to Iraq, or how best to punish our allies have declined to participate in the war. I mean different world views about whether to send troops to Iraq, whether to engage with countries like North Korea, whether to care about institutions such as the U.N. and NATO, and whether to embrace multilateralism or unilateralism.
When the U.S. is enjoying relative peace, these fissures are a whole lot less relevant. The administration may be divided against itself, and competing for the president’s ear, but without a major conflict to highlight these differences, administration adversaries and go along and get along.
Yet, we’re not at peace, we’re in a major conflict, the war is not going as well as was advertised, and the uncivil war within the administration is bubbling over. It’s not pretty to watch.
As the front page of the Washington Post notes today, “The first 11 days of the war have brought back with a vengeance the deep splits that have long existed within the Bush administration and the Republican Party over policy toward Iraq.” This is a must-read article that I can’t recommend enough.
As has been the case since Bush’s inauguration, we find Colin Powell’s State Department on one side, with the Defense Department and Dick Cheney on the other. Bush, unfortunately, lacks a coherent vision of his own and as a result, the administration meanders blindly from one side to other, apparently based on whomever as the president’s attention on that given day.
The Post report, however, shows the proverbial “mess” hitting the fan. “[T]here is a behind-the-scenes effort by former senior Republican government officials and party leaders to convince President Bush that the advice he has received” from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz has been “wrong and even dangerous to long-term U.S. national interests.”
The article added that one former Republican appointee said he and his allies are considering “whether this president has learned something from this bum advice he has been getting.”
That’s pretty serious language, but the report hints that behind closed doors, the accusations are striking an even more serious tone.
In light of Bush’s advisors intentionally limiting access to the president, many who may raise contrasting points of view are simply not heard. With that in mind, some GOP officials are considering going over the advisors’ heads and trying to reach the president by sending messages to the former President Bush.
“The only one who can reach the president is his father,” one former senior official said. “But it is not timely yet to talk to him.”
This is discouraging on several levels. The president does not seek and does not hear those who might question his decisions. He does not consider points of view that fail to adhere to the advice given to him by Cheney and Rumsfeld. When Cheney and Rumsfeld are wrong, even his Republican allies have to consider talking to the president’s father in order to be heard.
If the war were to end tomorrow, these divisions within the administration would largely disappear. Everyone’s happy on a winning team. But as long as the war continues, and the administration is now trying to prepare the public for a war that could last several more months, this infighting undermines the president’s credibility and leadership even further than it already has.
Rumsfeld wants to “put the ‘Powell Doctrine’ into obsolescence,” Powell doesn’t seem to trust the civilian military leadership, no one can reach the president except his father, and the president himself can’t seem to keep his own administration united behind a coherent vision, better yet the country or the world. Through it all, fears that George W. Bush is in over his head are reinforced on a nearly daily basis.