Before and during the war in Iraq, much was made of the significant divisions within the Bush administration over foreign policy. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a multilateral camp, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who urged the president to work with coalition allies, generate debate in the United Nations, work with U.N. weapons inspectors, and avoid military conflict unless absolutely necessary.
The hawk camp has even more champions in the White House, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. Their approach, naturally, was the opposite of Powell’s: the U.S. shouldn’t be afraid to launch wars alone, the U.N. is useless, so are its inspectors, and America can and should remake the world starting with the Iraq and the Middle East.
These fissures have torn at the administration since Bush’s inauguration, with the president unsure which approach deserves his allegiance. His commitment to both philosophies has, in fact, been on display at varying times, apparently based on which faction had his ear last.
The military fighting in Iraq is largely finished, but Defense and State are still jockeying for position. Defense, for example, has thrown its support behind Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, even helping airlift him into Iraq. State, meanwhile, believes Chalabi has little credibility in the country, is seen as too close to the U.S. to be effective, and has worked behind the scenes to “limit his role” in the government, as the Washington Post put it.
Complicating matters, the Defense vs. State hostilities are also shifting to other international crises.
As the New York Times reported yesterday, Rumsfeld and Powell are — once again — competing for attention, this time over how (and whether) to deal with nuclear threat North Korea.
The Times obtained a memo from Rumsfeld proposing that the U.S. “should team up with China to press for the ouster of North Korea’s leadership.”
More regime change! This scheme, though, seems odd. Why would China, which has been North Korea’s only strategic ally in recent decades, want to work with Bush to depose Kim Jung Il? More importantly, what makes Rumsfeld think China would even tolerate a U.S.-backed expulsion of the North Korean government, allowing for the possibility of an American-friendly government to share an eastern border with China?
As the Times reported, “Officials on all sides of the arguments say that, with the fall of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the internal battles that once surrounded the policy on Iraq are re-emerging over North Korea.”
Powell has arranged for new negotiations to begin between the U.S. and North Korea, in talks hosted by China, as means towards lessening the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Rumsfeld and his allies, meanwhile, believe the negotiations could reward North Korea, financially and diplomatically.
The memo’s very existence is a political problem for the administration. Powell has said the U.S. has no intentions to trying to invade North Korea or overthrow its government. Rumsfeld’s memo, however, suggests that the administration’s top goal should be the removal of Kim Jung Il.
The Times article also noted that Rumsfeld and the Defense Department suspect that Powell successfully got an unwitting Bush to go along with the State Department’s plans for negotiations with North Korea while the Defense guys were busy with the war.
“There’s a sense in the Pentagon that Powell got this arranged while everyone was distracted with Iraq,” one intelligence official told the Times. “And now there is a race over who will control the next steps.”
In fact, Powell got the green light from Bush for the State Department’s plan in a meeting with Bush just last week. As the Times noted, Rumsfeld was not present at the meeting.
Powell’s work is obviously infuriating the hawks in the administration, who’ve never trusted Powell’s instincts or ideas. As the Washington Post reported today, “the battle between the State Department and the Defense Department for control over U.S. foreign policy has intensified, U.S. officials said yesterday, with skirmishes waged almost daily over policy toward North Korea, the Middle East peace process and the reconstruction of Iraq.”
Now, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a Rumsfeld ally who serves on a Pentagon advisory committee, is going to announce today his proposal for a “major overhaul” of Powell’s State Department.
Gingrich will also make clear that he, and probably his neo con cohorts, have reflected on the Bush administration’s diplomatic failures at the U.N. in the months leading up to the war, and have concluded that the blame lies directly with Powell and the State Department.
For example, Gingrich told the Post that his proposal is motivated by the “failure of State,” which he described as “six months of diplomatic failure followed by one month of military success now to be returned to diplomatic failure to exploit the victory fully.” He went on to describe Powell’s work at the U.N. as a period of “unrelenting defeat.”
As much as I enjoy seeing Republicans tearing each other apart over an inept foreign policy based on which way the wind happens to be blowing, the neo cons blaming Powell is absurd. The diplomatic breakdowns at the U.N. and in NATO, which were certainly a debacle for the ages, had more to do with our allies’ disgust of the neo cons unswerving thirst for war than Powell’s attempts at consensus building. Friends and foes around the world heard Cheney dismiss the U.N. and its inspectors, heard Rumsfeld say we cared little about allies joining our “coalition” for the war, and heard Bush express his willingness to go it alone.
Regardless, the State vs. Defense battles aren’t going away. The administration is divided against itself, and the divisions are apparently getting worse and more intense. It’s worse than just having an administration where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing; it’s a situation where the left hand doesn’t like what the right hand is doing and is doing its best to undermine the efforts.
Wouldn’t all this be easier if we had a president who had his own beliefs and could lead his own cabinet officials based on his vision for world affairs? I know, I know, I ask too much.