Some might look at this as an opportunity after a dodged bullet. The president let crazed, reality-denying neocons drive his foreign policy for a term, leading to near-constant disaster. The neocon agenda (indeed, their entire worldview) has been discredited and exposed as a fraud. Bush won a second term anyway, giving him a chance to set his foreign policy right and drive the fools from his administration.
Except it’s not working out that way.
Jacob Heilbrunn had an interesting op-ed today noting that all the expectations that Bush would wake up and kick the neocons out of the White House were just wishful thinking. Heilbrunn is looking at this from a far different perspective than I do — he thinks Bush should keep the neocons in charge — but his observations about who’ll have the reins in Bush’s second term are important anyway. As Heilbrunn explained, the only people leaving the Bush administration are those who stood in the neocons’ way.
Bush hasn’t retreated an inch rhetorically and is stepping up the battle in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney is ensuring that the neocons are being promoted everywhere in the administration.
With Secretary of State Colin Powell gone, Cheney no longer faces even token opposition. Far from being headed for the political graveyard, neoconservatives are poised to become even more powerful in a second Bush term, while the “realists” — those who believe that moral crusading is costly and counterproductive in foreign policy — are sidelined.
Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, argued that neocon ideas “lie buried in the sands of Iraq.” Pat Buchanan gloated that the “salad days” of the neocons were over. These people assumed that abject failure would lead Bush to consider a different course. How utterly ridiculous. Bush rewards those who are wrong with promotions and punishes those who are right with dismissals.
Of course the neocon agenda have been unmasked as misguided fiasco, but why would that have anything to do with Bush’s decision making?