I‘m not sure whether it’s an encouraging sign or not, but recent weeks clearly show that a criticism I among many others have made of President Bush – that he is so stubborn he can never change policies no matter what the facts on the ground might indicate as prudent – is simply not the case any more. Lately the stay-the-course president has reversed course on a number of policies.
I still don’t expect him to begin withdrawing from Iraq or even drawing down the number of troops substantially before he leaves office. Even on that one however, conversations with various GOP movers and shakers in Babylon-on-the-Potomac lead me to believe that most Republican officials, elected or otherwise, would dearly love to see Iraq in the rearview mirror rather than the headlights come 2008. If Saudi diplomatic efforts and other factors (please don’t expect the “surge” to do it) lead to a somewhat more stable Iraq by the end of this year, Bush might even oblige them to some extent.
I suspect, however, that he’s more interested in his own sacred place in history than in the fate of the party whose national electoral prospects he may have torpedoed for a decade or more. And I suspect he has convinced himself that showing a strong and unwavering commitment to the war he started, and to the principle of preventive conflict, or whatever historians will end up calling the “Bush doctrine,” even when remaining “steadfast” is not politically advantageous, will serve him better in the estimations of future historians than changing course on the centerpiece of his presidency.
And heaven help us, he just might be right. Harry Truman’s numbers never got quite as low as Dubya’s, but he was pretty widely reviled by the time he left office, yet his reputation rather quickly rose in the eyes of mainstream commentators and historians, and largely because he was willing to take the country into war in less-than-ideal and not entirely justifiable circumstances. Relatively conservative historians tend to admire warriors or wartime leaders, and liberals admire activist presidents. Few actions are more activist than starting a war.
Bush might be so thoroughly despised about now that he will break that pattern of wartime presidents gaining retrospective respect. But I’m not sure I’d bet the ranch on it.
Although he may be unlikely to reverse course on the war, however, he has reversed course on a number of issues recently – perhaps even enough to hang the flip-flopper label on him.
The most obvious recent example, of course, is North Korea. The president’s first instinct regarding North Korea was to arbitrarily label it part of the abstract “axis of evil” in the fateful 2002 State of the Union speech, and to believe that what the administration now believes was dubious intelligence about North Korea having a uranium-enrichment program was rock-solid evidence that demanded a rhetorically unflinching response.
For years the administration rejected even talking about the idea of having one-on-one talks with anybody from North Korea, insisting that the only way the U.S. would interact with the Hermit Kingdom would be in the six-nation forum set up shortly after the U.S. accused North Korea of having a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In January, however, he authorized one-on-one talks in Berlin, which led to an agreement that erstwhile Bushies like former U.N. ambassador John Bolton were quick to denounce as rewarding North Korea for bad behavior.
Last Saturday we saw the results of another Bush, er, strategic repositioning. In the recent past Bush has rejected the idea of talking directly with Iran in dismissive, even sarcastic terms. The only way we’ll talk with them, he would say, would be if they agree in advance to stop enriching uranium, even though the nonproliferation treaty doesn’t forbid that unless it’s clearly part of a weapons program.
After the Baker-Hamilton report suggesting meeting with Iran and Syria, the administration dismissed the idea as unrealistic. As recently as a press conference in February, the Bushlet sneered that “This is a world in which people say, Meet! Sit down and meet! And my answer is: If it yields results, that’s what I’m interested in.”
On February 8 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified in the Senate that “talking with Syria now about Iraq would have downsides for us in terms of Lebanon, in terms of what Syria would be looking for, in terms of how it would be perceived. On February 25, on Fox News Sunday, she reiterated the administration view that the U.S. would talk to Iran only if it “will suspend its enrichment and reprocessing activities. Then on February 27 told a Senate hearing that “The government of Iraq is preparing for an expanded neighbors meeting” to which Iran and Syria had been invited.
It seems unlikely that the president and secretary of state weren’t aware when they made their earlier statements that plans were going forward for a meeting among Iraq’s neighbors, along with the U.S. and Russia. That meeting happened March 10. Iran had not agreed to stop enriching uranium; indeed it was still proclaiming its sovereign right to do so. The U.S. representatives didn’t go out of their way to hug the Iranian representatives and sing Kumbaya with them, but they showed up.
This was not the first shift on Iran. As former British MP Sir Eldon Griffiths outlines in his valuable new book, Turbulent Iran, in May and June of 2006 all the brave talk about possible armed action to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities and/or to orchestrate regime change died down remarkably quickly. As Sir Eldon writes, “The State Department was authorized to join in E.U. and Russian efforts to find a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear challenge,” for reasons that are still a little mysterious to mere outside observers.
The flip-flops on Iran and North Korea are the most significant Dubya policy shifts, but other shifts have taken place as well. Remember that the administration opposed the creation of a Department of Homeland Security before it became likely that such a proposal would get through Congress, at which point the administration reversed course and did everything possible to create the impression that it was their idea in the first place.
The current flap over the firings of eight U.S. Attorneys has featured all kinds of backing and filling, from declaring initially that the concerns were all performance-related to acknowledging some political motives to the president expressing disappointment while in Mexico that the whole affair had been handled so poorly to Attorney General Gonzales agreeing not to use the sneaky procedure slipped into a bill last year whereby U.S. Attorneys could be appointed with no requirement of Senate confirmation.
There is little question that this administration is headed by a man who is still one of the most stubborn and least reflective persons to occupy the Oval Office in recent memory. I can’t tell you how many Republican and conservative people in Washington I’ve talked to who have expressed surprise and dismay at the sheer incompetence of an administration that for the first few years looked like an extraordinarily tight and efficient ship. The Scooter Libby trial revealed an administration that even at the height of what seemed to be, back in 2003, a highly controlled and disciplined operation turns out to have had deep internal divisions and instances when the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.
While spokespeople always try to spin turnarounds as minor shifts that reflect a deeper internal consistency, however, the shifts on Iran, Korea and various minor matters show that this president can change his mind and turn policy around almost on a dime. That’s not entirely encouraging. The president and the administration still don’t show too many signs of being either thoughtful or even modestly humble when it comes to foreign policy.
