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The illusion of process
... The first question about [condoleezza] Rice's role as security adviser is, how was she able to stay out of the line of fire of the neocons who had fought her over Russia policy in the first Bush administration, and the evident answer is, only by staying close to the president. That, in turn, carried implications for Rice's ability to speak truth to power ...
Deciding what matters
Every presidency begins with the new chief executive and his National Security Council initiating a wide range of policy reviews that enable the new administration to put its stamp on U.S. policies. As they proceed, these reviews are discussed at the NSC Deputies Committee and then rise to the level of the NSC Principals Committee. Under Bush, the process of orderly review leads to National Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs) that specify decisions taken. Aside from any of its other consequences, Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission revealed that NSPD-9, the basic counterterrorism directive and authorization for the military campaign against Afghanistan, approved on September 17, 2001, was the first substantive policy directive approved by President George W. Bush during his term in office.
That no directive had been approved earlier does not mean that the Bush administration had not acted on foreign policy. The abrogation of the ABM Treaty, the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto environmental protocols and the International Criminal Court agreement, and other measures, all took place during this early period. What the revelation about NSPD-9 does mean, however, is that all of those early Bush actions were carried out without interagency policy review.
Conversely, the policy review on intelligence was carried out at the president's request by a group headed by Scowcroft. That review was completed around the time of September 11, 2001, but its conclusions had yet to be acted upon at the time of Rice's testimony to the 9/11 commission, more than two years later. This indicates that the policy process in the Bush administration functions much differently from the standard established earlier. The current system might be broadly characterized as a "personality-based policy."
An examination of particular policy areas and of the role of Rice and the NSC staff in those matters confirms this view. One more point needs to be made about Rice's 9/11 testimony. The testimony of senior Clinton and Bush administration officials, including Rice, establishes that Clinton administration officials very consciously made certain to indicate to Rice, Bush, and others, their view that terrorism would be the major foreign policy preoccupation in the immediate future.
Rice, Bush, and others proceeded to act as if these concerns had not been enunciated. It may be hindsight to point it out, but the Clinton officials were correct in their concerns, and the way Bush administration officials treated the issue is exactly analogous to the way the first Bush administration responded to Gorbachev's speech in December 1988. In each case, no response was made and crucial time was lost while the matter was subjected to formal policy review. In fact, the point is even sharper in the case of terrorism; current Bush administration officials acted quickly in many other areas while holding back on counterterrorism before conducting a lengthy review. As cited earlier, Rice had thought about the earlier failure and personally conceded her own blindness in the waning days of the Cold War. It is regrettable that a similar incident occurred when Rice returned to the White House ...
Obsession?
... Back in the heady days of the campaign, Rice authored an overview of her candidate's world views and intentions that appeared in Foreign Affairs. Referring to the Clinton administration's resort to force in Kosovo, she wrote: "The Kosovo war was conducted incompetently, in part because the administration's political goals kept shifting and in part because it was not, at the start, committed to the decisive use of military force." Substitute "Iraq" for the name of the country, understand Rumsfeld's "lite" invasion plan for what it was, and that observation applies exactly to Bush's war in Iraq as stage-managed by Rice.
Stage management is a matter of process, and it is the process of Rice's NSC that needs examining. Two factors greatly complicated the possibility of a smoothly running system. One is the deep chasm between Colin Powell's State Department and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The second complication is Dick Cheney, a vice president with unprecedented sway on national security issues, who forged an underground policy structure of his own with connections to Rumsfeld and links to key officials elsewhere such as Hadley on the NSC staff and Bolton at State. Cheney not only has the president's ear, he has the ability to create and push paper in the bureaucracy. Previous national security advisers, faced with State-Defense Department competition, have played traffic cop outside the Oval Office (in Kissinger's case, he moved to supplant both agencies and pull the reins of power into the White House). Rice has chosen instead to cultivate her direct relationship with the president, essentially getting out of the way of the policy war. Rice's ideological predilections, more attuned to those of the Cheney-Rumsfeld alliance, help assure that the NSC process is more a matter of ideology than of issues, evidence, and attainable objectives.
Finally, a word about Rice's role as public persona. During the Clinton administration, Tony Lake and Sandy Berger made the national security adviser more of a public person through their speeches and television appearances. Rice has taken this effort to an entirely new level. Frequently appearing on multiple news shows on a single day, spending hours in successions of interviews, presenting speeches in tandem with other officials in coordinated public relations offensives, making many speeches on her own, Rice has acquired unprecedented visibility as a spokesperson. I have not taken a systematic survey, but an estimate of her appearances would include speeches in the dozens and news contacts in the hundreds. The wide variety of public positions Rice has taken on substantive issues restricts her ability to act impartially in the policy process. And the sheer effort required to sustain her public appearances may seriously curtail the time Rice has available to actually manage the Bush administration policy process, such as it is ...
A report card
During the 2000 presidential campaign, when Rice was auditioning for her current position as national security adviser, she offered two statements that make perfect points of departure for an evaluation of the Bush administration's national security record. One is her January 2000 article in Foreign Affairs. The other is Rice's speech, accompanied by a discussion with the audience and host Charlie Rose, before the Council on Foreign Relations on October 12, 2000.
Rice argued in Foreign Affairs that "multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves." [26] She objected specifically to the Kyoto Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, on which the Bush administration has been as good as its word. Both of these agreements, as well as the ABM Treaty, are history. As mentioned earlier, U.S. actions opting out of these treaties were taken without reference to process. Whether the United States is better off as a result is disputable.
Rice also maintained that "the Clinton administration's attachment to largely symbolic agreements and pursuit of, at best, illusory 'norms' of international behavior [has] become an epidemic." One may easily make an identical comment with regard to the Bush administration's Roadmap in the Middle East.
Rice went on, "There is work to do with the Europeans too," pointing to the enlargement of NATO and defining what holds the transatlantic alliance together. The Bush administration has succeeded in enlarging NATO by incorporating East European nations. At the same time it has substantially undermined relations with key partners, leaving the overall NATO relationship shakier than ever before.
Rice saw China as "a potential threat to stability in the Asia-Pacific region," to be countered by deepening U.S. cooperation with Japan and South Korea. Today the United States is actually dependent on China, both as a source of imports and as a diplomatic intermediary with North Korea. Rice wrote that China was not a status quo power and thus was "a strategic competitor, not the 'strategic partner' the Clinton administration once called it." In fact, the Bush administration now relies on China as a strategic partner. Meanwhile, U.S. relations with South Korea are worse than before, and important differences have emerged with both South Korea and Japan regarding North Korea.
The United States, wrote Rice, needed to pay "immediate attention to the safety and security of Moscow's nuclear forces and stockpile. The Nunn-Lugar program should be funded fully and pursued aggressively." Today these nuclear safety programs are in a virtual state of suspended animation.
The "rogue regimes" in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Rice explained, "are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them." This statement speaks for itself.
Most important, Rice insisted, "Foreign policy in a Republican administration will most certainly be internationalist." That statement clearly conflicts with the Bush administration's unilateral abrogation of treaties, its unilateral push toward ballistic missile defenses, its flouting of the United Nations in the war with Iraq, and its treatment of alliance relationships. It has virtually ignored Latin America and conditioned foreign aid on performance norms.
On the Middle East, Rice told the Council on Foreign Relations, "The circumstances that created the opening for direct Palestinian/Israeli dialogue really goes [sic] back to a significant change in the circumstances in the Middle East coming out of the [1991] Persian Gulf War." A bit of overdetermined analysis that clearly foreshadows the miscalculation that led to the Iraq war?
Speaking the night after candidate Bush said in a presidential debate that the United States needed to be "humble" on the international stage. Rice told the Council, "Ever since I first talked to Governor Bush about foreign policy, this has been something that has been on his mind."
Once in power, however, the Bush administration has acted in the exact opposite fashion, as if it could sweep the board clear on the international plane. Rice also described Bush's view of U.N. peacekeeping: "I think he's somewhat skeptical of the idea that the United Nations could become a major force." In power, the Bush administration initiated a war with Iraq, ostensibly to strengthen the United Nations by enforcing a U.N. resolution.
- John Prados, "Blindsided or blind?" bulletin of the atomic scientists july/august 2004
posted July 28, 2004 in politics, print.