Press Action ::: 'Not the World's 911'

Sunday, January 04, 2004

'Not the World's 911'

By Mark Hand

What a difference a presidential election cycle makes. Four years ago, George W. Bush was telling reporters that the United States should not be arrogant in its foreign policy if it wants to have peace in the world. During the 2000 campaign, there were occasional murmurs among pundits that a Bush presidency would lead to the disengagement of U.S. forces from certain hot spots around the world in need of a superpower’s attention. A Bush presidency would diminish the effectiveness of United Nations and NATO “peacekeeping” missions, some observers said.

Today, Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean has adopted a much tougher posture on foreign policy than was the tone of Bush’s 2000 campaign. Dean has portrayed himself as a “muscular multilateralist” who supported past U.S. wars in Iraq (1991 through the decade of sanctions), Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Military action, according to the Dean doctrine, is appropriate when it is used to stop an imminent threat and when other nations refuse to halt genocide. Unilateral and preemptive action would have a home in a Dean administration’s foreign policy arsenal, the candidate says.

Given the radically militaristic turn of the nation during the past two years, the mainstream press and some of Dean’s competitors for the Democratic nomination are branding him as a throwback to the party’s McGovernite past who would get eaten alive by the vultures in Bush’s camp if he were to win the Democratic nomination.

Bush’s public stance on foreign policy issues during the 2000 presidential campaign, as we now know, was a charade intended to appeal to so-called Democratic centrists and Republican moderates. The concept of a “humble” foreign policy meshed nicely with Bush’s campaign slogan of “compassionate conservatism.”

In a 1999 interview with Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, Bush was very impressive in touting his phony peacenik foreign policy:

"We’ve got to be very careful not to become the Ugly American again,” Bush told Hoagland. “We can be a leader. We can be strong. But I don’t think we can be arrogant and keep the peace. ... The United States will not be able unilaterally to keep the peace. We can lead if we’re smart. We can lead in coalitions. We can be humble partners in coalitions.” (Washington Post, Dec. 30, 1999)

Contrast Bush’s comments from the 2000 presidential campaign with the tenor of Dean’s proposed interventionist foreign policy program for the 2004 race and one is left bewildered by how the mainstream press can seriously continue to characterize Dean’s foreign policy doctrine as McGovernite.

Max Boot wrote in a column in the Wall Street Journal in 2000 that Bush and Cheney were campaigning on a “Powellesque platform” that would increase funding for the military but not put military personnel in harm’s way. “This suggests that a Bush administration would be unlikely to bury the bodybag syndrome,” Boot said in the Sept. 11, 2000 column. “For those interested in utilizing U.S. military might to police the Pax Americana, this ought to be disquieting news.”

As one of the biggest cheerleaders for George W. Bush’s current imperial wars around the world, it’s not surprising that Boot in 2000 would question whether an administration that counts body bags would have the backbone to police the world. The purpose of Boot’s column in the Wall Street Journal, as was the case with many other pieces of commentary and analysis written at the time, was to camouflage the intentions of the people working in the background of Bush’s campaign.

An astonishing example of this type of analysis appeared in the Los Angeles Times in an article by Robin Wright, who now writes for the Washington Post. “Tactically, Bush wants to move incrementally when crises challenge American interests. Gore wants to be more engaged on a wider variety of fronts to preempt U.S. interests from being threatened,” Wright wrote in a Sept. 13, 2000 article.

The war hawks working behind the scenes of Bush’s campaign, all familiar names today, included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage and John Bolton. One of this cadre’s stated goals at the time was to take care of some business that its members believed George W. Bush’s father failed to finish in 1991: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The Bush campaign’s foreign policy team was closely associated with the Project for the New American Century (a think tank that has received a significant amount of press since Sept. 11, 2001 but was relatively unknown during the 2000 campaign). In 1998, PNAC sent an open letter to President Clinton and congressional leaders calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein and a shift toward a more assertive U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Two years later, in September 2000, PNAC issued a report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses. PNAC described the report as a “blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.”

In the report, PNAC predicted that the shift toward a more aggressive posture in the Middle East would come about slowly, unless there were “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” The day after the Sept. 11 attacks, Rumsfeld insisted at a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be “a principal target of the first round of terrorism,” according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, as several Bush advisers were playing an active role in developing plans to reshape the Middle East, the media remained sidetracked by Bush’s public statements against the United States serving as the world’s top cop.

Some of the analysis of the Bush campaign’s foreign policy goals, however, was calculated in its misrepresentation. In a classic example of obfuscation, William Kristol, editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard and supporter of Bush’s strategy in the Middle East, wrote in the Washington Post that the main applause line in Condoleezza Rice’s speech at the Republican national convention in Philadelphia “was closer to the spirit of George McGovern than Ronald Reagan.” (Washington Post, Aug. 31, 2000)

As it turns out, Rice’s speech in Philadelphia proved prophetic in a coincidental sort of way, given how the 9/11 attacks have defined the Bush presidency. George W. Bush “believes that America has a special responsibility to keep the peace — that the fair cause of freedom depends on our strength and purpose,” Rice said in her speech. “He recognizes that the magnificent men and women of America’s armed forces are not a global police force. They are not the world’s 911.”

Mark Hand is editor of Press Action.

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