Cover Story - State of Disorder by James Kitfield

Readers may be interested in this sober but nonetheless seriously disturbing critique of the Bush legacy. This comes to us thanks to Jim Campbell.

Cover Story - State of Disorder

James Kitfield
© National Journal Group, Inc.


Everything old is new again. In the final year of a two-term presidency, the commander-in-chief travels to the Middle East for a last, legacy-burnishing push to forge a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. He reaches out personally to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to close an elusive deal on the dismantlement of the Hermit Kingdom's nuclear weapons program.


Archterrorist Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda henchmen continue, meanwhile, to plot attacks against the United States from sanctuaries along the Afghan-Pakistan border. At home, a familiar nemesis from a competing political dynasty is running for president, promising to seize the reins of American foreign policy and dramatically alter the country's post-Cold War course yet again.


The eerie parallels between 2008 and 2000 -- a host of major international problems that have defied solution, the potential for another whipsaw change in American foreign policy, and a deeply divided domestic political landscape -- are striking. But beyond that, many more signs hint that America is entering a new and different period. The country faces threats and challenges today that defy easy characterization or a glib narrative.


Old problems persist, but new crises erupt with frightening regularity: devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists; war and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq; looming confrontation with Iran; an epidemic of political assassination in Lebanon; violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan; renewed tensions in the Balkans; a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America; slow-motion genocide and pandemic in Africa; a rapidly rising China; and an increasingly bellicose Russia. Anti-Americanism everywhere you look.


As his lodestar for navigating that perilous landscape, President Bush rallied the country and U.S. allies to an unprecedented "global war on terror" in his first State of the Union speech after the September 11 attacks. In his 2005 Inaugural Address he called for a generational struggle to spread democracy and end tyranny throughout the world. Neither vision has captured the support of the world, or the nation.


Despite Bush's frequent trumpeting of lofty goals, in fact, poll after poll shows the United States' standing and influence in the world sinking to unprecedented lows, with majorities in 10 of 15 countries polled in April 2007 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org saying that they do not trust the United States to act responsibly. Even in the closely allied countries of Britain, Canada, and Mexico, a majority of people polled by newspapers in late 2006 viewed Bush as a threat to world peace on par with Iran's Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea's enigmatic "Dear Leader," Kim Jong Il.


At home, only one in four Americans expresses a favorable view of Bush's foreign-policy leadership, and the president's overall approval rating remains at less than half his predecessor's standing at this point in his second term. There is a growing sense on both sides of the nation's "red-blue" divide that something has gone terribly wrong, although pundits manning the battlements on the left and right disagree vociferously on why. America's fundamental role in the world is being challenged abroad -- and questioned at home -- to a degree not witnessed since the Vietnam War.


"America's image and influence are in decline," concluded a recent report by the independent and bipartisan Commission on Smart Power, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and co-chaired by Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of State, and Joseph Nye, former dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. As an example, the report notes that foreign leaders have often found that standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush and U.S. policy is the "kiss of death." If you doubt it, look at the lipstick marks on the cheeks of former leaders Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, Tony Blair of Britain, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, and John Howard of Australia. "America may be less well regarded today than at any time in its history," declared the commission, which included military and foreign-policy experts from both political parties.


With his belated push for a Middle East peace deal and a pact ending North Korea's nuclear program, Bush is clearly trying to polish his legacy. He has begun the mandatory goodwill tour of lame-duck presidents, with six overseas trips already planned for 2008. He is also preparing his final State of the Union address, a last chance to articulate a strategic vision that makes sense of a world in turmoil for a nation in a state of great unease.


A Radioactive In-Box

Few Americans will be more directly affected by the Bush legacy than the presidential candidates now auditioning in earnest for the job of commander-in-chief. Whatever happens in the final year of the Bush presidency, the next White House occupant will confront a sobering list of challenges from the moment his or her shadow darkens the Oval Office door.


First on the agenda will likely be developing a strategy for maintaining U.S. interests in the "arc of instability" that stretches from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip and crisis-paralyzed Lebanon in the west, all the way east to Pakistan, tottering on the brink of political implosion in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. (See sidebar on the Mideast, p. 30.) Major elements of that strategy must include managing counterinsurgency wars and epic nation-building enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan; containing Iran's regional and global ambitions; contesting Al Qaeda's and the Taliban's newfound sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal regions; defusing conflict between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds; ending Syrian meddling and apparent assassinations in Lebanon; birthing a Palestinian state; and keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Iranian mullahs and Pakistani Islamic extremists. And all of that comes before the next president even looks into the eyes of Vladimir Putin -- the likely Russian premier and power behind the Kremlin.


The new president will also find the tools of American power in considerable disrepair. The all-volunteer and overburdened military has developed significant stress fractures, from persistent problems in recruiting qualified personnel to a looming modernization crisis. (See sidebar on the military, p. 32.) The intelligence community, still recovering from the Iraq debacle, remains deeply distrustful of the executive branch it serves, as evidenced by the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program that dramatically repudiated earlier intelligence estimates as well as the White House itself. (See sidebar on intelligence, p. 34.)


The State Department and related foreign-aid agencies have proven themselves woefully inadequate and under-resourced for the nation-building tasks they are increasingly asked to perform. The National Security Council, responsible for coaxing coordinated policies out of the interagency process, has consistently underperformed. A major reorganization of homeland-security agencies is incomplete, and serious questions remain about the faltering U.S. economy's capacity to indefinitely sustain spending levels that in Iraq and Afghanistan alone could top $1 trillion sometime during the next president's first term.


"It's difficult to imagine a more daunting in-box than the Bush administration is now coping with and will pass along to its successor," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. "Not only are the major issues we confront more numerous and demanding, but the United States is less well positioned to deal with them than it was seven years ago. We're far more stretched militarily and economically, and because we're more unpopular internationally, it's increasingly difficult to find partners around the world. Add in the fact that the 44th president is almost certainly going to face this terrible choice of what to do about an Iran on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and it's a pretty worrisome combination."


Fractured Consensus

Presidential election years and, especially, the close of two-term presidencies are natural times for reflection, in the Oval Office and Washington think tanks as well as in kitchens and coffee shops across America. Given the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the tumult of the Bush years, questions about how America will wield its still-unmatched power going forward and how it relates to other countries and international institutions loom very large. For good or ill, much of the world will perceive the election outcome as a mandate for the victor's worldview.


What already seems painfully clear is that the once-sturdy domestic consensus on what America stands for in the world, which was already beginning to fray in the post-Cold War 1990s, has shredded entirely in the post-9/11 millennium. The tatters are evident in the vastly different interpretations of the Bush foreign-policy legacy among Washington's camps of hard-line nationalists, liberal progressives, neoconservative idealists, and traditional realists. Moreover, uneasy voters have begun to question the basic tenets and burdens of global leadership, with poles in both political parties drawn increasingly toward protectionism and isolationism and away from free trade, international engagement, and liberal immigration policies.


A December 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, for instance, found that isolationist sentiment among Americans had risen dramatically, with 42 percent of respondents agreeing that the United States "should mind its own business internationally, and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." Thirty-four percent of Americans supported this view in 2004, and only 30 percent did so in 2002. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of Americans who said they supported global trade dropped from 78 percent to 59 percent, the steepest decline in any of the 47 nations polled in the Pew Global Attitudes survey.


"The spike in the percentage of Americans saying we should mind our own business in world affairs mirrors a similar rise in the mid-1970s after the Vietnam War," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Global Attitudes Project. "That resistance is something the next president, whether Republican or Democrat, will likely struggle with in fashioning a foreign policy."


Charles Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, and the author of The End of the American Era. "I worry that the broad, bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that Franklin Roosevelt put together, which was already beginning to fracture when Bush took office, has now been split asunder and could be gone for good," he said in an interview. "Given that deep divide among the electorate, I really think the next president is going to have a devilish time managing the domestic aspects of foreign policy. The erosion of America's standing abroad is also high on the list of damages done in the Bush years, because that will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reclaim. So the next president, whoever he or she is, will take office under some of the most inauspicious strategic circumstances in American history."


Defending the "Revolution"

Any assessment of Bush's foreign-policy legacy and its impact on the next presidency has to begin with the tumultuous first term, when an administration already inclined toward big, "transformative" ideas decided after 9/11 to make the world unsafe for terrorism, rogue states, and tyranny writ large. In less than two years, those ambitions led to the invasion of two Muslim countries. In the case of Iraq, the United States went in without a U.N. mandate or broad international support. The foundations of the old world order shook, which was just what the Bush team had in mind.


For the hard-liners and neoconservatives within the Bush administration who forged an alliance in those critical months after the attacks, a dramatic reordering of international affairs was a rational response to an extraordinary threat that they believed challenged the American way of life. They made the war on terrorism global and all-encompassing out of a belief that unrivaled and unshackled American military power could defeat both Islamic extremist terrorism and rogue-state sponsors that were pursuing weapons of mass destruction.


That thinking shaped the key elements of the Bush Doctrine: a preference for coercion rather than direct engagement with adversaries (hence, the "axis of evil"); a focus on regime change and reliance on pre-emptive war; and unilateral action masked behind small, ad hoc "coalitions of the willing."


Even today, the neocons and hard-liners are unapologetic. "Our enemies were not engaged in terror as political theater: Their aim was our destruction, and if they acquired weapons of mass destruction the result could be the deaths of many times the number of people killed on 9/11," said Douglas Feith, a prominent neoconservative intellectual and the No. 3 official in the Pentagon at the time of the attacks, speaking recently at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "The leading state supporters of terrorism also had a history of seeking weapons of mass destruction, a point not negated by our failure to find stockpiles in Iraq. So we determined that a series of 9/11-like attacks could change the nature of our society, because our constitutional system, civil liberties, and prosperity are all rooted in the openness of our society."


If the United States had not gone on the offensive against terrorists and rogue states with ties to terrorists, Feith argues, the alternative would have been adopting a stringent defensive posture, even including police-state tactics. "So the stakes in this conflict couldn't have been greater," he said.


Civil libertarians -- pointing to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, warrantless wiretapping, torture memos, and unprecedented assertions of executive power -- cringe at such arguments. But in the worldview of the Bush neocons and hard-liners and their ardent supporters -- some of whom today are top foreign-affairs advisers to Republican presidential candidates -- the problem with the Bush "revolution" was not that it was perceived as overly militaristic and unilateral. The problem was, rather, that the administration executed the revolution poorly and then abandoned its core principles in the second term.


Indeed, few of those who forged the Bush Doctrine, formulated the strategy for the global war on terrorism, and won the president to their cause, survived the harsh blowback from the Iraq war. These days, outside of Vice President Cheney's office, there is little talk within the administration of "regime change," "pre-emptive war," the "shock and awe" of transformative military power, or the mission "defining the coalition."


"I think the Bush foreign policy is in free fall at the moment, because the president has abandoned the principles and gut instincts he began to form in 2001," said John Bolton, the administration's former ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, who is closely associated with Cheney in the hard-line nationalist camp, recalls that Bush embraced a policy of close alignment with Israel, no bilateral negotiations or rewards for bad behavior for North Korea, and no nuclear weapons for Iran. Recently, Bolton said, the administration has done a policy U-turn on each of those critical issues.


"All three legacies are heading in the wrong direction," he said, "because [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice is now advocating the same policies that the State Department bureaucracy has been promoting for the past seven years, and she is effectively the only voice in Bush's ear on these issues now. I'm also afraid this focus on legacy is leading to bad policy, because legacy is what you accomplish during your entire term, not what you can rush in the waning months in office."


Bolton cites what he sees as a prime example of Bush's betrayal of the revolution. As recently as a year ago, Bolton says, the president genuinely seemed intent on ordering a pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure. "President Bush said it was unacceptable for that country to acquire nuclear weapons, and because he is a man of his word, I thought that meant 'unacceptable.' I'm not sure what 'unacceptable' means today. I still have a candle lit in my home to the prospect that Bush will eventually say all these issues are headed in the wrong direction, because I still think his instincts are in the right direction."


Competing Narratives

For many foreign-policy experts with less aggressive ideas about the use of U.S. military force and coercion, the Bush Doctrine was premised on a fundamental misjudgment about the true nature of American power. The Bush acolytes may have believed that their good intentions and U.S. military might would make right in world affairs, but, the critics say, the administration failed to see how the perception of a superpower run amok would diminish the greater source of American power: the principles, ideals, and good deeds that other nations and peoples freely acknowledge and embrace, and that long shaped the world's judgments of American intentions and leaders.


"The Bush administration tried to transpose a 19th-century belief that military power is the most important form of interaction in international affairs onto a 20th-century world, where the forces of globalization have made military power less dominant, and the result is that practically everything they touched they made worse," said Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton administration official who is now a senior foreign-affairs fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Now it appears that even Bush himself has started to realize his mistake, and is engaging in the Middle East peace process and with North Korea in an effort to essentially return those situations to where Bush found them in 2001. It's going to be difficult, however, to recapture what was lost in the last seven years."


Perhaps not surprisingly for an administration that at times has seemed almost bipolar in its foreign-policy strategies and philosophies -- and in which competing camps of neoconservatives, uncompromising nationalists, and such traditional Republican realists as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have constantly been at war -- some of the harshest criticisms come from former top Bush officials.


"When I think about the Bush legacy, the two words that come to mind first are 'squander' and 'overreach,' " said Haass, who was the No. 3 official in the State Department under Powell in the first Bush term. " 'Squander,' because I predict the common judgment will be that he inherited a country in a moment of rare advantage, and he squandered those possibilities by overreaching and trying to do too much. He tried to remake the world, to recast societies, and to do it acting alone and using primarily military force. And closely linked with those first two words that come to mind is a third -- 'Iraq,' " Haass continued. "More than any other single decision by this administration, Iraq illustrates the costs of the Bush foreign policy, both in terms of spent treasure and other potential achievements it made impossible."


That theme of overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks also runs deep in the conclusions from the bipartisan Smart Power Commission. Its report criticizes the Bush administration for, in particular, adopting methods and tactics that the United States had traditionally stood against when used by other governments: secret prisons; covert "renditions" of suspects to countries with poor human-rights records; unlimited detention of prisoners without judicial review; warrantless and unsupervised electronic surveillance of American citizens; and "enhanced interrogations" that looked to all the world, and even to some who conducted them, like torture.


"The good news is, President Bush shows signs that he has learned some of those lessons after stumbling badly, and that his worldview has evolved somewhat, but the country is going to pay a very high price for his initial on-the-job learning," Harvard's Nye said in an interview. "When Abu Ghraib replaces the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of what the world thinks America stands for, I think it's fair to say that we, as a country, lost our way after 9/11."


The Truman Clause

In the view of current top Bush administration officials (see excerpts from NJ's interview with John Negroponte, p. 28), today's focus on the president's legacy and the Iraq war captures only a snapshot of his time in office and risks missing the broader and brighter picture that will emerge in time. For an administration mired in an unpopular war and with historically low approval ratings, that's not a surprising take on things, but it comports with Bush's frequent contention that the fight against Islamic-extremist terrorism and its root causes will be a generations-long struggle.


A senior Bush official who asked not to be named said, "We are only in the opening rounds in this war against terror, which includes a Sunni version in the form of Al Qaeda and its networks that seek to find safe haven in weak countries, and a Shiite version with Iran as its state sponsor." In this construct, those early rounds have been about taking the fight to terrorists, and disrupting their capacity to attack the United States at home or to acquire weapons of mass destruction abroad.


The fight thus far has been violent and sometimes brutish. The fact that the United States has not been attacked again in the six-plus years since 9/11, this official argues, also suggests that the U.S. has won some of the early rounds.


While conceding setbacks and difficulties in their campaign to establish democracy in places with no democratic traditions, administration officials still argue that few alternatives exist for addressing the root causes of terrorism. The nation should take heart, they say, that Saddam Hussein is gone from Iraq, the Taliban no longer controls Afghanistan, and Syria is out of Lebanon.


"Has it been messy and is the world a volatile place today?" the senior official asked. "Sure, there is a lot of chaos out there. But democracy is a fairly messy business. It takes a long time to form, and elections open the door to some uncomfortable results. So the cake is not cooked yet. Part of it is still in the bowl being mixed. Part of it is in the oven. None of it is done yet. But I would argue that we will be leaving our successor some promising developments."


Call it the Truman Clause. On their bad days -- and there have been many -- Bush administration officials like to recall that during the Korean War, President Truman was excoriated in the press and pummeled by some of the worst public-approval ratings of any sitting chief executive in history. But long after Truman boarded the Ferdinand Magellan at Union Station for the long train ride home to Missouri, he would be remembered most as the president who implemented the international policies and constructed the national security architecture that eventually brought the United States victory in the Cold War. Legacy reformed.


"I actually think there's a pretty good probability that Bush will share the same fate as Truman," said Edward Luttwak, a longtime strategist and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Similar to Truman, in 50 years' time people are likely to only vaguely remember that Bush was president during an unpopular war. Instead, they'll remember him for establishing the architecture not of containment, but of disassociation of Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists from their support among Arab elites and states. In a half-century, I think he'll be given credit for marginalizing the enemy."


Hoover Could Work, Too

Of course, there is also the Hoover precedent to consider. From the evidence available, it seems just as likely that historians will one day place Bush alongside President Hoover as someone who responded to a crisis with instincts and a set of policies that made the original problem far worse. In Hoover's case, the government reacted to the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent recession with a tightening of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board, despite massive bank foreclosures; by Hoover's signing of the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that further strangled global trade; and by a hands-off approach to massive unemployment. The legacy: the Great Depression.


Many experts detect a similar serious misjudgment in Bush's post-9/11 decision to launch an all-encompassing "global war" on Islamic terrorism at a time when the United States needed to divide rather than unite its enemies. These critics question the administration's embrace of unilateralism and pre-emptive war at a moment when the nation could have benefited from collective action, and from the counsel and firm support of allies.


"For seven years we have seen a constant struggle within the Bush administration between ideologues and pragmatists, and for the first five or six years the ideologues who viewed military force as the prime instrument of change in the world prevailed," said Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress. "They argued that the military option would be quick, cheap, and easy. Instead as we've seen in Iraq, it's been a costly disaster. That put the final nail in the coffin. The Bush Doctrine is dead."


Even some of those who supported elements of the Bush Doctrine doubt that its core will survive the backlash against the Iraq war. That, too, is part of the Bush legacy. In too much of the world, America's promotion of democracy is now linked with violence and instability, and pre-emptive strikes against terrorists are equated with the unilateral invasion of nation-states.


"I fear that the biggest foreign-policy legacy of the Bush administration will be that it de-legitimized its own strategy, whether you're talking about the democratization agenda or the idea of preventive war and regime change as a response to terrorists and states that sponsor them" said Kori Shake, a professor of international security studies at West Point who served on the National Security Council in Bush's first term. "While I happen to think there is merit to those ideas in a world where terrorists cannot be deterred and can inflict truly strategic damage, I couldn't even convince my mother of that view after Iraq. And if I can't persuade her, I doubt the next president will be able to persuade a skeptical American public. Like so much else the Bush administration embraced in theory, those ideas were de-legitimized in practice."


* With six overseas trips already planned for 2008, a lame-duck Bush tries to clean up the puddle before the new president takes office.


* The old talk of "regime change," "pre-emptive war," the "shock and awe" of transformative military power is gone.


* As U.S. popularity hits new lows around the world, signs are surfacing that Americans, too, want to pull back from international engagements.







42% of Americans say that the U.S. "should mind its own
business internationally."