Bush royalty and Condi loyalty
Mounzer Sleiman : Aljazeera net 25/1/2005
As the Bush second term begins, many are looking at the president's changes to his national security team and wondering how they will affect policymaking over the next four years.
Condoleezza Rice moved to a more challenging post at the Department of State, while her deputy, Steve Hadley, will try to fill her shoes at the National Security Council.
In the meantime, Donald Rumsfeld appears to be firmly entrenched at the Pentagon, despite the growing number of calls for his removal.
While many analysts will look at these changes and try to divine how this will change US national security policy, they tend to overlook the major player in making policy: The president.
It is clear from Bush's first four years that he has more influence in arriving at crucial decisions than his critics are willing to admit. Influence from cabinet members such as Colin Powell was much less than most analysts expected.
It is an axiom of presidential politics that a second-term president seeks a legacy. And Bush, being a Texan, is prone to thinking big, having apparently set his sights on reshaping not just Iraq but the entire Middle East.
This is a fundamental characteristic of Bush's decision-making process. Despite a Yale education, Bush is a Texan and Westerner at heart. He brings these traits of expansiveness and unbridled ambition to the Oval Office; they drive every decision he makes.
From Bush's eyes, America is the world's only superpower and the force for good. This, in his view, confers a unique right to act unilaterally: to orchestrate regime changes when it suits him, to hold elections when it suits him, to arm insurgents and provocateurs when it suits him, to depose democratically elected presidents when it suits him - in short, to play the emperor.
Unlike previous presidents, who strove to maintain balances of power and respected recognised spheres of influence, Bush is given to brazenly pushing ahead, camouflaging his aggressive foreign policies amid campaigns to spread democracy and freedom.
Bush's new national security team will only reinforce this world view. Rice, Rumsfeld and Hadley are in lockstep with Bush's position, of course, and cannot be expected to differ to any measurable degree.
Thus, there is a greater chance that Bush will see his policies implemented, rather than obstructed, by the bureaucracy.
To anoint Rice as secretary of state is to send a loud message - that, at least in the Bush administration, it is OK to fail miserably at your job as long as you are loyal.
In light of that truth, it is hard to imagine that Rice will be anything other than completely obedient to her master in her new position.
We have seen Rice, the national security adviser, fail to assert her power as an independent thinker in that position; her visibility did not translate into success.
Her reluctance to speak up - whether due to loyalty to, or awe of, Bush - made her a party to Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's usurping of power from then secretary of state Powell
Notably, the Bush administration had assigned Rice the responsibility to oversee both the Iraq and the Palestinian situations; she mismanaged both.
Now the administration is putting forward the Iraq election as the magic solution to the current military quagmire. The reality will most likely be that the situation will worsen, not improve, after the charade of a "free election".
As national security adviser, Rice was free of Congress's scrutiny, reporting only to Bush. As secretary of state, however, she will be accountable to Congress, and it will not be so easy to deflect blame or hide missteps and shortcomings.
Managing and conducting US foreign policy from her new position will demand not only the ear of the president, but also the skill, experience and courage to communicate dissent to the president, without appearing to be disloyal.
The transition to a new position plus the inertia of the Washington bureaucracy will guarantee some hitches.
Rice will be moving from a small organisation at the NSC (National Security Council) to the entrenched bureaucracy of the state department.
As former secretary of state Kissinger noted in his memoirs, there are natural conflicts between the NSC, which is designed to develop and advocate the president's policy, and the state department, which remains in place through many administrations and whose approach reflects the views of professional diplomats.
The view from Foggy Bottom will be a very different one from the view in the West Wing. Rice will undoubtedly have problems reconciling the two different world views, and will have to decide which one to advocate.
As an advocate for state, Rice will also have turf problems with her former deputy Hadley and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld.
Her advantage is that she has a close relationship with Bush and her political star is seen as ascending, while Rumsfeld, who is supported by Vice-President Cheney, is probably filling his last government job.
Cheney and Rumsfeld represent the end of an era. Once the young lions under president Gerald Ford, they are now the old guard giving way to a new generation of foreign-policy experts such as Rice.
Unfortunately, Rice showed no serious commitment to diplomacy during her confirmation hearings at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite her new slogan "the time of diplomacy is now", which was met by scepticism as one member of the committee responded, "... it is long overdue".
And just as the Bush administration has declined to admit any mistakes, Rice declined to take any responsibility for her obvious failures in the past four years.
The impression left is that of a defensive political science professor, not of a presidential adviser responsible for coordinating and representing various agencies' views and options to the president, including dissenting ones.
While the road to approval from the Senate was relatively smooth for Rice, the path at Foggy Bottom may prove substantially more challenging.
After all, sturdier fellows than Rice, namely Powell, have folded under the steamroller that is the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war machine. As we look ahead, this administration will continue pressuring Iran and Syria, assigning to them the blame for its failure in Iraq.
However, it is unlikely that this pressure will culminate in the use of significant military force, since the US military is already overextended with its commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. North Korea could prove to be an interesting test of the Bush doctrine.
The biggest problem with implementing this Bush doctrine is the lack of uncommitted military force. Obviously, the US has considerable political and economic muscle, but as long as the US remains committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, there are few military options that are available with those commitments intact.
Consequently, military options against Syria, Iran, and North Korea are limited to air strikes for the foreseeable future.
This leads to the issue of Iraq. Bush has made it clear that he is committed to the establishment of democracy in that country, and he will not be easily dissuaded. The future depends a great deal on the outcome of the election later this month, especially since US military forces have been extended to oversee the election.
If the Iraq crisis escalates, as latest developments indicate, the Bush doctrine may be seriously challenged.
If, by 2006, Iraq is seen as an open sore by the majority of the American people, Bush could lose support in the House and Senate as Republicans begin to oppose the war in order to keep their seats.
In that case, Bush may have to moderate his position in order to keep the Republican Party viable.
Commenting on the second term, a prominent critic of Bush said: "When historians look back at the Bush presidency, they are more likely to note that what sets him apart is not the crises he managed, but the crises he fabricated."
Mounzer Sleiman is a Washington-based senior political-military analyst with expertise in US national security affairs.