The Australian Take On Current Events

Voices of restraint give way to Bush hawks beating war drums ever louder
By Peter Hartcher
July 19, 2005 Link

When John Howard called on Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage in Washington yesterday, he was seeing champions of the two opposing forces in the Bush Administration's first term. Cheney is the arch-hawk of the Administration. He may be the US Vice-President, but on many issues of foreign policy he is the driving force.

"The invasion of Iraq was in many ways Dick Cheney's war," wrote a close student of the Administration, James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. Armitage, with his boss and alter ego, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, was the voice of restraint in the Administration.

The standing of these two factions in the Administration today, in the early phase of its second term, is easy to assess. Cheney is still the Vice-President, still the arch-hawk, and still the key voice on central questions of US foreign policy. Armitage and Powell are now private citizens.

The hawks are rampant. The Administration no longer has a voice of restraint nor a dissenting opinion.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter and a strong presence in US foreign policy circles, said in a recent interview that the Bush Administration now had "the most remarkably homogenous closed-shop decision-making process - the principals tend to think alike and they tend to reinforce the thinking of the President".

But surely Cheney was wrong on Iraq - he had predicted that the invading force would be "greeted as liberators" - and the sceptics have been vindicated? A former senior official in the Clinton Pentagon, Kurt Campbell, cautions that many people inside the Administration do not perceive reality in the same way as most people on the outside.

"A lot of people who support the President are really not interested in the facts on the ground," Campbell says. "There really is a faith-based belief in the President as a person and in his ability to remake reality."

So where others believe the Iraq adventure has clarified the limits to US power, the Bush Administration believes it illustrates the need for the application of yet more power. Brzezinski sums up: "To put it simply, if we weren't in a mess in Iraq we would be repeating it in Iran or Syria."

The Administration continues to develop its options in dealing with both these countries, and also with North Korea, a slow-burning but real crisis.

The three central impulses from its first term remain intact. First is that it will not negotiate with rogue states. Second, it will not relent in its insistence that they relinquish their nuclear weapons programs, or other weapons of mass destruction. And third, the US retains the right to use force against any state it deems to be a threat.

The Bush Administration is content to have other nations do the negotiating in the most advanced of these crises - the remaining two points on Bush's original axis of evil, Iran and North Korea.

In Iran's case, the principal negotiators are the European Three - Britain, Germany and France. For North Korea there is a six-country negotiation group including the US, but Bush has publicly put the main onus on China to do the negotiating. And while others do the negotiating, the US stands half a step behind the negotiating table with the heavy club of military force slung across its shoulder, bringing a deliberate pressure to bear.

Wielding the club is another matter. Any sort of attack on North Korea or Iran could precipitate a war with heavy damage to US interests and allies. But a great deal of work is going on in Washington to try to develop workable military options for dealing with these countries.

And all the while there is a group of hawks casting a suspicious eye on China. Jim Steinberg, former deputy national security adviser to Bill Clinton, talks of "a worst-casing coming out of the military that carries the risk of becoming self-fulfilling". The inflammatory remarks of a Chinese general last week, threatening to strike the US with nuclear weapons if Washington should take sides against it over Taiwan, only advance a deepening mutual suspicion.

This is combining with a recrudescence of economic nationalism to sharpen antagonism between Washington and Beijing. The inclinations of the Administration's foreign policy hawks are backed by the Republican Party's political interests.

The party's "strongest card of all is national security", write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of a treatise on conservative power in America, The Right Nation. "September 11 has allowed the Republicans to reassert their traditional advantage with a vengeance."

So Howard is likely to have had the benefit of the dominant view from the Administration in his lunch with Cheney, and a very well-informed understanding of the limitations of policy from Armitage. How to keep up with the hawks, yet keep a clear view of Australia's interests, is the question that Howard must weigh for himself.