Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Who’s behind the new Bush policy of negotiations?
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Who’s behind the new Bush policy of negotiations?
The radical post-2006 election changes in the Bush policy – a drift toward negotiations with North Korea, Iran, Syria and the Palestinians, de-emphasis of tax cuts, Medicare reform and other Conservative issues - open the question of new influences in Washington that may have shunted aside the hawk/hardliner/conservative cabal, reduced to Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rowe, as neocons and hawks leave their government posts. Speculations about the departure of Under Secretary of State Robert G. Joseph, whom some CIA sources consider the spearhead of the notorious “16 words” in the Presidents 2003 State of the Union message, have sharpened the debate. Can it be that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and her department are the main sources of this policy? Are her players neocon-based, hawks, “realists,” or ex-hawk “semi-realists”? (This in the terminology of the Right Web, by International Relations Center (IRC), a Bush watchers’ think tank.)
Let’s examine the structure of the DOS, headed by the Secretary and her Deputy SOS John Negroponte, a Bush faithful (successor to realist Robert Zoellick 2005-06 and near-realist Richard Armitage 2001-05), with six Under Secretaries and a Counselor, running a structure based on 22 Assistant Secretaries. The Under Secretaries –most not noted for public talk – are R. Nicholas Burns for Political Affairs, Joelle Sheehan for Economics, John Rood (successor to Joseph) for Arms Control and International Security, Karen Hughes for Public Diplomacy (a sometime Bush emissary), Henrietta Fore for Management, Paula Dobransky for Global Affairs. The recently appointed watchdog Counselor Eliot Cohen is a neocon theorist (he replaced the realist Philip Zelikow). Evidently the sources of the new realist policy cannot be solely in the DOS.
Looking at the recent changes in government, the pundits point to the old George H. W. Bush crowd, as the source of the new realist policy, within which the former National Security Advisor, Gen. Brent Showcroft, has been a consistent cautioner. The group took force with the appointment of former SOS James Baker on the Iraq Study Group, replacement of Secretary of Defense Douglas Rumsfeld by Robert Gates, of the director of national intelligence Negroponte by Admiral John McConnell, and of CIA’s Porter Goss by Gen. Michael Hayden. Secretary Rice herself was part of that group, and appears to take a semi-realist position, of working with the regional powers in pacifying the crisis situations, notably Jordan and the Saudis, who have taken the lead positions in the Middle East.
Evidently President Bush’s change of direction has come from the above group as well as from the results of the complete turnover of the balance of power in the US Congress. Several departures of hawks and neocons actually preceded the balance changes, with Secretary of Defense Rumsfelds deputies, the disciples of Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, leaving early: Paul Wolfowitz shifting to presidency of the World Bank in 2005, Stephen A. Cambone, and Douglas J. Feith to consulting, I. Lewis Libby resigning from his Chief of Staff to VP Cheney position, and John Bolton from his ambassadorship to the United Nations.
Robert G. Joseph, the most recent departure, was typically influential, as a director on the National Security Council for most of his career since the 2000 election. Born in 1949, Williston ND, in a American-Arab family, he attended the Naval Academy, St. Louis University, University of Chicago, capping his education with a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1978, and immediately moving into the Department of Defense, as negotiator, nuclear policy expert and NATO liaison, concurrently teaching at the National Defense University and National War College. . After 1989 he taught at Carleton, Tulane and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. As Policy Director of the National Institute for Public Policy, he has long argued counter proliferation strategies, favoring the use of strategic nuclear weapons. He left the NSC in 2005 to replace John Bolton as the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. He is deemed to have engineered the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, substituting in 2002 a weak arms reduction agreement. He was the architect of the Security Proliferation Initiative, favored by both the Republicans and Democrats, joining some 80 nations in identifying illicit arms shipments. It succeeded in catching Abdul Qaader Khan’s nuclear centrifuge shipments to Libya in 2003, in persuading that country to give up its nuclear ambitions, and in having Pakistan take actions to stop the Khan nuclear smuggling enterprises. Joseph allegedly quit because he could not abide the Bush administration’s agreement with the “criminal” North Korea government, reached in February 2007.
Have the neocons and hawks left? No, there are still hawks on the NSC, Elliott Abrams and J. D. Crouch. As to whether the hawks are still proud of the Bush 1st term strategy on ABM, walking away from the Kyoto Protocol on climate, and legitimizing preemptive strikes as a doctrine is not clear.
Wally Dobelis thanks the IRC, NYTimes and internet sources
Who’s behind the new Bush policy of negotiations?
The radical post-2006 election changes in the Bush policy – a drift toward negotiations with North Korea, Iran, Syria and the Palestinians, de-emphasis of tax cuts, Medicare reform and other Conservative issues - open the question of new influences in Washington that may have shunted aside the hawk/hardliner/conservative cabal, reduced to Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rowe, as neocons and hawks leave their government posts. Speculations about the departure of Under Secretary of State Robert G. Joseph, whom some CIA sources consider the spearhead of the notorious “16 words” in the Presidents 2003 State of the Union message, have sharpened the debate. Can it be that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and her department are the main sources of this policy? Are her players neocon-based, hawks, “realists,” or ex-hawk “semi-realists”? (This in the terminology of the Right Web, by International Relations Center (IRC), a Bush watchers’ think tank.)
Let’s examine the structure of the DOS, headed by the Secretary and her Deputy SOS John Negroponte, a Bush faithful (successor to realist Robert Zoellick 2005-06 and near-realist Richard Armitage 2001-05), with six Under Secretaries and a Counselor, running a structure based on 22 Assistant Secretaries. The Under Secretaries –most not noted for public talk – are R. Nicholas Burns for Political Affairs, Joelle Sheehan for Economics, John Rood (successor to Joseph) for Arms Control and International Security, Karen Hughes for Public Diplomacy (a sometime Bush emissary), Henrietta Fore for Management, Paula Dobransky for Global Affairs. The recently appointed watchdog Counselor Eliot Cohen is a neocon theorist (he replaced the realist Philip Zelikow). Evidently the sources of the new realist policy cannot be solely in the DOS.
Looking at the recent changes in government, the pundits point to the old George H. W. Bush crowd, as the source of the new realist policy, within which the former National Security Advisor, Gen. Brent Showcroft, has been a consistent cautioner. The group took force with the appointment of former SOS James Baker on the Iraq Study Group, replacement of Secretary of Defense Douglas Rumsfeld by Robert Gates, of the director of national intelligence Negroponte by Admiral John McConnell, and of CIA’s Porter Goss by Gen. Michael Hayden. Secretary Rice herself was part of that group, and appears to take a semi-realist position, of working with the regional powers in pacifying the crisis situations, notably Jordan and the Saudis, who have taken the lead positions in the Middle East.
Evidently President Bush’s change of direction has come from the above group as well as from the results of the complete turnover of the balance of power in the US Congress. Several departures of hawks and neocons actually preceded the balance changes, with Secretary of Defense Rumsfelds deputies, the disciples of Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, leaving early: Paul Wolfowitz shifting to presidency of the World Bank in 2005, Stephen A. Cambone, and Douglas J. Feith to consulting, I. Lewis Libby resigning from his Chief of Staff to VP Cheney position, and John Bolton from his ambassadorship to the United Nations.
Robert G. Joseph, the most recent departure, was typically influential, as a director on the National Security Council for most of his career since the 2000 election. Born in 1949, Williston ND, in a American-Arab family, he attended the Naval Academy, St. Louis University, University of Chicago, capping his education with a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1978, and immediately moving into the Department of Defense, as negotiator, nuclear policy expert and NATO liaison, concurrently teaching at the National Defense University and National War College. . After 1989 he taught at Carleton, Tulane and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. As Policy Director of the National Institute for Public Policy, he has long argued counter proliferation strategies, favoring the use of strategic nuclear weapons. He left the NSC in 2005 to replace John Bolton as the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. He is deemed to have engineered the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, substituting in 2002 a weak arms reduction agreement. He was the architect of the Security Proliferation Initiative, favored by both the Republicans and Democrats, joining some 80 nations in identifying illicit arms shipments. It succeeded in catching Abdul Qaader Khan’s nuclear centrifuge shipments to Libya in 2003, in persuading that country to give up its nuclear ambitions, and in having Pakistan take actions to stop the Khan nuclear smuggling enterprises. Joseph allegedly quit because he could not abide the Bush administration’s agreement with the “criminal” North Korea government, reached in February 2007.
Have the neocons and hawks left? No, there are still hawks on the NSC, Elliott Abrams and J. D. Crouch. As to whether the hawks are still proud of the Bush 1st term strategy on ABM, walking away from the Kyoto Protocol on climate, and legitimizing preemptive strikes as a doctrine is not clear.
Wally Dobelis thanks the IRC, NYTimes and internet sources
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 7:43 PM 
