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Column. Part one of a short three part series on President Bush, U.S. foreign policy, Iran, Israel, Hezbollah, and Hamas. (Back to Articles)

Is President Bush finding wisdom for the Middle East?
Keep your eye on Iran for the answer
by Charles Strohmer

If President Bush has been reading his Bible, maybe that explains why in recent months he seems to have had a change of heart and is ditching the neoconservative war agenda, sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice overseas to attempt multilateral, negotiated agreements. Maybe he has found where the Bible instructs the faithful to “get wisdom,” and where it explains that all the ways of wisdom are paths of peace.

The Scriptures, of course, don’t paint a rosy picture of international relations. War and violence regularly mar the scene. But wisdom itself, when employed in international relations, is about pulling out all the stops to find ways wiser than war. Is this what our President is now attempting? Is he following a changed US foreign policy toward the Middle East? For the answer, we should be watching the President’s actions toward Iran. And here’s the big question: Is it in the mind of President Bush to do unto Iran as he did to Iraq?

President Bush has said that he wants to reach a negotiated agreement about Iran’s nuclear program. But given his track record in the lead-up to the war about Iraq, why should anyone believe him about Iran? Maybe the roiling waters between Israel and Hezbollah will become the perfect storm the White House has been hoping for in order to justify doing Iran.

Okay, so we don’t know if the White House has been hoping for that, but can you say for certainty that it hasn’t been? And if it has been, maybe its diplomatic efforts to bring about the ceasefire will one day be seen as merely the equivalent of the administration’s public WMD argument for doing Iraq. “We tried diplomacy. It didn’t work.” Maybe Secretary Rice’s trips to the Middle East will become the equivalent of Secretary Powell’s rum power point presentation at the UN.

Three things, according to many analysts, are preventing the administration from doing Iran. First was the departure in 2005 of key neoconservative policy advisors. Both Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, for instance, are no longer at the Pentagon advising Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz is now president of the World Bank; Feith is writing a memoir and begins teaching at Georgetown this autumn.

Second, Condoleezza Rice has, by all accounts, been performing splendidly the past year-and-a-half, mending fences with Europe and other U.S. friends and allies to implement the administration’s increased desire for more multilateral policies in the Middle East, including toward Iran.

Third, this spring we heard reflective remarks from President Bush. In late May, he said he regretted having used the words “bring it on” to the terrorists and the wild West cliché of taking al Qaeda leadership “dead or alive.” He also candidly admitted that the Abu Gharib prisoner abuse scandal was “the biggest mistake” in Iraq and that the U.S. was paying for it. Coming from a President who had never publicly admitted to second-guessing himself, it was understandably big news. It seemed to indicate a change of heart in some previously non-negotiable areas.

Including toward Iran. On May 31, secretary Rice formally announced from the Benjamin Franklin Room of the White House that the U.S. was willing to join the ongoing multilateral talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The remarkable news, here, was that this would end Washington’s twenty-seven-year-long policy against direct negotiations with Iran. When Richard Armitage was asked on June 12 by journalist Charlie Rose about the President’s changed mind toward Iran, the well-informed former deputy Secretary of State (under Colin Powell) replied that the President was now open to direct negotiations because he had recognized that hard-line demands were not only non-starters but dangerous policy. “Understanding brings wisdom,” he told Rose.

Has it? Everyone seems to think so. Time magazine even featured a cover story in July titled “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy.” (Notice there’s no question mark in the title.) But has the President found wisdom? We all ought to pause ourselves for a moment of reflection. It is too soon to conclude that what we have been hearing indicates a shift away from a neoconservative foreign policy agenda in the White House. It is too soon to conclude that understanding about Iraq has brought wisdom to the Bush administration about Iran. History, said Mark Twain, may not repeat itself but it sure does rhyme. And let us reflect on this, also. Although key neoconservatives advisors have left, the hawks Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld orbit President Bush like twin moons.

Contrary to the President’s public statements in 2002 and early-2003, in which he claimed to be looking for a way wiser than war with Iraq, we now know from many sources, including authors George Packer and Thomas Ricks, and former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, that the administration during those many months was organizing an invasion of Iraq. Even close aides to Tony Blair now admit it. At best, this was not an administration seeking a way wiser than war but a way to sell a war. At worst, we were lied to.

The road map included dozens of stops and from January 2002 followed a route that began with the President’s first State of the Union speech, when he declared that Iraq (Iran and North Korea, too) belonged to an “axis of evil.” Back in his Congressional office after hearing the turning point speech, Rep. Ike Skelton, of the House Armed Services Committee, told his staff: “That was a declaration of war.” In February, President Bush ordered Gen. Tommy Franks to begin to begin shifting forces from Afghanistan to the Gulf. In March, according to Packer in The Assassin’s Gate, the President interrupted a high-level meeting, swore, and said of Saddam, “We’re taking him out.” Barely two months later, the President heard two extensive briefings based on a series of war games titled Prominent Hammer. These briefings had concluded that an October 2002 invasion date was out of the question. By the early spring of 2002, “a full year before the invasion,” Packer wrote, “the administration was inexorably set on a course of war.”

And on it went. In June at West Point, Bush shocked the world by trotting out the new U.S. doctrine of preemption. By August, the administration had begun using much shriller rhetoric when talking about Iraq, and vice-president Dick Cheney made his hugely influential “there is no doubt” speech to the VFW convention in Nashville. “Time is not on our side,” Cheney concluded. “The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.”

September was pivotal. Congress received a comprehensive summary about Iraq’s WMD program. Called the National Intelligence Estimate, the 92-page classified version of the report concluded that Iraq possessed WMD and was “reconstituting its nuclear program.” The effect of that formal intelligence conclusion on Congress can be implicated in the huge majority who would soon vote in favor of going to war. On the first anniversary of 9/11, Sen. Max Cleland left a Pentagon briefing on WMD, and would later write: “It was pretty clear that Rumsfeld and Cheney are ready to go to war.” The next day, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, President Bush described Iraq as “a grave and gathering danger.” Just days later, the administration released its formalized and controversial National Security Strategy (NSS), the complete doctrine of preemption it had submitted to Congress, which then could become part of the administration’s ethical and philosophical justification for doing Iraq.

“By the time the public really focused on” any real debate about the war, Thomas Ricks wrote in Fiasco, “the decision to go to war had been made, though more through drift than any one meeting. In September 2002 word began to circulate inside the military that an invasion of Iraq was inevitable, and the march toward war had begun.” The long-standing U.S. policy of containment of Saddam Hussein and inspections clearly had been scrapped. October 11, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Iraq War Resolution. All of this was occurring deliberately, including the massive U.S. troop build-up in Kuwait, even though President Bush still stated publicly, when asked, that he had not yet decided to go to war.

Too much questionable public misdirection from the White House about Iraq in 2002 has made it inadvisable for us to yet trust the President on Iran today. It is not enough to think that this administration won’t do Iran because it seems that the President has had a change of heart, or because our troops are stretched too thin in Iraq, or because the international community presently won’t stand for an invasion by the U.S. The President may be sincere about multilateral negotiations. Let us hope that he is. If he has had a change of heart, trust will be reestablished not from words alone but from his deeds, just as trust in a busted marriage is rebuilt slowly over time. Or not at all.

None of us, of course, can know the President’s intent. This President, however, would admit that his motives are known by the God he claims to serve, and that the injunction to “get wisdom” runs throughout the Bible he reads. If, then, he has found policy wisdom for the Middle East, hallelujah! And may it stand the tests it will face from influential neoconservatives who believe that a U.S. war with Iran ought to be another phase in their dealings with the region. Exploited tensions in the Middle East, such as between Israel and Hezbollah, would serve their purpose well.

But if the President is merely having us on, then get on your knees and pray. Just like yesterday, if war is in his mind, we can expect the year 2006 to have rhymed with Bush history of 2002, with Iran becoming in 2007 next to feel the blows of the Bush doctrine. Woe to America and the world if these two histories rhyme.

Mr. President, wisdom, as your Bible instructs, is about finding ways wiser than war. And wisdom is continually seeking to reach common ground agreements among peoples and nations of different interests. To find those agreements, it is willing to go with peculiar people on very long, winding walks called talks. Conversation is the key, and understanding brings wisdom. Are you with us on this, Mr. President? Are you leading us there? Or are you having us on; again? (Charles Strohmer is religion and political commentator, author, and contributor to the Dictionary of Contemporary Religion in the Western World. He is a Visiting Fellow of the Center for Public Justice, Washington DC, and writing a book on international relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.)

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