Dateline: Portsmouth RI, 17 October 2004
Looking at five presentations in five days this coming week, in trips that take me to Washington, West Virginia, Newport, Washington again, and finally Camden ME. So Sunday is a rather hectic day much like yesterday. But whereas yesterday tried to cover up for last week, today is all about covering up for next week in terms of homework assignments, housecleaning, repairs, etc.
So a quick integrated blog today:
■"Without a Doubt," by Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004, p. 44.
■"Who'd Be In, Who'd Be Out," by David E. Sanger, New York Times, 17 October 2004, p. WK1.
■"Inquiry Opens After Reservists Balk in Baghdad," by Neela Banerjee and Ariel Hart, New York Times, 16 October 2004, p. A1.
■"Iraq Commanders Warn That Delays in Civil Projects Undermine Military Mission," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 17 October 2004, p. A13.
■"Drawing From Its Past Wars, Britain Takes a Tempered Approach to Iraqi Insurgency," by John F. Burns, New York Times, 17 October 2004, p. A12.
■"Democracy as a Brand: Wooing Hearts, European or Muslim," by Roger Cohen, New York Times, 16 October 2004, p. A17.
I have compared George Bush to Harry Truman. I liked his certainty at an uncertain time. I admired his courage in forging new rule sets at a time when they were desperately needed. He knew he was starting something for the long haul, and he was committed to seeing it begun and set on its irrevocable path.
Like Truman, Bush is facing a very difficult election, with his Dewey being John Kerry. People wonder about Kerry like they did about Dewey: Will he follow through on what's been started? Can he stay the course while somehow making it better? Can we risk the change in leadership at this dangerous time?
Having made all those historical comparisons, let me know tell you why I think the buck stops here for Bush.
Four more years of such certitude when the United States has damaged so many key relationships with big players in both the Old and New Core is simply too great a risk to take. I'm not just talking about our standing in the world. I'm talking about the very concept of the Core itself.
Over the next four years, Europe will be making huge decisions about where it's current unity is taking it and who else should be invited to that pathway. China will be making huge decisions about what sort of rising power it plans on being, and how much internal change that emergence will require from the political leadership. India's next four years will be much like China's last four years, so enough said there. Russia's next four years will either mark a solidity achieved by Putin and passed onto another leader, or the rapid decay of that system's ability to move forward toward further economic integration with the Core. The Middle East will either move significantly toward reform or self-immolate. Latin America will either find strong reasons to cooperate with the United States on trade or reorient itself toward Asia and Europe. Africa will either stabilize or go up in flames as the war between radical Islam and the rest of the world moves progressively southward as that rejection of modernity seeks further escape backwards in time.
The next four years will be a huge turning point in how America is perceived and what it's leadership role will be not only in growing the Core but in the historically inevitable task of shrinking the Gap. If we are unable to get Core-wide subscription to the new rules necessary to fight transnational terrorism and extend the Core's security rule sets toward the Gap, then the Core itself is likely to fracture dramatically over the next four years.
The question we face as a nation right now is not whether George W. Bush was the right man for the last four years. He was. The question we face is whether he's the right man for the next four years. He is not.
Bush is a man who's time on the stage, while well served, has now passed. He is burned out and weary, as is to be expected, but that burn-out has only exaggerated those characteristics that have ably defined his presidency to this point: his certitude in his course and his faith in a benign future of America's great making. He is now intransigent in dangerous ways, unwilling to see the need for compromise and conciliation and refusing to recognize failure when it's staring him in the face.
Simply put, we cannot grow the Core by ourselves, much less shrink the Gap by ourselves. We cannot transform the Middle East (much less Iraq) by ourselves, nor can we wage a global war on terrorism by ourselves.
Bush is beat up. He's looking like Carter near the end. He sees what he sees and he knows what he knows--and neither are good enough for the tasks that we face over the next four years.
America will need to listen more in the future than speak. We will need to lead more by example of change than by example of continuity. We will need to make deals all over the dial that draw the rest of the Core into the long-term struggle which we have so correctly begun in the Middle East. We will need to revamp an international security architecture much like the Clinton team did with the international financial architecture in the 1990s. In short, we need a Clinton on national security. Not the Clinton we had on national security in the 1990s, but the one we had on the economic side of globalization in the 1990s. We need that sort of visionary deal-making applied to the security side of the house now, and Bush is not by nature nor current outlook that leader.
Nor are those around him ready to lead in that manner. When you think of the key foreign policy players (Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz), all seems used up and bereft of new ideas. They seem past their prime. Like a General Manager looking over his NFL team roster for the next season, I scan this list and can't spot anyone who's likely to improve the next time around. In fact, all seem on a downward slope, meaning we are extremely unlikely to do better if we keep them on the roster--no matter how they get switched around (all of those ideas being complete losers in my mind). If they were to be replaced, it's hard to see Bush picking the GOP talent (e.g., McCain, Lugar) that could really reverse this downward slope, simply because these individuals would not be attracted to his certitude and faith. In other words, they would want to wheel and deal and they'd know their hands would be tied in a second Bush administration--if not by Bush then by Cheney.
Let me be perfectly clear: we are near a variety of breaking points in our foreign policy right now. We cannot continue this go-it-largely-alone path in Iraq. Our people are burning out. When you get troops balking in numbers at orders, that's not just a bad sign, that's the beginning of a very ugly pathway. And there is nothing coming along that will make this situation any better any time soon. Our rotation schedule for troops in Iraq is heading for a trainwreck. We have units go back for a second time and their impressions are near universal: this situation is much worse now than when they left it.
Moreover, no one else in the Core sees a happy ending, and thus they're not eager to come to our aid, knowing we are unwilling to pay the prices necessary to gain their help. So they promise help but send only small shares of it. At the same time, our bills pile up under the supposition that the rest of the Core will finance our ruinous budgetary situation ad infinitum, which is a dangerous belief at best.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis themselves see a losing proposition: a regime who's sole claim to legitimacy seems to be its ability to fight on but not to accomplish much of anything in terms of rebuilding. That is pure war-within-the-context-of-war vision, and it's won't yield a successful pathway for either the regime or the United States.
I know, I know. Many in the Pentagon will tell you that we're doing better than the press reports, and that is true. Many will also tell you that the U.S. military doesn't need the sort of radical change I advocate, noting that the Brits seem to do Leviathan-like warfighting and Sys Admin-like peacekeeping with the same troops. But that is to confuse Intel with Microsoft. Intel gets to be Intel because it works hand-in-glove with big brother Microsoft. If you tried to run Microsoft like Intel you'd run it into the ground; that's the simple difference in scale and ambition. Plus, the Brits are watching (just barely) the more quiet parts of Iraq, and with Blair sinking in popularity back home, who's going to run those "quiet places" for us once the Brits decide they've had enough of suffering at the right hand of an America whose only expectation seems to be that they'll continue on as before despite no gives from Washington on anything with regard to the rest of the Core that is growing increasingly disenchanted with our course?
This whole global war on terrorism, not to mention the transformation of the Middle East, has all been cast primarily in terms of what America needs from the world in order to feel safer after 9/11. What 9/11 said to us was that the global security order was in deep bifurcation: between a world that felt secure and was moving ahead on globalization and a world that felt great insecurity and was feeling left behind on globalization. The solution set that America must push over the next four years cannot be the same one we pushed over the last four years. Over the last four years we concentrated largely on getting our house in order and projecting that new order on the rest of the world. The next four years must be all about getting the Gap in order by enlisting the entire Core's aid in making that happen, and that unity won't come until we assure the rest of the Core that the new rules we're pushing in security will not only make America more secure, but them as well.
In short, the happy ending we sell over the next four years needs to be about security elsewhere, not at home, and that message is unlikely to be delivered by a second Bush Administration, simply because they're not genetically predisposed to those sorts of "humble" interactions, despite Bush's promise of four years ago. Simply put, any "Marshall Plan" for the Gap will be looked upon as a bailout for those crazy, war-happy Americans at this point, and not viewed in terms of its real motivation of making globalization truly global.
Again, I credit the Bush Administration with many great decisions and actions over the past four years, but their success in moving America off the old rule set and onto a new one puts us in far different territory than we found ourselves in following 9/11. We have laid down the bulk of the necessary new rule sets in global security over the past three years, but without the buy-in from the rest of the Core over the next four years, we may end up doing more to damage globalization's future than to secure it. For the rule set that has no widespread buy-in is not a rule set, just the proposal for one--or a rallying cry for its opposition.
So yes, it's time for nuance. It's time for deal-making. It's time for splitting differences and moving the pile. It's time for achieving progress over perfection, for compromise over certitude, for real global vision over personal belief.
It's time for war to be put back in the context of everything else, and that's not going to happen with a self-declared "war president."
All you have to do after reading this post is ask yourself: Is Bush more likely to grow out of his myopic view of this war and into the direction of "everything else," or is Kerry more likely to be forced into factoring war into his preferred definition of "everything else"?
Events tend to harden presidents, not soften them. Bush is about as hard as he can get with his certitude and his baggage, as are the major players in his administration. It's time to reset the political rule set known as party control of the Executive Branch.
That's why I voting for Kerry. Not because I'm a Democrat, but because that is what both America and the world really need right now.
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