Posted on 5/25/2007, 1:56:52 AM by blam
Decline and fall of the Washington hawks
By Toby Harnden
Last Updated: 1:20am BST 25/05/2007
The hawks have flown the nest. Across the Bush administration, the uncompromising intellectuals determined to use American power to revolutionise foreign affairs and confront dictators are departing, exhausted and disillusioned.
Robert Joseph resigned quietly, reportedly because he could not accept the six-party deal with N Korea
Now, the dovish career diplomats who viewed the hawks as unwelcome ideological interlopers have reasserted control and rule the roost.
President George W Bush, many of the hawks fear, has been so undermined by the spectre of defeat in Iraq that he has privately ruled out military strikes to prevent a nuclear Iran and is helping prop up North Korea's gangster regime.
The hawks' plans, embraced by Mr Bush in his "axis of evil" address in 2002, lie in tatters. All three countries identified as axis members, they lament, present growing threats to the world - Iraq as a haven for al-Qa'eda, Iran as an aspiring Shia nuclear hegemon and North Korea as an established nuclear power.
One of the latest hawks to leave was Robert Joseph, who resigned quietly from the State Department after telling colleagues that he could not accept last month's six-party deal with North Korea. Although he declines to talk publicly, his dismay is clear.
Mr Joseph was instrumental in pressuring Libya to give up its weapons of mass destruction programme and securing America's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. His recommendations on North Korea, however, were spurned.
"I was sceptical about Libya giving up its weapons of mass destruction programme but we tested the proposition and they did," he said, speaking in his new capacity as a senior scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy.
"I'm certainly for testing the proposition with North Korea. But the key to success is continuing to apply pressure so the regime understands there are consequences if it does not give up its nuclear programme."
That pressure, the hawks argue, has been lifted.
Mr Joseph said that Iran was well on the way to getting nuclear weapons, which would be a disaster for the world. "It's not years, it's months. Once they can operate centrifuge cascades over sustained periods of time, there will be no stopping them. They have the technical skills to pull this off."
Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual father of the Iraq war, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, are long gone.
J D Crouch, one of the architects of Mr Bush's "surge" strategy in Iraq, has just left the White House. John Bolton, who was Mr Joseph's predecessor, ticked off the names in a recent interview with this newspaper in which he said he had reluctantly reached the conclusion that "in a lot of respects, you can have more influence on the outside than you can on the inside" of the Bush administration.
Condoleezza Rice, he argued, had allowed herself to be "captured" by career diplomats who favoured a cautious, traditional policy. Since becoming Secretary of State, Miss Rice had appeared to have shed her hawkish feathers.
"Policy is flowing from the State Department through the Secretary of State to the White House, whereas in the first term [until 2004], policy was flowing from the White House to the Secretary of State down to the bureaucracy," said Mr Bolton. "I think the difference in flow accounts for the difference in substantive policy."
Mr Bolton's chief aim now, he said, was to "reclaim the philosophical high-ground" in the hope that a Republican successor to Mr Bush might shake off the influence of diplomats.
Mr Joseph said that Mr Bush deserved "great credit" for his achievements in preventing the proliferation of nuclear technology. US efforts, in tandem with Britain, against Libya, had been a shining success. "The Libyan nuclear weapons programme is now located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that is unequivocally a good thing."
But Iraq casts a long shadow. "Everything is about Iraq," said an ally of the hawks still in government. "It sucks the energy out of policy-making, limits options and discredits us in the eyes of the world."
The hawks, who once prided themselves on seeing over-the-horizon threats, still hold out hope that Mr Cheney, who continues to advise a hard line against Iran and North Korea, will maintain his influence. But it will probably be years before the hawks have a chance to soar again.
There is no dove policy.
Empowered, they will flail hopelessly and allow things to drift. Onto obvious rocks.
The disasters that follow, the doves will try to pin on the hawks past. At first some may even buy it. But they will not be able to make any of it stop, no matter what they do.
So in the end, hawks will be back. There simply isn't another policy option with any long term future.
They are having orgasms. I hope they are as ecstatic when they become Muslim slaves.
save
You are correct. The difference will be a lot of innocent deaths in between.
Militants 'Will Fight To The Last Drop Of Blood' (Lebanon)
"Every land Islam has entered must return to Muslim hands."
Its inside baseball, or to switch metaphors, its worrying about who gets to sit at the captain’s table while the ship heads toward the iceberg.
The iceberg worry-warts are gone, but the icebergs are still there.
The people who pride themselves on seeing over the horizon have been pushed aside, the writers and professional diplomats who pushed them aside may now gloat and congratulate one another. For a while.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.