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Locking the Doors
Feb. 26th, 2003 06:42 amJohn Judis's analysis of administration Iraq policy sounds plausible to me, and it got me thinking. A lot of us have been tearing our hair out over the atrocious diplomacy of the Bush administration. Why oh why, we ask, are Bush hawks so determined to piss everyone off? It seems pointlessly destructive.
One alarming possibility is that Rumsfeld and the hawks are deliberately undermining America's diplomatic position. They may be doing this to humiliate Colin Powell and the multilateralists and to undercut their influence within the administration. Rumsfeld bad-mouths the French, bad-mouths the Germans, starts a dust-up in NATO and makes it clear we're invading Iraq no matter what anyone says. All of this, of course, makes it harder for Powell to get what he wants in the UN. When Powell returns to Washington empty-handed, the hawks sneer at him and say we shouldn't have gone to the UN in the first place.
Thomas Friedman says administration officials don't like to travel because "they spend so much time infighting in Washington over policy, they're each afraid that if they leave town their opponents will change the locks on their office doors." I remember Henry Kissinger, of all people, saying that Rumsfeld was "the ruthless man he'd ever met." (This from a man who knew Mao and Pinochet.) I wonder if we have more to worry about than a change of office locks.
One alarming possibility is that Rumsfeld and the hawks are deliberately undermining America's diplomatic position. They may be doing this to humiliate Colin Powell and the multilateralists and to undercut their influence within the administration. Rumsfeld bad-mouths the French, bad-mouths the Germans, starts a dust-up in NATO and makes it clear we're invading Iraq no matter what anyone says. All of this, of course, makes it harder for Powell to get what he wants in the UN. When Powell returns to Washington empty-handed, the hawks sneer at him and say we shouldn't have gone to the UN in the first place.
Thomas Friedman says administration officials don't like to travel because "they spend so much time infighting in Washington over policy, they're each afraid that if they leave town their opponents will change the locks on their office doors." I remember Henry Kissinger, of all people, saying that Rumsfeld was "the ruthless man he'd ever met." (This from a man who knew Mao and Pinochet.) I wonder if we have more to worry about than a change of office locks.
