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Ten months back, Bush All-Stars turned out to be Sandlot Players.  Ten 
months later in October, 2004, no change.




        



All-Stars of Team Bush Fall Flat in Iraq

By Max Boot

Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2003

During the 1990s, Republican foreign policy types rolled their eyes and 
snorted in derision as they watched the Clinton administration commit 
one blunder after another, from Somalia to North Korea.

The conceit began to grow that the Clinton team -- Warren Christopher, 
Madeleine Albright, Tony Lake, Sandy Berger and the rest -- was made up 
of amateurs. The Republicans had the A-team -- the Reagan/Bush All-Stars 
-- and once they were back in office they would show the world how a 
foreign policy was supposed to be run.

Well, George W. Bush did install the Dream Team: Dick Cheney, Colin 
Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice. But lately they've been 
performing more like a squad of out-of-shape weekend players than a 
lineup of NBA superstars.

Their missteps have been particularly glaring in the case of Iraq, and 
none more so than the decision last week to publicly release a 
memorandum signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz specifying 
which countries are eligible for reconstruction work in Iraq.

The list includes such global powerhouses as Micronesia, Uganda and 
Macedonia but conspicuously excludes Canada, France, Germany, China, 
Russia and other countries that were not part of the coalition that 
invaded Iraq. To add insult to injury, the memorandum claimed that this 
was a necessary step "for the protection of the essential security 
interests of the United States," suggesting that these countries are 
somehow our enemies.

What makes this memo truly boneheaded is that it was released the very 
day that President Bush was dialing the leaders of -- you guessed it -- 
Russia, France and Germany to ask them to grant Iraq billions of dollars 
in debt relief. Those must have been fun and productive conversations 
for the president.

I understand and sympathize with the impulse behind the memo: a desire 
to reward friends and punish enemies. But there are much cannier ways of 
doing so without any of the blowback that this overly blunt document has 
aroused. For one thing, the Pentagon could simply have favored coalition 
countries in the contracts without being explicit about what it was 
doing. The countries left out would have gotten the message.

If the Pentagon did choose to issue such a memo, the time to do so would 
have been back in May, when emotions were still running high over Iraq. 
Since then, the United States has been trying to patch up relations with 
the countries that opposed us on Iraq, and many of them have shown a 
desire to crawl back into our good graces.

France, Canada and Germany, in particular, although not doing much in 
Iraq, have been a big help in Afghanistan, where all of them have 
sizable troop commitments. At the very least, the Pentagon policy should 
have left open the possibility of awarding contracts to countries 
helpful on Iraq in the future.

By itself, the memo might not be much of a reason to kick up a fuss, but 
it is simply the latest of many faux pas on Iraq. The most famous of 
these was, of course, the lack of adequate planning for the postwar 
environment, which led to mistakes such as prematurely disbanding the 
Iraqi army without having a security apparatus to replace it. The 
administration also absurdly low-balled the costs of rebuilding Iraq, 
budgeting only $2.5 billion initially. It took until the fall for the 
administration to belatedly recognize its mistake and request $87 
billion from Congress, but by then valuable time had been lost.

For the last six months, the Pentagon, CIA and State Department have 
been engaging in finger-pointing -- played out in news media leaks -- 
over which agency should bear the brunt of the blame for what's gone 
wrong in Iraq. The answer is that all of them are responsible, but the 
ultimate blame falls on the president and his national security advisor, 
Rice, who has not done a good job of coordinating the interagency process.

Then there is the hash that the administration has made of U.S. 
relations with Turkey, our most important ally in the Muslim world. Last 
year, the administration tried to pressure Turkey into allowing U.S. 
troops to use its soil to invade Iraq. During the negotiations, the U.S. 
side leaked word that the Turks were holding up a deal because they 
wanted a bigger bribe, amounting to tens of billions of dollars. Whether 
true or not, this sort of public humiliation was not likely to win the 
Turks over. And, sure enough, Turkey did what the administration never, 
in its worst nightmares, expected: It said no to the U.S.

Without the 4th Infantry Division coming down from the north as planned, 
the coalition had no way to block the escape of numerous Baathists 
fleeing the armored advance from the south. Many of the enemies not 
caught or killed then have now resurfaced to cause considerable mayhem. 
Thus we are still paying a hefty price for the failure to win Turkey over.

Once the insurgency in Iraq flared up, the administration desperately 
cast about for foreign troops and once again lighted upon our friends in 
Ankara. This time the Turkish government reluctantly went along and 
pledged 10,000 troops, only to have the U.S. turn around and say "no, 
thanks" because of Kurdish opposition. I am completely agnostic on 
whether it was a good idea or bad idea to have Turkish troops in Iraq. 
But I am pretty certain the administration should have figured this out 
before putting the squeeze on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It is hard to recall a more egregious example in recent history of the 
U.S. mishandling and alienating an important ally -- unless it's the 
administration's failure this past winter to garner more support among 
Western European countries for its Iraq policies.

There was probably no chance that France and Germany would ever sign off 
on regime change in Iraq, but the administration surely could have done 
more to make its case among the European public for a war that, after 
all, had as much humanitarian justification as the interventions in 
Kosovo and Bosnia. It is hard to know how many Europeans would have been 
won over by an eloquent statement of the pro-war position, because the 
U.S. government made almost no attempt to present its arguments. 
Secretary of State Powell, who is supposed to the U.S. spokesman to the 
world, barely visited Europe. The most conspicuous administration 
spokesman on the Continent turned out to be Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, 
who plays a lot better in Paris, Texas, than in Paris, France.

Let me be clear here. I am not complaining about the overall direction 
of Bush's foreign policy. I believe the administration has made correct 
and courageous choices on all the major issues -- toppling the Taliban 
and Saddam Hussein; trying to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan; putting more 
emphasis on democracy promotion in the Middle East; making it clear that 
the U.S. will deal preemptively with terrorists and weapons of mass 
destruction; and pulling out of flawed treaties like the Kyoto global 
warming convention and the antiballistic missile pact.

My complaint is a procedural one, about how the administration has 
carried out its policies. Watching one blunder after another, I can't 
help but wonder: Can't anybody here play this game?

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and 
author of "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American 
Power" (Basic Books, 2003).