|
Team Bush: Get it together
Quit creating problems, follow Condi's lead, and focus, focus, focus on IranAt Harvard Business School, young George W. Bush learned "management by objective" or maybe he didn't. A look at the Bush administration policy toward Iran shows that the president has allowed multiple objectives to get in the way of pursuing a single objective: keeping Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.If Mr. Bush is going to succeed, he must unite the world against Iran. Confronted by a united world, Iran might yet back down. And if military action proves inevitable, a grand coalition increases the chance of success. To gain perspective on the value of coalitions, we might look at the difference between U.S. military action against Vietnam in the 1960s and against Serbia in the '90s. The Vietnamese had help from Russia and China, and so Hanoi prevailed. By contrast, neither Moscow nor Beijing helped Belgrade, and so the Serbs capitulated. The key potential allies for the United States against Iran are Russia, China, the European Union and the U.N. Security Council. So, if Mr. Bush were managing his policy to focus laserlike on Iran, he presumably would be seeking to minimize friction with these potential partners. Strangely enough, manager Bush has let others in his administration freelance their own friction-creating policies. In each instance, there's a logic to the friction-creating sideshows, but, nonetheless, each bit of freelancing undercuts the prime objective, which is a non-nuclear Iran. Freelancer No. 1 is Vice President Dick Cheney. Last month, Mr. Cheney traveled to the former Soviet republic of Lithuania to denounce Russia for using "tools of intimidation and blackmail" against other countries and against its own people. That's exactly what the Russians are doing, of course, but if we choose this moment to restart the Cold War, will the Russians help us against Iran? Freelancer No. 2 is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Earlier this month, he was in Singapore, chastising China for spending too much on defense. These comments must have both amused and annoyed China, because Beijing spends perhaps 15 percent as much as Washington on arms. Freelancer No. 3 is our ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who routinely antagonizes both the EU and the Security Council. Mr. Bolton makes no secret of his disdain for traditional diplomacy and seems to relish telling EU and Security Council types what they can do with their diplomatic niceties and nuances. Mr. Bolton has long opposed any direct contact between the United States and Iran over nuclear concerns or any other matter. He might be correct in his view that the Iranians are so hostile to the United States that fruitful negotiations are impossible. If he's right, that's all the more reason to go through the motions of negotiating, so that Tehran, not Washington, suffers the onus of being perceived as "intransigent." Indeed, thanks to the influence of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bolton, the United States insisted until recently that it would not talk to Iran about nuclear issues unless Iran scrapped its program first. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finally changed that shortsighted policy, pleasing the EU and the United Nations the folks we'd need in an anti-Iran showdown. But Mr. Bolton noisily rejects such politesse; thus the headline in last Saturday's Financial Times: "Bolton rejects 'grand bargain' with Iran." Mr. Bolton is not the final word in U.S. foreign policy, of course, but as long as he is free to speak out, others will wonder whether the United States is really interested in a deal with Iran. And if those other countries and institutions don't think the United States is negotiating in good faith, they are less likely to support us, either in diplomatic action now or in military action down the road. As we learned in Vietnam and are learning in Iraq an inadequate coalition to bolster our efforts is a formula for failure. If Mr. Bush wants to succeed in de-nuclearizing Iran, he must focus his entire team on that one objective. But he's not forcing such focusing. And that's bad management. James Pinkerton writes for Newsday Posted by: ryuge 2006-06-16 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=156329 |