Blood Sacrifice
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 9, 2006

No sooner had Democrats captured one House, than President Bush began cleaning another. First on the presidential chopping block was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who will now step aside in favor of former CIA director Robert Gates. The president’s new choice is a foreign policy “realist” who believes Iran “could play a potentially significant role in promoting a stable, pluralistic government in Baghdad.”

Rumsfeld’s strong support for the war effort has made him enemy number one for Democrats – Nancy Pelosi, in her inaugural act as House speaker, demanded a “change in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon” – and the president seemingly concluded that the Democratic Party’s success in the midterm elections necessitated his ouster.



The logic is flawed on several counts. Anger at Rumsfeld from the Left is only tenuously connected to developments in Iraq. In July 2003, with the war only months old and U.S. forces fresh off a successful military siege unmatched in military history, pundits like Boston Globe columnist H.D.S. Greenway were already demanding that Rumsfeld be given “the boot.” Likewise, the notion that the midterm elections represent a national repudiation of the Iraq war does not survive scrutiny. It fails to explain, for instance, why hawkish Joe Lieberman triumphed over DailyKos darling Ned Lamont, while Republican opponents of the war, like Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee, went down in defeat. And so far from sating Democratic critics, Rumsfeld’s exit has only emboldened their attacks on the war. John Kerry, ever the opportunist, yesterday dismissed the significance of the personnel change: “The best way to honor the brave men and women of our armed forces is with a strategy for success that brings our troops home,” Kerry droned.



If the president’s reading of the post-electoral map was suspect, his decision to offer the Pentagon’s top post to Robert Gates is no wiser.



Having spent much of their ire on Rumsfeld, the president’s critics have a new target. Democrats and friendly media outlets have already responded to the choice by dredging up Gates’s alleged role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Similar claims were made when President Bush-41 appointed Gates as CIA director in 1991. Ornate conspiracy theories aside, there has never been much foundation for the claim. Evidence of Gates’s direct role in the scandal is conspicuously lacking.



Not only that, but Gates specifically distanced himself from the Reagan administration’s policy of supporting Contra rebels against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. In 1984, Gates, then the CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence, wrote a memo to then-intelligence tsar William Casey, stating that American involvement in the region’s politics would result in the “destabilization of Central America.” “Even a well-funded Contra movement cannot prevent this,” Gates averred. “[I]ndeed, relying on and supporting the [C]ontras as our only action may actually hasten the ultimate unfortunate outcome.”



But while Gates can be absolved of involvement in Iran-Contra, his current views on Iran compel investigation. Especially noteworthy is a report on U.S. policy toward Iran that Gates co-authored in July of 2004 with Zbigniew Brzezinski, a onetime national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and, more recently, a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry’s presidential campaign.



Entitled Iran: Time for a New Approach, the report reads like a study in self-contradiction. Conceding that Iran has used “Iraqi instability for its own political gain,” the report concludes, “Iran nevertheless could play a potentially significant role in promoting a stable, pluralistic government in Baghdad.” Noting that “Iranian foreign policy remains captive of the regime’s official enshrinement of anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology,” the authors nonetheless attribute strained U.S.-Iranian relations to the Bush administration’s decision to include Iran in the “Axis of Evil,” lamenting that this “undercut several months of tacit cooperation between Washington and Tehran.” The undeniable fact of “Iranian incitement of virulent anti-Israeli sentiment” guides the authors to the non sequitur that “Arab-Israeli peace is central to eventually stemming the tide of extremism in the region.” From the fact that Iran has been a far from reliable negotiating partner, and that it has failed to “cooperate adequately with the [IAEA’s] investigation into its nuclear program,” the authors conclude that the answer is…more “constructive dialogue” on the nuclear issue. That Iran has been a perennial source of regional instability prompts the authors to recommend that it is in the “interests of the United States to engage selectively with Iran to promote regional stability.” And so on.



Central to the report is the fatalist assumption that the United States is powerless to prevent an Iranian nuclear program and that the only solution is to submit to “dialogue” with the mullahs. Cognate arguments have long been advanced by the so-called “realist” school of foreign policy, of which Gates is a member in good standing. In the 1990s, these arguments formed the ideological basis of the Clinton administration’s spectacularly misnamed “Agreed Framework” with North Korea. In exchange for giving up its nuclear program, the reasoning went, North Korea would receive diplomatic recognition and other concessions. Reality proved less obliging. Rather than live up to its end of the bargain, Pyongyang accelerated its program. Last month’s nuclear weapon test by North Korea was the logical conclusion of a decade of misguided policy.



Astonishingly, Gates regards the Clinton approach as the perfect model for dealing with Iran. At a July 2004 briefing on the Iran report, Gates explained the kind of discussions the U.S. should seek with Tehran: “In my view, my personal view, it's very similar to the kinds of discussions that have been going on with North Korea in the respect of more for more” Asked whether his report might be used for political purposes, Gates responded in the affirmative: “Oh, I have no doubt that various pieces of the report will be used by a variety of people,” he said. The danger is that one of those people is Gates himself – no longer a foreign policy theoretician laboring on the sidelines but, pending confirmation by the Senate, the man in charge of American defense.



Gates’s presumptive entrance into the president’s cabinet bespeaks a troubling, if ill-noticed development. Amidst a steady drumbeat of obloquy from Democrats and the antiwar Left, and growing recriminations from the neo-conservative Right, the most serious threat to the Bush administration’s muscular foreign policy has come from within.



In recent months, the president has made repeated overtures to James Baker, the former Secretary of State under President Bush Sr. whose Iraq Study Group (ISG) has pressed the administration to appeal to Iran and Syria – perhaps the two most destabilizing forces in the Middle East – to help pacify Iraq. Robert Gates himself was a member of the ISG and, in view of recent reports that the president consults with Baker about “policy and personnel,” it cannot be a complete coincidence that he has emerged as the president’s choice for defense secretary. Now, if his views in Iran: Time for a New Approach are any guide, Gates may translate Baker’s calls for Iranian appeasement into American foreign policy.



Against this background, the Democratic takeover of the House and, in all probability, the Senate is so much insult to self-inflicted injury. Even before the elections, the Democratic leadership was united in its support for the withdrawal of American troops: Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and John Kerry have called for troops to be withdrawn by the end of 2006.



Talk that a Democratic majority, taking a cue from Congress’s 1973 prohibition on appropriations for U.S. military operations in Vietnam, may de-fund the war effort, has also become more plausible. Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, likely the future chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, just yesterday scoffed at American development of “fancy weapons systems.” Meanwhile, rumors that the formidably antiwar John Murtha may yet assume the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee as a bribe not to run against Steny Hoyer for the post of Majority Leader have only sharpened the anxiety of those who fear the Democratic Party’s commitment to wage retreat.


In the end, though, blame for the dubious new course of American foreign policy must be ascribed to the Commander-in-Chief. “Do not confuse the workings of our democracy with a lack of will,” the president insisted yesterday, after announcing Rumsfeld’s resignation. Lost on the president is that, by replacing a committed prosecutor of the war on terror with a cynical “realist” pining for “dialogue” with America’s enemies, he himself has sown this confusion. In this season of political upheaval, it is one of the stranger ironies that the Bush Doctrine may ultimately be undone by President Bush.