Published in Maclean's Magazine, March 17, 2003 (edition date: March 24) New York Even the most stalwart White House staffers could not have held their hands over their hearts, at prayer meetings this past week, and swear in good conscience that their Chief deserved flattering comparisons with the presidential ghost of the moment, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was the 70th anniversary of FDR's first Fireside Chat, those reassuring radio homelies that rallied the nation against the ravages of the Depression and World War II. While Roosevelt made international affairs comprehensible to ordinary Americans, George W. Bush seems only to confuse them. Although one poll this week showed that more U.S. citizens now support action against Iraq, even without the U.N.'s authority, the same sampling revealed that a clear majority of Americans feel the president hasn't clearly explained the justification for a pre-emptive attack. While FDR convinced the nation to join a great world alliance against Hitler -- "Our future independence is bound up with the future independence of all of our sister Republics" -- George W. Bush has been turning some of America's traditional allies into opponents faster than Iraqi wrecking crews turn their al Samouds into trash. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," Roosevelt famously intoned in his chat of May 27th, 1941. If only things were that simple today, grumble a growing number of U.S. lawmakers, conservative Republicans among them. Bad enough they fear the cost of war in human, geopolitical and monetary terms; they're also deeply troubled by the Bush administration's genius for inflicting massive amounts of collateral diplomatic damage even before the first sand berm on Iraq's southern border with Kuwait has been breached. "There's no question that this administration has been ham-handed in dealing with our allies," says Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century. PNAC is nothing like a nest of lefty critics, it's the neo-conservative think-tank founded in 1997 by, among others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, these days the brain-and-brawn trust of the Bush administration. Schmitt continues: "But what about the Europeans? Basically, Europe is preoccupied with their own social and economic programs, essentially enriching themselves while they live off the umbrella of global protection the U.S. provides." This sounds more like the far right's agenda -- but nothing like responsible statesmanship, according to the U.S. government's in-house adviser on diplomacy. Charles Dolan is vice-chairman of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, a bi-partisan consultancy to the president, secretary of state and congress. He told Maclean's: "I think the administration's messaging has been a little too belligerent and it's been counterproductive in some cases. You've got people using words like 'pygmies' to describe allies, and words like 'irrelevance' for world bodies." Dolan continues: "the name of the game of diplomacy is making friends out of enemies, not the other way around. And one of the fundamental purposes of public diplomacy is creating a positive atmosphere abroad, which in turn makes it easier for leaders in those countries to shift to our position. Through a lot of missteps, we now find ourselves going the wrong way in that respect." For proof of those missteps, look no further than Britain's Tony Blair, the embodiment of incipient diplomatic burnout. Battling the flu, scrapping his way through a hostile Euro-hood, the British Prime Minister could be forgiven, this past week, for not watching his back -- into which the President and his men thoughtlessly flung a pair of diplomatic daggers. The first was a patently shameless policy reversal: Bush announced that his "roadmap for peace" between Israel and the Palestinians has been bumped out of the slow lane and into the pits, where no one is waiting with fuel or directions. Bush had promised Blair and other European leaders that prior to any invasion of Iraq, he would unveil this three-year plan of mutual concessions leading to the creation of a Palestinian state. Welching on that deal was an acute embarrassment to Bush's closest ally on Iraq, and even though the President, in another quick reverse, has promised to detail the plan once the Palestinians have sworn in their newly-elected Prime Minister, Arab critics charge that the West's double-standards are alive and well: mere promises on Israel; iron and steel against Iraq. Even before Tony Blair's blush had paled from this fiasco, there was another unwelcome surprise -- a classic Rumsfeldian slip of the tongue. The U.S. Defence Secretary said American commanders were prepared should Britain balk at putting their troops at Washington's disposal. Rumsfeld swiftly backtracked, but Blair's parliamentary opponents, especially those in his own party, leaped to their feet at Westminster and pummelled the hapless PM. It was obvious, they said, that the Americans had been prepared to go it alone all these months of painful "coalition building." "It's surprising," comments diplomatic adviser Dolan. "When this administration together with the British undertook the Afghan war, they set up coalition offices in Washington, London and Pakistan. They kept the message straight and clear, and we had 80 per cent of the world behind us. What happened? Clearly the message has become confused." And expensive and dangerous, to critics of the Bush war plan. "The destruction and loss of life will aggravate tensions in the region," says Joseph Wilson, who as U.S. charge d'affaires to Iraq during its occupation of Kuwait was the last US diplomat to deal directly with Saddam Hussein. "And this is the wrong destination -- the road to peace and stability in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem, not through Baghdad." Aside from strategic concerns, senators from both parties complain that the administration hasn't adequately planned and budgeted for post-war peacekeeping. Estimates of war-fighting costs alone range up to $100 billion, and a $900 million pricetag was tacked onto the initial post-war phase of occupation and reconstruction, when it emerged that the administration has quietly been seeking tenders from America's elite construction giants such as Fluor, Bechtel and Halliburton, formerly headed by vice-president Dick Cheney. "Let's just stop a minute and do the math," says former charge to Iraq Wilson. "Last year, America's corporations -- all of our companies -- earned a total of $450 billion after taxes. Can we afford a war and the costs of cleaning up afterward? Absolutely not." The nation's cloudy economic horizons bear that out: unemployment is rising and budget deficits look like flashbacks to the Bush Sr. era. For many state legislatures, the situation's worse. Lawmakers in one state within shouting distance of the White House, Maryland, are currently fretting over a proposed raft of spending cuts, tax increases -- even legalizing slot machines -- to counter a budget shortfall estimated to reach $2 billion by June, 2004. For all the administration's chest-beating, America's war chest is draining fast. That's not a problem, says PNAC's Schmitt, just a challenge. "You've got to compare the short term costs with the long term costs. The consequences of having Iraq still armed with weapons of mass destruction, that's what I call a high cost option. The truth is that during the Cold War, we routinely spent anywhere from 6 to 9 per cent of GDP on defence, and we still had pretty good economic growth. Now we spend between 3 and 4 percent of GDP on defence. We clearly could spend more." But while U.S. pundits speak fast and loose about financing warfare, America's record for post-war reconstruction hardly glitters like gold. Even the C.I.A. admits to the dismal reality of life in Haiti, 'assisted' by U.S. forces in the last decade. Today, Haiti remains politically unstable and is still one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest countries: 80 percent of Haitians, according to the C.I.A.'s on-line factbook, live in abject poverty. And this past week Afghanistan, last year's model for U.S. military intervention, figured darkly in assessments of American reconstruction capabilities, when Amnesty International called for urgent reform of the country's police forces and western help to restore the rule of law. Aid specialists in the Gulf, meanwhile, warn that nowhere near enough food, water and emergency supplies have been gathered to help Iraqi populations displaced by war. Clare Short, Britain's international development secretary, who has threatened to resign from the Blair cabinet should war proceed without U.N. approval, told parliament that no amount of delay would allow adequate preparations for the worst-case scenario of open warfare in Iraq. Despite those warnings and America's lacklustre history in long-term foreign aid, President Bush presists with his uncompromising push for a massive military onslaught. Two factors are at work, agree Washington observers from across the political spectrum. The first, doctrine; the second, a lack of escape routes. The vaunted Bush political machine has left itself no room for error, much less for withdrawal. "We can't withdraw now, no way," says Gary Schmitt of PNAC. "We'd show our friends, as well as our enemies, that we're just not serious. That'd be a failure too dangerous to think about." One seasoned member of Washington's foreign diplomatic corps agrees, but laments the seeming inevitability of bloodshed. "This is like August of 1914 -- everything appears to be moving in slow motion, but then wham! it will all open up." Doctrinal inflexibility, he says, has left the administration trapped. "There's a small but powerful group of people here who have a larger vision of using war in Iraq to force change in the Middle East, to foment reform within oligarchies like Saudi Arabia, and to bring fundamentalism under control in places like Pakistan." Leaders of America's Muslim community scoff at that strategy. "They say there's going to be Jeffersonian democracy, that people will dance in the streets when Saddam Hussein is gone," says Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on Armerican-Islamic Relations, CAIR. "But there's going to be tremendous blood letting and revenge by all the people who've suffered under the regime. And if you really have democracy in Iraq, you'll get a Shia government. Is America going to say 'let's have a Shia government in Iraq that can ally itself to Iran?' They'll never let that happen. They'll make sure some croney gets in -- what they want is another strongman who'll do what America wants him to do." But the fact that Iraq's post-war leadership is still just a glimmer in the president's eye isn't dissuading him. An eerie sense of mission colours his expression and weighs heavily in his voice; it was Roosevelt who pioneered the presidential use of religious overtones, but George W. Bush adds an unwavering -- some say blind -- conviction to his speeches. "This is his moment; this is his Omaha Beach," a close friend, Craig Stapleton, America's ambassador to the Czech Republic told the Washington Post this week. In contrast, many statesmen and soldiers are by nature uncomfortable with such zeal: how many times in history have leaders set off in search of an Omaha Beach, only to find themselves in Mogadishu instead? This was precisely the point raised this week by Col. Mike Turner, who was Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's briefing officer in the 1991 Gulf War, and a former adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Middle East and Africa. In a commentary on America's National Public Radio, Turner cautioned that a weaker coalition, operating on a much more treacherous battlefield, makes the planned assault on Iraq look much less like Desert Storm and more like the situation prior to the disastrous U.S. operation in Somalia, depicted in the film Black Hawk Down. What is Canada to do faced with all of this? Like much of the rest of the world, that's still a policy work-in-progress. "The PM is still undecided as to what Canada might contribute militarily and under what circumstances," says one Canadian diplomat in the U.S. capital. "There's a determination to concentrate on what we do best, which is to maintain multilateralism, encourage democracy and support reconstruction." For democracy and reconstruction, read Iraq; multilateralism means helping to pick up the pieces of decades' worth of painstaking effort in creating international alliances and partnerships. If its Iraq campaign goes badly wrong, the U.S. will need emergency relief of its own to regain a measure of credibility and trust abroad. Invading Iraq against the explicit warnings of the U.N. Secretary General and several members of the Security Council amounts to something a long way from George W. Bush's vision of an Omaha Beach in the Middle East. It's an immense gamble, one that history may eventually regard as America's own diplomatic day of infamy. |