[A-List] US state: the 'return' of Baker

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

I thought Jim Lobe's analysis of Haiti was well-described by Stan, since it
seemed so at odds with the quality of what he tends to write about the Bush
administration and its policies -- something he seems to possess certain
insight on. A trawl through the A-list archives will reveal that Baker has
never really been away, since he has been Bush's pointman since day 1, even
before that, if you count the Florida fiasco. This is because Baker has been
handling the sensitive issue of Morocco and the Western Sahara, very much as
part of the Bush administration's (and its Clinton predecessor's) steelier
focus on the oil reserves in West Africa. His higher profile may mark a
return to more diplomatic forms of hegemony, itself visual evidence of the
struggle going on within the wider state. But there are stronger
continuities here than those suggested by Lobe.

-----

Baker's return spells Cheney's heartburn
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, December 16 2003

WASHINGTON - It may take four or five months to take shape, but a new
scenario could be unfolding, a shifting balance of power within the Bush
administration, a reconfiguration in the interests of realism - and aimed at
a Bush re-election victory:

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz will have heard the siren song of
academia and returned to teach in ivy-covered halls somewhere;
His deputy, Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, will have decided he
can't really afford to put his young kids through school on a government
salary, and that it's time to return to a lucrative law practice;
John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International
Security, will have been advised that the sustained excitement of defending
US national sovereignty against all comers - from al-Qaeda, to the French,
to Amnesty International - was simply too much for his nervous system, and
that it was time to take a long vacation;
And finally, Vice President Dick Cheney will have been sternly warned by his
doctors that his chronic heart problems make his participation in a rigorous
re-election battle simply out of the question and that he will have to take
himself off the ticket for the sake of his own survival, if not for that of
his deeply concerned family members.

Fantasy? Mindless speculation? Wishful thinking? Desperation?

Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that such scenarios suddenly
appeared far more real when former secretary of state James A Baker returned
last week to take up his new office in the White House close to the Oval
Office, as President George W Bush's personal envoy for persuading other
countries to forgive tens of billions of dollars in Iraq's debt.

The return of Baker - long-time consiglieri to the Bush family whose last
mission was to secure all of Florida's electoral votes for George W in 2000
regardless of the state's actual voting laws or how people actually voted -
made an already bad week for administration hawks much, much worse.

One unnamed "senior administration official", quoted by The New York Times
noted that Baker wields vastly greater influence over the Bushes than
Secretary of State Colin Powell, his fellow-realist, could ever hope to
have. "Baker is Bush,"the official said. "Other countries know that Powell
doesn't win all the [intra-administration] battles. If you deal with Baker,
you know you're going to get what you need," said the official source in a
line that must have sent chills down the spines of the neo-conservatives and
their right-wing fellow-travelers, most notably Cheney himself.

Of course, it is not yet known how much Baker, the master diplomatic
puppeteer of the first Gulf War in 1991 and Ronald Reagan's former White
House chief of staff and treasury secretary, intends to weigh in on policy
decisions that go beyond his specific brief.

But the fact that he is now in the White House and dealing directly with all
of Washington's major allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East on the
future of Iraq, if not the entire region, places him in the thick of the
administration's foreign policy, to put it mildly. From now on, very little
is likely to be decided on anything that affects Iraq or US alliances
without his "input".

And one can only imagine Baker's input to Bush on Wolfowitz's incredibly
ill-timed decision, making Baker's task far more difficult and expensive, to
announce that the allies that are owed most of Iraq's debt will not be
permitted to bid on some US$18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts.

If Baker interprets Wolfowitz's move as a deliberate effort to sabotage his
mission ab initio (as did New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Friday),
the consequences could be severe for the former dean of the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies, whose hopes of becoming secretary
of state in a second Bush term were already on the wane.

But the threats posed by Baker's presence to the hawks, especially the
neo-conservatives both in and out of the administration, go far beyond
personal score-settling in which Baker has historically shown little
interest: they are strategic. By all accounts, Baker believes the neo-con
domination of US foreign policy since September 11, 2001, especially the
Iraq invasion, has been disastrous for the country and, perhaps more
important, for Bush Jr's re-election chances.

Before the Iraq invasion, Baker made no secret of his opposition to the US
waging unilateral war, although he was more discreet about his dismay than
Bush I's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to whom Baker remains
close.

Baker, like other realists, has also been deeply skeptical, not to say
incredulous, of neo-conservative ambitions to "remake the face of the Middle
East" by exporting democracy. Long associated with "big oil", Baker would
find the kind of radical regional change promoted by the neo-cons to be
unacceptably risky and destabilizing.

Moreover, Baker has always disdained Israel's right-wing Likud Party. It was
he who threatened to cut off housing guarantees if then-prime minister
Yitzhak Shamir did not take part in the 1991 Madrid peace talks that led
eventually to the Oslo peace process. This caused great public dismay and
anger among neo-conservatives like Feith, the powerful former chairman of
the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, the current
Middle East director on the National Security Council.

And he has also sided consistently with those, like Powell and Bush's
father, who have favored consistently constructive relations with Beijing, a
position which Bush Jr has clearly come to share, as he demonstrated last
week during the visit of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Indeed, the
younger Bush tilted so far, at least rhetorically, in China's direction at
the expense of Taiwan that top neo-cons outside the administration claimed
for the first time since he took office that Bush himself was guilty of
"appeasement", a charge highly unlikely to generate warm feelings in the
White House.

Finally, as secretary of state, Baker gave top priority to close ties to
traditional European allies, including Germany and France, or what the
neo-cons and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld have referred to disdainfully as
"Old Europe". In that respect, Wolfowitz's directive banning German and
French contractors from bidding on reconstruction contracts at this time not
only has made Baker's job more difficult and more costly for the US
taxpayer, but also has confirmed that the hawks have their priorities upside
down.

But Baker, Scowcroft, Powell and their fellow realists had already reached
that conclusion 12 years ago when some of the neo-cons, like Wolfowitz and
Perle, were furious that the Gulf War ended without the US army marching on
Baghdad.

Similarly, it was Wolfowitz and his boss at the time, then-secretary of
defense Cheney, who kept up a stream of strident warnings that Soviet
president Mikhail Gorbachev remained a committed communist whose designs for
global conquest were no different from his predecessors' right up until ...
well, right up until the Soviet Union collapsed. Even then, they thought it
might be a trick.

And of course it was Wolfowitz and his top deputy, I Lewis Libby - now
Cheney's powerful chief of staff - who prepared the 1992 Defense Planning
Guidance draft calling for the US to pursue a strategy of global domination
and pre-emption, nuclear if necessary, against rogue states and possibly
emerging rivals.

Baker, Scowcroft, and then-armed forces chief of staff Powell, not to
mention Bush Sr, were so alarmed - as were senior lawmakers and European
allies after parts of it leaked to The New York Times - that only Cheney's
promises to overhaul the text saved the jobs of its two main authors. Still,
the radical proposals of Wolfowitz and Libby would endure and guide US
policy after the September 11 attacks a decade later.

In many ways, therefore, the hawks themselves already see Baker as their
nemesis, but they have been steadily losing power over the past several
months in any case.

Bush's harsh words for Taiwan's leader this week, and the readiness with
which neo-cons like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol accuse him of
appeasement, attest to the very serious strains between the White House and
the neo-con network. Until now that network has assiduously avoided
attacking the president himself for any disagreements it has had with the
administration.

In addition, the balance now appears to be tilting away from the hawks, who
held sway since the Iraq war, and toward the realists in the
intra-administration fights over Iran, Syria and North Korea. The decision
last week by the Iraqi Governing Council, for example, to disarm and deport
the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq marked a signal defeat for Cheney and the
neo-conservatives, who have wanted to use those Iranian resistance fighters
against the Islamic Republic. Similarly, the acceleration of "Iraqification"
in neighboring Iraq without a thoroughgoing "de-Ba'athification" marks a
triumph of the realists.

Indeed, Baker's arrival in some ways may crown the successful development of
a effective "counter-network" within the administration that has gradually
eroded the hawks' authority since September. Aside from Powell and senior
officers in the uniformed military and the intelligence community who were
always dubious of the hawks, key members of this group include the National
Security Council's coordinator for strategic planning, ambassador Robert
Blackwill, who came on board in September, and the chief of Iraq's Coalition
Provisional Authority, ambassador L Paul Bremer, in Baghdad.

Both are former foreign service officers who are conservative but not
ideologues, Bremer and Blackwill have known each other since they both
worked for arch-realist Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s. Blackwill is
particularly interesting, both because he was Condoleezza Rice's boss as
National Security Council director of European and Soviet Affairs under
Scowcroft in the first Bush administration. In that capacity Blackwill
clashed with Wolfowitz and Cheney over Gorbachev. He reportedly met Israeli
prime minister Ariel Sharon as a political officer in the US embassy in Tel
Aviv and has remained on good terms, although he disdains neo-conservatives.

When hired by Rice, former ambassador to India Blackwill's job was to assert
firm White House control over Iraq policy, which had been seen increasingly
between August and October as having been botched by the Pentagon,
especially Feith's office. By most accounts, he has made so much progress in
that regard that he also has begun weighing in on overall Middle East
policy, possibly at Abrams' and the neo-conservatives' expense.

Of course, the situation in Iraq is the most important single factor in the
changing the balance of power within the administration. But Blackwill was
also brought in to ensure that the National Security Council enforces
discipline - something which Rice on her own was unwilling or unable to do -
over all the policy agencies, particularly the Pentagon. Under Cheney's
protection, the Pentagon has often appeared to act on its own. Bush's top
political adviser, Karl Rove, who warned several months ago that there
should be "no more wars" before the November election, also has weighed in
to support these changes.

Indeed, some analysts believe that Baker's return was promoted by Rove as
part of a discreet "dump-Cheney" campaign. Philip Giraldi, a former Central
Intelligence Agency officer and political columnist for The American
Conservative, wrote last week that Baker and Scowcroft are "orchestrating" a
Rove-backed campaign to blame Cheney and the neo-conservatives around him
and in the Pentagon for botching Iraq and, with it, Bush's re-election
chances.

But the larger, foreign policy impact of the resurgence of the realists -
capped by Baker's return - may already be tangible.

While Israel's Sharon clearly is under growing domestic pressure to
reinvigorate peace negotiations with the Palestinians, his recent moves - as
well as Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's unexpectedly far-reaching
proposals for territorial compromise - suggest that the Israelis themselves
perceive a shift in the US administration's internal balance of power that
needs to be accommodated.

In this context of shifting balance, added significance may well be ascribed
to Powell's recent meetings with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and
the cosponsorship of Baker's Houston-based institute of a poll showing
majority support among both Israelis and Palestinians for the recently
proposed Geneva Accord.

If Baker's European interlocutors suggest this week that real pressure by
Washington on Israel - perhaps of the kind Baker exerted back in 1991 -
could make them more amenable to reducing Iraq's official debt, then the
larger implications of Baker's appointment become more tangible. In any
event, Wolfowitz's timing in barring some allies from Iraq's rebuilding
contracts has clearly given Mssrs Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder,
Vladimir Putin and other European leaders more leverage to raise issues of
this kind.

And for the hawks, even the recognition that the Europeans enjoy significant
leverage over US foreign policy is very bad news indeed.