Strains Increasing Within Bush Inner Circle

The three biggest hawks working for George W. Bush are Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and UN Ambassador John Bolton. It's clear they are not pleased by Condi Rice's role in the current negotiations with Iran (though it should be noted that some concrete things have to happen before anyone should take the negotiations too seriously). So how are things going these days with Cheney, Bolton and Rumsfeld? Think Progress has this on Cheney:

Specter angry about getting snubbed by Cheney.

In a three-page letter to Cheney, Specter complained about the Vice President’s unwillingness to cooperate on NSA eavesdropping oversight. “I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine, the action of the Committee without calling me first. … This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican Senators caucus lunch yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions en route from the buffet to my table.”

Also, note this recent column from Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post (via the Houston Chronicle):

President Bush handed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and German Chancellor Angela Merkel a significant foreign policy victory and put new distance between himself and Vice President Cheney with last week's decision to dangle the carrot of U.S. participation in talks with Iran. But it is a victory of process rather than of substance and could still come undone.

(snip)

Expectations of successful talks with the Iranians are low at the White House. The true immediate significance of Rice's dramatic announcement was that it shows Bush is now fighting to save his battered presidency by allowing change in a White House where Cheney's influence has been paramount.

Bush's move to bring Wall Street heavyweight Henry Paulson in as his Treasury secretary was another case in point. The decision was taken, senior aides told reporters, without participation by Cheney or political adviser Karl Rove. Whatever the accuracy of those anonymous comments, the fact that Bush aides made them without fear of retribution is a startling measure of the vice president's lessened standing.

In some respects, Hoagland overplays his understanding of what's going in the longterm. The dynamics in the world are changing rapidly. Even if Bush's incompetence were not weakening America's position in the world, the dynamics of just two things, energy and the impact of the emerging economies of India and China, might already been in play by now. And those are not the only issues the world is now facing (but Hoagland is still a useful observer if you know what to discount).

And now let's see how John Bolton is doing these days. My read of the post in Think Progress suggests Bolton is barking as loud as ever but is anyone listening?:

Yesterday at a conference co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, Mark Malloch Brown — the #2 official at the U.N. — offered a constructive critique about the way the United States treats the organization...

(snip)

Brown noted that rampant U.N. bashing in the United States makes even renovating their dilapidated headquarters difficult...

(snip)

In response, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has lashed out at Brown. He said that if Annan didn’t immediately repudiate the remarks, the United Nations would be the “victim.”

Bolton's response, of course, is juvenile. Perhaps Bolton is frustrated by his inability to get a war going in Iran and he needs something to attack, a curious response for an ambassador, I might add. There's something Bolton still doesn't get: unilateralism has failed along with nearly every aspect of the neoconservative movement. The United States may be the world's remaining superpower but we can't go it alone if we are to be effective in the world. We can lead, but going it alone exacts a price we cannot afford.

In many ways, Rumsfeld is the most slippery of the uber-hawks. How can someone with such a dismal record still be on the job? But the pressure on George W. Bush to do something about Rumsfeld continues to grow as Sidney Blumenthal reports in Salon:

Former President George H.W. Bush waged a secret campaign over several months early this year to remove Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The elder Bush went so far as to recruit Rumsfeld's potential replacement, personally asking a retired four-star general if he would accept the position, a reliable source close to the general told me. But the former president's effort failed, apparently rebuffed by the current president. When seven retired generals who had been commanders in Iraq demanded Rumsfeld's resignation in April, the younger Bush leapt to his defense. "I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain," he said. His endorsement of Rumsfeld was a rebuke not only to the generals but also to his father.

The elder Bush's intervention was an extraordinary attempt to rescue simultaneously his son, the family legacy and the country.

Now I take all these stories about Cheney, Bolton and Rumsfeld with a grain of salt. Cheney and Rumsfeld, in particular, are fully capable of comebacks. They are fully capable of pushing Condi Rice aside as they have done before. But the fact that there is a steady stream of negative stories about the three is not something that was happening three years ago this month when Joe Wilson was quietly beginning to criticize the bogus Niger/Iraq uranium connection that was used to justify war with Iraq. Much has changed since then.

The only question is whether Bush will minimize damage to his presidency and our country by sending the uber-hawks packing or whether his many flaws will win out and force Congress and the nation to hold him accountable and his powers in check. Even diplomacy with Iran will have limited promise as long as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bolton remain.