Hard to Have Confidence in Stephen Hadley

I watched Stephen Hadley a couple of times on Friday and sagged in my chair as I listened. He's no Scowcroft or Brzezinski. I'm no fan of Kissinger but he did a few things well; Hadley isn't close to being in that league. Condi Rice wasn't much of a national security adviser (she ignored warnings about al Qaida and Osama bin Laden and helped make the phony case for war in Iraq) but Hadley is clearly not an improvement.

In most presidencies since World War Two, the foreign policy heavyweight is either the national security adviser, or the secretary of state, or sometimes both. In Bush's first term, Colin Powell was the heavyweight though he was badly undermined by people like Cheney and Rumsfeld. In Bush's second term, there is no foreign policy heavyweight unless, hidden from view, it's Cheney, who has a view of the world that's somewhat paranoid and fundamentally at odds with the character of our nation and our long-term interests. There are major reasons why many experts are concerned about the drift of our foreign policy.

Here's some thoughts from the Carpetbagger on what Hadley said:

At a White House press briefing today, NSA Stephen Hadley seemed to believe the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was favorable to the White House’s war policy. “One of the things you should conclude from this NIE is the best plan is to have this plan succeed,” Hadley told reporters.

Look, when it comes to convincing spin doctors, Hadley isn’t the White House’s best. He’s not even in the top five. When Hadley is making a demonstrably false claim, which is not terribly uncommon, he doesn’t even sell it well. And arguing that the NIE tells us that an escalation is the “best plan” for Iraq certainly qualifies as demonstrably false.

(snip)

...the NIE notes that “even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate.”

In other words, the NIE does not say that Bush’s escalation strategy is “the best plan.” Hadley does know that reporters sometimes check these things, doesn’t he?

Bush came into his presidency knowing little about the world and less about foreign policy and we have been more or less asked from time to time to trust him. That's become very difficult. For some time it's been obvious that the Bush Administration has been less than straight with the American people. Admittedly people in business and politics sometimes try to buy themselves time to get a job done. But Bush has had six years to show us he can get things right, that we can trust his gut instincts. Desperate to salvage Bush's presidency, Bush's right wing supporters have been shrilly arguing that, in his seventh year, Bush will suddenly get it right. Of course, it's not going to happen. The best we can hope for is to limit the damage that Bush has done.

Let me offer one last comment on Stephen Hadley. Bob Woodward in State of Denial wrote this about Bush's preparation for running for president:

...[Bush] apparently didn't know that the Joint Chiefs, the heads of the services, serve only four-year terms. He clearly thought of them as a monolith.

At another meeting during Bush's early candidacy, the Vulcans [Bush's advisory team] were discussing arms control. Bush had lots of questions and he was getting lots of answers. Hadley told Bush, "They're very good on this stuff. You don't need all the technical stuff. You've got great instincts. If I could urge you to do one thing, it would be 'Trust your instincts.'" [pg. 11]

You've got great instincts. Who could have imagined?

More on the Strange Rumsfeld Memo

First, a quick word about Bolton and Rumsfeld after they leave their jobs: they're not going away. There are any number of right wing billionaires and mini-naires who will fund their speeches and any think tank jobs they can have for the asking. In Washington, it's a revolving door for everyone, but the Republicans, in particular, tend to be well cared for. Even Scooter Libby is being cared for while he fights his indictment for obstructing justice in the outing of Valerie Wilson/Plame.

Juan Cole of Informed Comment had this to say about the Rumsfeld memo:

1. Rumsfeld doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis or the tightrope the US is walking in the Gulf. His attitude is almost lackadaisical. Doing an all right job, but it isn't working fast enough or well enough. So maybe make some changes-- apparently any old changes will do because there are infinite lives to play with and infinite monies to spend.

2. Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war. Everything is about spin, about giving the image of progress even in the face of a rapid downward spiral into the abyss. ...

(snip)

It is about how we talk, how we are perceived to set goals, what is made to look like progress. It isn't actually about getting progress. The point of going minimalist is to reduce expectations among the American public. If you tell them you can only move the ball a yard, you get a lot of points for moving it two yards.

Too many people in the Bush Administration cannot make the connection between policy that guides our actions towards a goal and their own actions which in any case have too often been ad hoc reactions to the flow of events (Oops, our missile missed the target in Pakistan; oops, we just got everybody mad at us for killing women and children). Words for these guys have no other purpose in government than to manipulate people, whether it's the public, those we do business with or are allied to, or those who work for the government. And yet, they are guided by an ideology that remains poorly developed and rarely challenged.

Here's another take on the Rumsfeld memo by Bruce W. Jentleson of TPM Cafe with a brief mention of the Hadley memo:

Here’s Rumsfeld privately telling the President that we need a major change of policy at the same time he, Bush, Cheney and others were publicly calling into question not just the policy savvy but the patriotism of many who were saying essentially the same thing. “It is time for a major adjustment”, Rumsfeld writes in his memo on the day before the same congressional elections in which one Democrat after another sounding the change course theme was attacked, reviled, smeared. “An accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases” from 55 to 10-15 by April to 5 by July: sounds liked a phased withdrawal to me and a more rapid one than even the Iraq Study Group may be proposing (“modest” he says in another paragraph, without defining the term).

(snip)

And then there’s the Hadley memo which shows more concern about telling the President what he wants to hear than what he needs to hear.

These guys truly have no shame. They leave us no basis to trust either their foreign policy capacity or their belief in our own democracy let alone an Iraqi one. Bad policy is bad enough. Breach of faith is even worse.

Nobody would ever run a business the way Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have run our government. At some point, a greater number of the TV media stars and even some of the major print journalists are going to have to stop boring us with stories about process and Republican-driven memes, and recognize that our nation is in crisis and the epicenter of that crisis is the White House.