I think Shadi Hamid (via Matt, who shares his take) is a little hard on that Peter Baker piece I mentioned yesterday, about how Bush's democracy-promotion agenda has been frustrated by the foreign-policy bureaucracy. For one thing, I don't agree with Hamid's claim that in Baker's telling, "President Bush comes out as a courageous visionary whose wonderful ideas were stilted by the State Department bureaucracy and by the government’s traditional resistance to new ideas." Rather, I think he comes across as a well-meaning, ineffectual, and extremely naive politician whose somewhat dubious ideas were effectively resisted by the State Department bureaucracy (though maybe I'm just reading the piece through the lens of my own biases). Meanwhile, both Matt and Hamid make the point that when Bush really wanted a policy course pursued - namely, the invasion of Iraq - the opposition from the professionals in the State Department and elsewhere was steamrolled. Which is true enough, and I don't think there's any question that invading Iraq was a higher priority for Bush than the larger reorientation of American diplomacy in a more pro-democracy direction. But I think the contrast between how Iraq played out and what's happened to the freedom agenda doesn't just speak to Bush's priorities; it also speaks to the unfortunate truth that it's become easier for an American chief executive to invade a foreign country than to control the more banal, day-to-day workings of his own diplomatic corps.
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Lost in the Bureaucracy
22 Aug 2007 10:31 am
Comments (6)
Yeah, I agree with David here.
I guess, Ross, that you're inclined to be sympathetic to the view that the entrenched bureaucracy can thwart a president's desires.
I'm sure that can be true, but I just don't think the president's vapid happy talk about Democracy being Good is the right place for you to fight that battle.
I remember at the time of one of those "landmark" speeches, the reaction from some diplomats of our allies was, "where the heck did this come from? Why wouldn't you lay the groundwork for this for a little bit to make sure something will come of it?"
The answer is, because the rhetoric was never conceived of as policy. It was never thought through as to how it would apply to, say, Saudi Arabia, because it was more about a post-hoc rationale for the Iraq invasion. It was something for speechwriters and speech readers, not for people who actually implement policy. Its grandiosity should not be mistaken for sincerity, or for an intention to do the work necessary to accomplish it.
There's just no evidence to support the view that the president cared about this, fought for it, and lost.
Elvis writes: "It was never thought through as to how it would apply to, say, Saudi Arabia"
It was never meant to apply to Saudi Arabia. Dumbya's tiptoe-through-the-tulips and kissy-face games with Abdullah gave the message loud and clear - hands off THIS brutal dictator.
And of course it was never meant to apply to Uzbekistan, because we needed their airstrips... and so on, and so forth.
It's a little late in the game to be giving credibility to any of the self-serving claims of Bush and his various handlers.
Here's what I posted in comments at Kevin Drum's blog on Monday. It's pretty much what Matt Yglesias said just now, only with a bit more detail:
From Peter Baker's WaPo piece:
Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.
"It's our policy," the official said.
"What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked.
"Read the president's speech," the official said.
"Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."
And so the Arab Spring proved short-lived both in Washington and abroad. By August came the pushback, as Russian officials warned authoritarian governments around the world that Bush wanted to foment revolutions as in Ukraine and Georgia. Nongovernmental organizations promoting civil society were harassed and even kicked out.
The bureaucrat's right, and it's a significant mistake on Baker's part to describe the bureaucrat's response as 'defiance.'
Presidents say all sorts of things in speeches, and they don't necessarily mean all of them to be taken seriously. It's not my job as a GS-13 to decide whether or not a particular speech text is to be taken as direction to be obeyed.
If the President wants a speech turned into policy, he has to tell the appropriate political appointees - Cabinet secretaries and whatnot - to turn it into action, and they pass the word on down to the appropriate people to get to work on the nitty-gritty of turning the speech into a working policy.
There will be interagency meetings, decision memos, drafts going up to the Secretary of Whatever and the White House for review, and going back down with changes. And eventually an actual policy is worked out, that gives officials some clue as to what they're actually supposed to do.
And until this takes place, there's no policy. There's just a speech.
Having had an additional couple of days to let this settle in my mind, let me add a WAG:
When it comes to foreign policy, who is it who initiates the implementation of Bush's ideas - and who generally is the one who plants them in Bush's head in the first place?
That's right, Dick Cheney.
But even Peter Baker's story makes it clear that Cheney was one of the rocks on which Bush's democracy promotion 'agenda' foundered.
So who exactly was going to take the lead in turning Bush's ideas into policy, since Cheney clearly wasn't going to be driving this particular agenda?
I expect there might've been a real vacuum somewhere in there.
One has to wonder if Bush really knows how his own government works. He's always had Cheney and Rove to provide the push that turns his ideas into something more concrete. But this was outside of Rove's portfolio, and Cheney was on the other side in this case.
So what we have left is Junior (and apparently at least one equally ignorant White House official) thinking that giving a speech was the same thing as creating a new policy.
Kinda pathetic, really.
It is kind of funny, though, to imagine that line with scary music in the background, being spoken by Darth Vader.
"Policy is not what the president says in speeches. Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."
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Perhaps--but the bureaucracy doesn't force the President to reward despots with arms deals, or undercut democratically elected governments he doesn't like. Bush does these things on his own [and, BTW, I'm not necessarily saying he shouldn't do these things--just that they're inconsistent with the "freedom" talk]. If the bureaucracies do their own thing, it's because they know the rhetoric is empty.
Posted by David | August 22, 2007 11:05 AM