The Bush Legacy: National Security

In looking back at national security policies during the Bush Years, the Council for a Livable World provides “the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

The Good

* For eight years, Congress stopped Bush proposals for a new generation of nuclear weapons, including small nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Bunker Buster (Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator) and the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

*The Bush Administration did not resume nuclear testing and did not withdraw the U.S. signature from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The U.S. has not conducted a nuclear explosive test since 1992.

* Congress made some reductions in missile defense money and placed severe restrictions on the third missile defense site in Europe.

* After six years of refusing to talk with North Koreans and that country testing a nuclear device, the Administration has negotiated for the past two years and achieved some progress.

* In 2008, in one of the few instances in which we were able to cooperate with the Bush Administration, our community worked with the Administration to ensure funding was included in a Supplemental Appropriations Bill to help North Korea proceed with its end of the bargain. Congress approved $53 million for energy assistance to the Pyongyang regime and authorized another $10 million for dismantlement work.

* The four horsemen, Kissinger, Schultz, Perry and Nunn, have created the space for moving towards a world free of nuclear weapons that both Obama and McCain endorsed during the 2008 campaign.

* There was no war with Iran.

* Congress refused to fund the administration's plan to build a new facility to produce annually 125 to 200 plutonium "triggers" or pits for nuclear weapons; at one time, the Administration planned to produce 450 plutonium pits per year. Congress drastically cut funding for reprocessing U.S. and foreign nuclear waste as part of a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program.

* Congress rejected a Pentagon request to put conventional warheads on Trident nuclear-powered submarines.

The Bad

* The Bush Administration refused to request Congress approve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

* The U.S.-India nuclear deal was approved and undermined anti-proliferation efforts.

* The Administration abrogated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and began deployment of National Missile Defense in Alaska and California despite insufficient testing and no evidence that the system would work in realistic situations.

* The Administration undermined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by walking back from key promises the United States made in 1995 and 2000.

* The war in Iraq has continued for six years, and Congress was unable to end it.

* There were virtually no negotiations with Iran.

* There were eight years of unilateralism.

* The military budget has skyrocketed by 86% since 2001.

* Arms sales have dramatically increased. The United States’ share of the world arms trade has risen from 40 percent of arms deliveries in 2000 to nearly 52 percent in 2006. U.S. weapons exports rose about 45 percent to $33.7 billion in FY08, the highest total since 1993.

* The U.S. has failed to pay all its dues to the United Nations. In March 2008, the U.S. was $1.6 billion behind in its treaty obligations to the United Nations. The U.S.’s failure to pay its bills on time and in full could have a negative impact on key UN operations, including jeopardizing the 19 peacekeeping missions around the world.

* Congress continues to fund Cold War-era weapons systems, such as the F-22 Raptor, Virginia-class submarine and the V-22 Osprey, that have little purpose in the current security environment.

* The Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review expanded the possible use of nuclear weapons to counter terrorists and chemical and biological weapons attacks, and walked back from promises not to threaten to attack non-nuclear weapon states with nuclear weapons.

The Ugly

* The Treaty of Moscow (SORT) produced inadequate reductions in Russian and American nuclear weapons with no verification and excess weapons on storage.

* The was some progress made helping the former Soviet states dismantle nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery systems and safeguard their nuclear materials, but the Administration tried to cut funding for the program more than once. Congress added funding during several years and removed some bureaucratic restrictions that had hampered the program.

* Congress launched two reevaluations of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, but the Perry-Schlesinger commission may be too divided to produce any productive conclusions.

* The Bush administration has used the supplemental funding process to an alarming degree to fund ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that sets a dangerous precedent for the future and threatens to further weaken the already-flawed federal budgeting process.

* The weak Proliferation Security Initiative only established a framework, which can be built upon, to stop the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies and fissile material, specifically when these items are being transported.

Breaking Down the Obama-McCain Debate

Nick Kristof elaborates on the “Impulsive, Impetuous, Impatient” McCain that quickly became evident during the debate.

As Mr. McCain demonstrated in Friday evening’s debate, he is a serious foreign policy thinker who has traveled widely, and he certainly showed vision and bipartisanship in helping to repair relations with Vietnam. But it’s equally clear that in recent years Mr. McCain has become impish cubed — impulsive, impetuous and impatient — and those are perilous qualities in a commander in chief.

Although he is frantically trying to distance himself from President Bush, Mr. McCain, by his own accounting, would be more Bushian in foreign policy than even Mr. Bush is now. While Mr. Bush has been forced to accept more sensible policies in his second term, Mr. McCain has become steadily more of a neocon in the cowboy role that Mr. Bush played in his first term, prone to solving problems with stealth bombers rather than United Nations resolutions.

Judging from Mr. McCain’s own positions, he might well revive a cold war with Russia and could start a hot war with Iran or North Korea. In those three hot spots, Mr. McCain could constitute a dangerous gamble for this country:

Iran seems determined to continue its uranium enrichment and will be vexing for any president. But Mr. Bush, under the influence of Bob Gates and Condoleezza Rice, has realized that the best hope is diplomacy and negotiation. In contrast, Mr. McCain denounces Barack Obama’s call for direct talks with Iranian leaders and speaks openly about the possibility of bombing Iranian nuclear sites.

“There’s only one thing worse than military action against Iran, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran,” Mr. McCain has told me and others, repeating the line regularly. That’s a nice sound bite, but it suggests that if Iran continues to enrich uranium he would feel obliged to launch airstrikes. And while Mr. McCain understands the lack of any effective military solution (we don’t even know exactly what to hit), he can sound cavalier about a new war. When a South Carolina man asked him about Iran, he responded by singing to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”: “Bomb, bomb,
bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

So if Iran continues its policies as most expect, we might well find ourselves under a McCain presidency headed toward our third war with a Muslim country. The result would be an Iranian nationalist backlash that would cement ayatollahs in place, as well as $200-a-barrel oil, open season on Americans in Iraq, and global fury at American unilateralism.

North Korea is one of the Bush administration’s greatest failures, and Mr. McCain seems intent on making it worse. For eight full years, the Clinton administration kept North Korea from obtaining plutonium to make a single nuclear weapon; on Mr. Bush’s watch, North Korea has obtained enough for a half dozen weapons and has conducted a nuclear test.

Even President Bush recognized the failure of his first term’s hard-line policy and abandoned it, instead pursuing negotiations and diplomatic solutions with North Korea. Mr. McCain fumes that this is accommodation and seems to prefer the first-term fist-waving that was emotionally satisfying but failed catastrophically.

A McCain administration would thus apparently mean no more diplomatic track with North Korea. The upshot would be North Korea’s restarting its nuclear weapon assembly line. In similar circumstances in 1994, Mr. McCain raised the prospect of military strikes on North Korea and suggested that war might be inevitable
(instead, President Clinton stopped plutonium production with a negotiated deal).

Russia underscores Mr. McCain’s penchant for risk-taking, theatrics and fulmination. Most striking, he wants to kick Russia out of the Group of 8. Mr. McCain’s lead-with-the-chin approach to Russia reflects the same pugnacity that resulted in obscenity-laced dust-ups with fellow Republican senators, but it’s less endearing when the risk is nuclear war. Do we really want to risk an exchange of nuclear warheads over Abkhazia or South Ossetia? The Spanish prime minister, José Zapatero, told me a few days ago that what he fears most under a McCain administration is a revival of the cold war with Russia.

In Friday’s debate, Mr. McCain was on his best behavior. But he did reiterate his suspicion of diplomacy with our enemies, and he has often shown that his instinct in a confrontation (whether with a colleague or a country) is the opposite of John Kennedy’s in the Cuban missile crisis; Mr. McCain responds to challenges by seeking to escalate, to fight.

All in all, it’s astonishing that Mr. McCain seems determined to return to Mr. Bush’s first-term policies that have been utterly discredited even within the administration. Judging from Mr. McCain’s own positions, on foreign policy he could well end up more Bush than Bush.

Meanwhile, EJ Dionne points out McCain’s missed opportunities during the debate, the only one with a focus on foreign affairs (his alleged turf):

September began as John McCain's month and ended as Barack Obama's. McCain's high-risk wagers aimed at shaking up the campaign turned into very bad investments. And Friday's debate eliminated McCain's best chance to deliver a knockout blow to an opponent whose most important asset may be his capacity for self-correction.

McCain is supposed to own the foreign policy issue -- and he should have owned Friday's debate. During their respective primary battles, McCain was a better debater than Obama, who could be hesitant, wordy and thrown off his stride.

But the Obama who showed up at Ole Miss was sharper and more concise than the man who frequently lost debates against his Democratic foes. He was also resolutely calm in standing his ground against McCain, whose condescension became a major talking point after the debate. If Al Gore suffered from his sighs during the 2000 debates, McCain will be remembered for his supercilious repetition of seven variations on "Senator Obama doesn't understand."

This gave special power to Obama's peroration about McCain's "wrong" judgments on going to war in Iraq. McCain's dismissal of Obama brought back memories of how advocates of the war arrogantly dismissed those who insisted (rightly, as it turned out) that the conflict would be far more difficult and costly than its architects suggested.

McCain's derisive approach may help explain why the instant polls gave Obama an edge in a debate that many pundits rated a tie -- and why women seemed especially inclined toward Obama. CNN's survey found that 59 percent of women rated Obama as having done better, with just 31 percent saying that of McCain.

An Obama adviser who was watching a "dial group" -- in which viewers turn a device to express their feelings about a debate's every moment -- said that whenever McCain lectured or attacked Obama, the Republican's ratings would drop, and the fall was especially steep among women. But if the debate was indeed a tie -- and McCain certainly looked informed and engaged once the discussion moved from economics to foreign affairs -- this would count as a net gain for Obama. A foreign policy discussion afforded McCain his best opportunity to aggravate doubts about his foe. That opportunity is now gone.

As for the first 40 minutes devoted to the economic crisis, Obama was more forceful in addressing public anxieties. He used the occasion to tout his middle-class tax cut that a large share of the electorate doesn't even know he's proposing. Obama's campaign quickly went on the air with an ad noting that McCain did not once mention the words "middle class" during the discussion.

Thus ends a month that began with such promise for McCain. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate at the end of August created a fortnight of excitement among Republican loyalists who were less than enthusiastic about McCain. Some said Palin would also enhance his appeal to female voters and help him recast his candidacy as a maverick's crusade.

But it was a reckless choice. Palin has proved herself to be spectacularly unprepared for a national campaign and embarrassingly inarticulate and unreflective. She is held in protective custody by a campaign that trusts her less and less. A few conservatives have suggested she should be dropped from the ticket.

Then came McCain's abrupt foray into Washington's negotiations over a Wall Street bailout bill. His showy call for postponing Friday's debate was serenely rebuffed by Obama, and McCain was forced to retreat. The candidate with 26 years of congressional experience lost a test of wills to an opponent with just four years on the national stage.

And when McCain intervened in the rescue package discussions, his position on the matter was muddy. This champion of bipartisanship briefly stood up for a House Republican minority that was battling against a bipartisan accord largely accepted by his Senate Republican colleagues, and then he pulled back. The McCain who had once allied with such liberals as Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold was suddenly flirting with an approach to the economic rescue that was recommended by Newt Gingrich. The
post-Labor Day period has thus brought the campaign to an unexpected point.

McCain, once the candidate of tested experience, must now battle the perception that he has become the riskier choice, a man too given to rash moves under pressure. Obama, whose very newness promised change but also raised doubts, has emerged as the cool and unruffled candidate who moves calmly but steadily forward. However one judges the first debate, it did nothing to block Obama's progress.

The Injection of Nazi

On Slate, Anne Applebaum explores the strange and unproductive need for politicians to inject the Nazis into the political discourse. An excerpt:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals. … We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.'" - George W. Bush, May 2008

"Moreover, in our time, these threats are not diminishing… [and] in these new threats, as during the time of the Third Reich, are the same contempt for human life and the same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world." - Vladimir Putin, May 2007

No, by citing these two quotations, I am not drawing comparisons between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, two vastly different men. Nevertheless, it is clear from the above that Bush and Putin, despite their vast differences, do share a common ailment: They both suffer from the inexplicable need to inject the Nazis into current political debate whether they belong there or not.

...I am not, I hasten to add, arguing here against the public discussion of history. If the Nazis were being invoked more generally - in warnings, say, about the unpredictability of totalitarian regimes - they might be a useful part of a number of discussions. Unfortunately, Nazi analogies are nowadays usually deployed in order to end arguments, not to broaden them. Once you inject "Hitler" or "the Third Reich" into a debate, you have evoked the ultimate form of evil, put your opponent in an indefensible position—"What, you're opposed to a war against Hitler?"—and for all practical purposes halted the conversation.

Invoking the Nazis also changes the tenor of a debate. There may be good, tactical reasons for choosing not to negotiate with Hezbollah or the Iranian regime, for example (the best reason, usually, is that the relevant diplomats are fairly sure that negotiations won't work). But calling opponents of this policy "appeasers" distorts the debate, giving tactical choices a phony moral grounding. In reality, circumstances do change, even where "terrorists and radicals" are involved, as this administration in particular knows perfectly well.

Clearly the circumstances changed, for example, in the case of North Korea, a regime that was featured as a part of the axis of evil in 2002 and with whose leadership a number of Bush administration officials now negotiate full-time. ...Still, that doesn't mean that the Americans participating in talks with North Korea are the precise contemporary equivalents of Neville Chamberlain, and it doesn't mean that the North Koreans are about to invade Poland.

By the same token, we don't learn anything useful by calling Kim Jong-il "Hitler," we haven't achieved much by calling Bush or Blair a Nazi, and the idea that people who want to negotiate with Iran are the moral equivalent of Vichy collaborators is ridiculous. Seventy years have now passed. Let's put the ghosts of Munich to rest, this time for good.

Knesset-Gate Continued...

During a press gaggle aboard Air Force One, White House Counselor Ed Gillespie said: “And I would again encourage the media, whatever you want to do, it's your editors - to ask them if maybe you might ask the Speaker of the House, or the leader of the Senate, or the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, what sentence that the President uttered, what words do you disagree with in those comments in the Knesset?”

Senator Joe Biden, never one to back down, gladly responded:

“Here’s what I disagree with – this White House long ago perfected the art of the political misrepresentation and innuendo masquerading as policy and stringing together sentences that seem unobjectionable when read in isolation, but send a very different message when read together. What is stunning is that this is the only president I can think of – and I’ve served with seven of them – who would engage in this kind of activity while overseas in the Knesset, even as he revealed a totally incoherent policy.

“In the space of three paragraphs, the President cited the outrageous statements of Iran’s leader; said “some” believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals; and drew a parallel to “an American senator” in 1939 declaring that talking to Hitler might have prevented World War II and the Holocaust. Then, his staff told the press on background that the remarks were a reference to calls by Senator Obama and other Democrats to engage with Iran, only to later say on the record the President intended no such thing. Karl Rove would be proud.

“As to the incoherence, to say that those who would negotiate with these terrorists and radicals are peddling “the false comfort of appeasement” is one of the most extraordinary self-indictments by any administration in history. As recently as the day before the President made his remarks, his own Secretary of Defense called for engaging Iran. His Secretary of State has done so repeatedly. And the President himself struck a deal with Libya’s Qadafi and wrote polite letters to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who would make most people’s top ten lists of “terrorists and radicals.”

“The President was right to engage Libya and North Korea, just as his cabinet officials are right to want to engage Iran. That’s the best way to get them to change their conduct. The President was profoundly wrong to launch a political attack from abroad. That’s beneath the office of the Presidency. Ed Gillespie should stop playing the American people for fools.”