Bush could learn from Blair

[MIKE BURN]

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Bush could learn from Blair



Nicholas D. Kristof

Op-ed columnist, New York Times



Tuesday, July 8, 2003 Posted: 11:47 AM EDT (1547 GMT)



LONDON -- One of the saddest results of our war in Iraq is that it may finish off Tony Blair before Saddam Hussein.



Everywhere I go in Britain, people dismiss Mr. Blair as President Bush's poodle. Mr. Blair's Labor Party has fallen behind the Conservatives in the latest poll, for only the second time in 11 years. "The Iraq critics think that the prime minister has betrayed his country to a Texas gunslinger," William Rees-Mogg noted in The Times of London.



So it'll sound foolish when I suggest that President Bush should study Mr. Blair and learn a few things. But on the other hand, everybody likes Mr. Blair but the Brits.



A poll by the Pew Research Center found that Mr. Blair was the world leader Americans trusted most (Mr. Bush ranked second), respected by 83 percent of Americans, and he was also highly esteemed in countries as diverse as Australia and Nigeria. More interesting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair took very similar positions over the last couple of years, and both exaggerated the Iraqi threat — and yet Mr. Blair is perhaps the leading statesman in the world today and Mr. Bush is regarded by much of the globe as a dimwitted cowboy. Or, as an Oxford don put it to me after perhaps too much sherry, "a buffoon."



The main reason is that the White House overdosed on moral clarity.



Mr. Bush always exudes a sense that the issues are crystal clear and that anyone who disagrees with him is playing political games. This fervor worked fine in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and in proper doses, moral clarity is admirable. But too much hobbles policy-making and insults our intelligence.



Mr. Blair stands with Mr. Bush on Iraq but acknowledges the complexity of the issues.



"Yes, there are countries that disagree with what we are doing; I mean, there's no point in hiding it — there's been a division," Mr. Blair told reporters at Camp David early in the war, when the two leaders were asked about opposition to the war among allies. But Mr. Bush gave no ground, saying: "We've got a huge coalition. . . . I'm very pleased with the size of our coalition."



Mr. Blair met Pope John Paul II and the archbishop of Canterbury to discuss their opposition to the war. But President Bush refused to discuss objections to the war with the head of the National Council of Churches or even the head of his own church, the United Methodists.



Political insults are a traditional British sport (Churchill famously described his rival Clement Atlee as a sheep in sheep's clothing, and as a modest man with much to be modest about). But Mr. Blair dignifies his opponents by grappling with their arguments in a way that helps preserve civility — and that we Americans can learn from.



Mr. Bush is not the dummy his critics perceive. My take is that he's very bright in a street-smarts way: he's witty and has a great memory for faces, and his old girlfriends speak more highly of him than many women do of their husbands. But he's also less interested in ideas than perhaps anybody I've ever interviewed, and his intelligence is all practical and not a bit intellectual. Nuance isn't his natural state, and yet he gives us glimmers to show he can achieve it.



The last time Mr. Bush seemed genuinely to wrestle with an issue was the summer of 2001, when he acknowledged the toughness of the stem cell debate. He showed an impressive willingness to puzzle through stem cell policy and seek a compromise.



If Mr. Bush had pursued that same model of policy-making into Iraq, then we would not have alienated our allies or bungled postwar planning because of rosy assumptions.



In 1979, James Fallows wrote a legendary critique of President Jimmy Carter's "Passionless Presidency." He argued that Mr. Carter was a smart, decent man who excelled in details but catastrophically lacked a sweeping vision to inspire the country and animate his presidency.



Well, now we've got a Passionate Presidency. But it's so focused on big-picture ideological campaigns that it doesn't bother with details (like what we will do with Iraq after we've conquered it). Mr. Blair offers a third way — passion tethered to practicality, idealism without ideologues.



Given that Mr. Blair might end up with time on his hands, perhaps Mr. Bush could hire him as an adviser.



Nicholas D. Kristof is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

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[Rev9Volts]

from the wall street journal which is a "tad" more respected than the ny times....



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A 'Miranda' Warning for Saddam?

Democrats try to discredit America's victory.



BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY

Monday, July 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT



"It's time to tell the truth," the Democratic National Committee urges in an Internet ad, complaining about something President Bush said about uranium. Yes, this is the same DNC headed by Clinton apologist Terry McAuliffe; you'd think the president proclaimed, "I did not have sex with that yellowcake."



But nothing so exciting; the ad is merely carping about the now-famous 16 words in the president's State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The White House now says this statement should not have been included; CIA Director George Tenet has said his agency erred in vetting the speech, and Democrats and other malcontents are in full cry about the president lying to build his case for war.



Now, those 16 words were entirely accurate in the sense that the British government had reached and publicized that conclusion. The media flogging the story might be more careful to tell us, too, that the British government maintains the same position today. The prime minister's official spokesman stood by the original report as recently as Friday, after remarking earlier in the week that he was "surprised that journalists had not yet picked up on what we had been saying consistently about this matter."



In testimony to a parliamentary committee on June 27 and consistently since, the British government has maintained that it reached this conclusion from "intelligence reporting from more than one source" and independent of documents that proved to be forged. It also believes it knows more than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked the allegations after the CIA sent him to Niger to investigate back in February 2002.



British intelligence has not revealed its sources, so unease naturally remains. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee proclaimed the uranium report "very odd indeed," even while rejecting accusations of political interference and generally concluding that "Ministers did not mislead Parliament." In the end, the uranium issue seems to concern disagreement among intelligence analysts, in this case British ones and CIA ones.











Such controversies are pretty much routine after any war. The congressional hearings over the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack ran 39 volumes, for example, and the Ford administration formally chartered a "Team B" to second-guess estimates of the Soviet military build-up. Generally the losing side within the intelligence community will wrap itself in "professionalism" and charge "political interference." This is under way both in the U.S. and in the U.K., with Greg Thielmann, a retired State Department intelligence officer, joining Mr. Wilson on this side of the Atlantic.

The invocation of "professionalism," though, raises the issue of when was the last time the intelligence professionals got anything right. The professionals failed to foresee September 11, though terrorists had already attacked the same building once. They failed to warn in a persuasive way about Muslim terrorism, though I suspect that here the Clinton administration will have much to answer for. They failed to foresee the collapse of the Communist empire, though Ronald Reagan predicted it at least four times.



Intelligence professionals are entitled to our sympathy, I hasten to add, since their job is to sift for clues in inherently ambiguous signals. We shouldn't expect too much of them, and they shouldn't be surprised if policy makers decide for themselves what the signals mean.



Especially so since it frequently turns out that disagreements are above the professionals' pay grade. Mr. Thielmann, for example, concludes that "Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States." Interesting word, "imminent." It also appears in the DNC ad and increasingly in press commentary.



The word does appear once in the president's State of the Union. To wit, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." He rejected this: "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option." The whole thrust of the policy of pre-emption, after all, is that in a world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer wait until a threat is imminent. A madman like Saddam heading a nation-state is itself an intolerable threat.



This conclusion is of course subject to debate, but it is a matter for presidents, not intelligence "professionals." As Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has tried to point out above the din, September 11 changed the American view of what threat is tolerable; hence decisions to call Saddam to account at the U.N. and to go to war if necessary. The war resolution passed the Senate by 77-23 and 29-21 among Democrats. The ayes included Senators Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Daschle, Dodd and Clinton. For that matter, the policy of regime change was signed into law by President William Jefferson Clinton with the Iraqi Liberation Act back in 1998.











It's a mystery, too, what policy the malcontents would urge instead. The complaint seems to be that President Bush didn't read Saddam his Miranda rights. Does Howard Dean want to apply to international affairs Justice Cardozo's famous observation that since the constable has blundered the criminal should go free? If the president got the uranium report wrong, should we invite Saddam Hussein to come out of hiding and resume his murderous rule? And if not, what's all the fuss about anyway?

Yes, there is some thread of an issue, since by its nature intelligence is never perfect. But more fundamentally, the uranium issue is the latest in a series of desperate efforts by critics to impugn the president's success in Iraq. As the British might say, this is very odd indeed. Usually, intelligence controversies are over who is to blame for failure; this time it seems to be about discrediting victory.



Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Rev9Volts]

every one knows the new york times is a left wing paper that is focused on furthering the democratic party agenda. who cares what 1 person thinks.

Edited by: Rev9Volts at: 7/15/03 4:57 pm