Bush ignores contrary opinions

One of the most important critiques of George W. Bush's foreign policy has just been put forward by a close friend of his father.
In a stunning profile in the Oct. 31 issue of the New Yorker, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the first President Bush, lays bare the policy flaw that turned postwar Iraq sour. The article's title: "Breaking Ranks -- What turned Brent Scowcroft against the Bush Administration."
Its most important point: Bush foreign policy has been undercut by the president's unwillingness to listen to ideas that conflict with his convictions.
It is a devastating portrait of a president cut off from contrary views.
Scowcroft comes from the realist school of foreign policy that believes America should act according to its interests, not embark on moral crusades. He helped persuade George H.W. Bush to roll back Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. But he warned before the 2003 invasion that Saddam was not an imminent threat and that an invasion would worsen, not help, the war on terrorism.
Not a panacea
He further warned that democracy in a Mideast with no history of such was not a panacea, and could sweep Islamist movements into power. He also argued that an Iraq war would do nothing to solve the key conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
But despite Scowcroft's intimate friendship with Bush pere (whose memoirs he co-authored), he was never able to deliver his message in person to the White House. Despite the fact that Dick Cheney was a friend and Condoleezza Rice was his protegee, Scowcroft had to deliver his prewar warning via an August 2002 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
And according to the New Yorker piece, Bush pere is still unable to arrange a policy meeting between his friend and his son. Scowcroft has been frozen out.
This is not the first time former White House officials have complained about the closed minds of the current Bush team. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who served in four Republican administrations, wrote that he never worked for a White House so closed to debate.
This month, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, gave a bombshell speech in Washington accusing the younger Bush of letting a Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal" control foreign policy.
John Sununu, chief of staff to the elder Bush, told the New Yorker: "We always made sure the president was hearing all the possibilities. That's one of the differences between the first Bush administration and this Bush administration."
Even President Bush's father has weighed in. When asked about Scowcroft's most useful qualities as national security adviser, George H.W. said he "was very good about making sure that we did not simply consider the 'best case,' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not."
That sounds like an oblique reference to George W.'s allergy to contrary views.
Hypersensitive reaction
The issues raised by the New Yorker piece shed light on the investigation by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to the media. Apart from the legal issues, the leak case lays bare the hypersensitive reaction of top administration officials to any criticism of the Iraq war.
It also reflects the narrow approach that left the White House so unready for the aftermath of the Iraq war. Scowcroft brands key administration players as "utopians" who brushed away any doubts about the ease of imposing democracy on Iraq, and therefore were unprepared for the war's downside.
And Scowcroft has proven prescient about elections alone not being enough to make a democracy. Almost 80 percent of voters said "yes" to Iraq's constitution, for example, in a referendum whose results were announced this week, but the vote split entirely along ethnic lines. Senior Iraqi officials tell me that the vote is unlikely to have any effect on the continuing violence.
The current troubles in Iraq seem to have opened a chink in the White House barrier to fresh foreign policy thinking. The administration has tempered its hopes for speedy regime change in the Middle East and North Korea. Yet the White House has hardly become a hotbed of competing ideas.
Despite endorsing a Palestinian state, President Bush appears closed to critics, such as Scowcroft, who claim a more active U.S. policy is needed to get there.
X Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.