[Mb-civic] Stumbling Past The Good News - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Stumbling Past The Good News

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, February 26, 2006; B07

Laugh or cry? Hard to choose when it comes to the descent of the Bush 
White House into total incoherence over the Dubai Ports World contract. 
Once again we turn from weighty matters to ask: What did this president 
not know and when did he not know it?

 From his vice president spraying a hunting buddy with birdshot to the 
negotiation of the politically charged ports contract, George W. Bush 
has had his spokesman fall back on his father's lame defense in 
Iran-contra: Me? I was out of the loop.

That's not a defense, Mr. President. That is confirmation of our worst 
fears -- especially when that declaration of prior ignorance follows an 
immediate, defiant threat to exercise the first-ever Bush 43 veto. 
That's shooting yourself in both feet.

That is not to say that Bush should have been following the ins and outs 
of a commercially sound, if difficult to explain, contract. Nor does it 
absolve opportunistic politicians in both parties who are exploiting 
this flap by playing on racial animosities and fears. They toy with U.S. 
foreign policy and domestic accord.

But where was White House chief of staff Andrew Card as the ports 
contract moved through the bureaucracy? Or Karl Rove, who is paid to be 
Bush's political early warning system? From Hurricane Katrina on, they 
have let Bush down. No, let's be more precise: They have melted the Bush 
presidency down to a nub.

This incredibly sustained oblivious staff work -- and Bush's incredibly 
sustained enabling of it -- carries a high price, for Bush and the nation.

<>The president embarks this week on a journey to India that should be a 
foreign-policy high point for his second term. The visit has been 
meticulously and imaginatively prepared. Instead, it may well be 
eclipsed in national attention by the guffaws, sneers and blatant 
disrespect this White House has both allowed and encouraged to flourish 
with its bumbling responses to controversies big and small.

The fault lines that split the State Department and the White House in 
Bush's first term involved loyalty, conflicting agendas and giant egos. 
In the second term competence is the clearest dividing line, with Bush's 
rapidly deflating economic agenda and his appalling relations with 
Congress dragging down a more effective presentation of U.S. aims in 
foreign policy.

Pursuing an idea I heard him discuss before he ever went to the White 
House, Bush has worked steadily to construct a strategic partnership 
with the world's largest democracy. His journey to India, and an 
obligatory stopover in Pakistan, will give substance to this 
administration's innovative foreign policy doctrine for working with 
other powers.

I think of it as the Rice Doctrine, since the secretary of state has 
stated it most clearly: "The fundamental character of regimes matters 
more today than the international distribution of power." Only democracy 
ensures "lasting peace and security between states, because it is the 
only guarantee of freedom and justice within states," she wrote in a 
Post op-ed on Dec. 11.

This idea underlies the U.S.-India agreement on civilian nuclear power 
that Bush hopes to make final with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New 
Delhi and then sell to Congress and the international Nuclear Suppliers 
Group.

The agreement is the first important, realistic reshaping of the global 
rules of the proliferation of nuclear technology in decades. It puts 
flesh on the bones of the Rice Doctrine: Washington is now prepared to 
provide civilian nuclear supplies to democratic India, which has been 
scrupulous in controlling its technology and equipment, but not to 
Pakistan, a notorious proliferator of both.

This echoes American willingness to tolerate Israel's undeclared nuclear 
arsenal while opposing Iran's desire to acquire one. Bush and Rice 
explicitly say that it is not the nature of the arms a government has 
but the nature of the government that has the arms that will determine 
its standing in Washington.

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has conducted nearly a dozen 
high-level negotiating sessions and seems to have moved India's nuclear 
establishment to the edge of accepting the agreement's opening up of the 
nation's reactors to partial international inspection. Burns flew to New 
Delhi late last week to overcome the last obstacles to the deal.

"Today we have zero impact on India's nuclear facilities. We have very 
little impact on its long-range development of energy supplies. This 
agreement could change that and much more," Burns told me in a telephone 
conversation while in India.

This is creative diplomacy that springs from a big idea that Bush has 
nurtured. Reducing India's reliance on fossil fuels addresses global 
climate change concerns. It helps give India alternatives to financing 
oil pipelines from Iran.

This should be a week of foreign policy high-fives or even hosannas for 
Bush. Instead he is likely to be sliding on the banana peels his chief 
White House aides leave strewn in his path. That's reason enough to cry 
over Dubai.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR2006022401803.html
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