Return of the Realists

The day after the 2006 US mid-term elections, a polite but important coup is under way in Washington. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld has gone. Brent Scowcroft acolyte, former CIA director and anti-neo-conservative realist Robert Gates has got Rumsfeld’s job. Democrats control both chambers of Congress. And George W. Bush has found that not only can he not stay the course in Iraq, he can’t stay the course on any policy front.

Quite uncharacteristic of his earlier tenure, somewhat desperate-sounding pleas for bipartisanship have become the President’s most often-stated phrase since voters ripped the gear shaft and steering column out of his control of the US political scene.

Top-tier neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and even "axis of evil" wordsmith David Frum -- who brand Rumsfeld and Bush as seriously incompetent in the latest issue of Vanity Fair -- are jumping off the Bush ship that they helped sink with the war against Iraq.

Realists are hot again and are trying to rescue Bush’s administration from total ignominious collapse out of patriotism and loyalty to his father, George H.W. Bush.

This week’s election has sent the Bush administration into a tailspin. Karl Rove, architect of the President’s resilient hold on power during the past six years, simply could not deflect a significant wave of voter dissatisfaction over Republican corruption and sex scandals, the Iraq war, terrorism and the economy.

Democrats have secured firm control of the House of Representatives and are projected to take control of the US Senate by a one-seat margin after two nail-bitingly close races in the states of Virginia and Montana.

In Virginia, the Democrats have successfully sent to the Senate an important military figure, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy, who became a Democrat recently much in the same spirit as General Wesley Clark adopted the Democratic Party before the last presidential race.

Present trends may imply that the Dems are increasingly seen as trustworthy stewards of national security policy and as more pro-military than incumbent Republicans. That’s a very big switch.

American voters are proclaiming loud and clear their lack of interest in "staying the course" with Bush’s war team. The high-fear tactics that Bush and Dick Cheney used to milk American insecurity about the so-called global war on terror reached a point of diminishing returns some time ago. In recent years, Americans gave their commander-in-chief extraordinary powers and support to confront the world’s thugs and terrorists and to make the nation safer.

But the verdict of the 2006 elections is simply that the President and his team have made matters worse.

The US, for the first time since Vietnam, is looking at a big military and political loss in the Middle East as well as a world of allies and foes who count on US support less than they once did or who are moving forward their aggressive and potentially harmful agendas.

Israel, Europe and Japan are behaving differently and engaging in military postures and aggressive diplomacy that was inconceivable even a year ago, mostly because of their perception of the weakening position of the US. States such as Iran and North Korea are aggravating the global order with disruptive nuclear pretensions, while Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez flies across the globe attempting to cultivate a sphere of interest melded from oil influence, a revived state socialism and anti-Americanism. Russia and China are back as big power players in the global game; and al-Qa’ida, the transnational Islamist terror network that shocked the American psyche on September 11 more than five years ago, is still functioning, with its two top leaders at large, inspiring radical, often tragic terrorism across the world.

Americans pay a lot for their security -- roughly half of what the entire world spends on defence -- and they are not satisfied with the "deliverables" they have been getting.

Washington believed unilateralism conveyed US power more effectively than serious multilateralism. When the US got bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq and overtly displayed its military limits, the global equilibrium, already in shabby shape after the Cold War’s end, came apart.

But all of this has been evident for some time. The neo-conservatives such as former deputy secretary of defence and now World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, former under secretary of defence Douglas Feith, former Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby and others laid the groundwork in the Bush administration for a "faith-driven" foreign policy of aggressive thug toppling and democracy promotion at the end of a gun that failed to take into account the costs and benefits of their actions, particularly the costs.

The neo-conservatives of the Bush administration -- despite the informed objections of many inside the trenches such as former secretary of state Colin Powell and outsiders such as Bush Sr’s friend and national security adviser Scowcroft -- really did believe that the Iraq war and subsequent occupation would be so easy and create so much momentum for the global US cause that anti-democratic theocrats in Iran would tremble, along with many of the world’s worst dictators, at the power and resolve of America’s democracy-promoting global juggernaut.

Bush’s team not only thought Iraq would be a cakewalk, they thought a good dozen or so other bad countries would simply reform after watching Iraq remade as the poster child for democracy building.

Most neo-cons wanted to start the Iraq war under any conditions because they believed the US could not lose and saw it as a necessary stepping stone to taking on the "real threat" in the region, Iran.

They also believed Iraq was a Romania in the Middle East and that the methodology of democracy would be easy for the downtrodden and terrorised in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to wear.

Frum once wrote that Americans needed to beware a revival of "Scowcroftism", meaning a kind of state-based realism that shies away from aggressive meddling in the internal guts of other nations.

But as the election was drawing close, it became clear that realism and realist-hybrids, with other related schools of foreign policy thought, were growing in popularity at the expense of neo-conservative influence. In coming weeks, for example, Bush family fixer and former secretary of state and treasury secretary James Baker will release a report of the Iraq Study Group, which he co-chaired with Lee Hamilton. This report, acknowledged as important by the President, is expected to be a realistic call for deal-making in the Middle East, even with parties such as Syria and Iran, to establish a "new equilibrium of interests" in the region.

Baker’s influence flows not only from the potential efficacy of his study group’s proposals but from the realisation that Bush has alienated most of the American public with ineffective and counter-productive national security policies constructed and informed by his team.

Although it is still highly doubtful that the Democrats have a serious plan for Iraq that its factionalised party supports, it is clear that the President can’t continue in the direction in which he has been heading on Iraq. If neo-conservatives have jumped ship, and if the Dems are wanting change, the most logical course for Bush is to get logical: to revive the realist wing of US foreign policy and re-establish some of his bona fides with a besieged and overwhelmed military.

On his death bed in AD211, Roman emperor Septimius Severus warned his successor and future emperors: "Keep the soldiers happy." Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush not only did not keep the soldiers in body armour and out of reckless escapades, but the soldiers on active duty in the military as well as the National Guard reserves -- and their families and neighbours and retired veterans -- may in fact have helped breathe new life into America’s diminished and now revived system of checks and balances in government.

The military and the people may have just restored the republic.