What Zelikow Got Wrong

The Apologetics are emerging en force this week, and one worth noting is Phillip Zelikow who published his attempts at self-justification over at the Foreign Policy Magazine’s “Shadow Government” blog.

Unfortunately Mr Zelikow’s style tends toward the very dry and impenetrable sort that pervades official Government policy presentations, like, say, the 2002 National Security Strategy, which he, along with Condi Rice and Stepehn Hadley authored and which forms the basis for his assessment of Bush’s Legacy, so it’s very difficult at first to for laymen as such to figure out what the fuck he is trying to say.  Much easier to just sort of nod to the awareness that Bush did have a profound impact on foreign policy, point out that most of it sucked but that there is some plausible argument that some points of his policy did OK, maybe, and walk away.

But Zelikow’s position is such that, when he says “What Bush Got Right,” and then proceeds to frame the analysis around the policy documents he crafted, he’s essentially saying, “What I, Phillip Zelikow, Got Right,” and so walking away actually entails letting this man win the argument that “The Bush Doctrine” lead to some positive outcomes.

Yes, that Bush Doctrine. The one Sarah Palin should have read, for if she had she could have found many nice things to say about ‘championing aspirations to human dignity’ and ’strengthening global alliances to defeat global terrorism,’ for this is a fairly wide ranging document which remains American foreign policy to this day, and any talented politician should’ve been able to find positive things to say about some of the goals within.

Zelikow, luckily for us, is ready to debate the key issues of this policy, the one buried deep as a bullet point within section iii:

Defending the United States, the American people, and our interests at home and abroad by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders. While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country

This is, of course, the doctrine of pre-emptive war, the one Charlie Gibson wanted to debate with Palin, and which Zelikow argues at one point was not written to rationalize the Iraq war specifically. Whatever. We’ll get to that. Let’s unpack some of Mr Zelikow’s arguments, both then and now, and see if he, uh, I mean Bush, really got anything right.

In his first of several posts re-visiting the Bush Legacy, Zelikow’s first assessment of foreign policy success is stated thus:

Success #1: The Bush approach solidified an emerging consensus that world politics had changed in a profound way, emphasizing the rise of transnational issues, cutting across societies instead of being defined principally by the divisions between states…

…As part of this transformation, traditional rivalries of power blocs receded in importance, at least for a time. There are unprecedented opportunities for cooperation among the world powers. This extraordinary situation of global opportunity remains in place, despite the acrid controversies of the early Bush years, in part because the essential global linkages were ably rebuilt and strengthened by Rice’s diplomacy during Bush’s second term.

I told you his prose was all but indecipherable. This language traces back to the 2002 NSS, and basically amounts to “The world changed after the fall of the Soviet Union, and it changed again after 9/11.” While there is a lot of glorious rhetoric in the document about international cooperation and aid, almost none of the important stuff worked out the way they hoped, so I’m not entirely sure what “extraordinary situation of global opportunity” he is talking about.

As but one important example, one which Zelikow deals directly with in his article “The Transformation of National Security,” published just days before the invasion of Iraq, is the International Criminal Court. In both the NSS and Zelikow’s article, great emphasis is put on ideas of justice and fairness in the international community:

Seven of these demands, all originally appearing in the President’s January 2002 State of the Union message, are listed in the strategy document: the rule of law; limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice; and religious tolerance. All seven focus on the relationship of individuals to the state. None deals directly with the form or processes of government to produce these relationships: There is no mention here of democracy. Far from being an assertion of American exceptionalism, therefore, or a call for others to emulate the example of our “city on a hill”, both the strategy document and President Bush have stressed that these are universal principles that apply everywhere.

I highlight this passage because Zelikow (and the Adminstration policy) is arguing that these institutions are universally regarded as pillars to a post-superpower agreement structure, one specifically designed around the rule of law as a primary point of agreement. Yet later in the piece (and the NSS itself), Zelikow has this to say about the ICC:

First, the Bush Administration prefers an inductive method that draws ideas from many sources and adapts them to specific conditions. Alternative deductive strategies develop abstract principles and develop them into generic, universal solutions. For instance, the painstakingly crafted individual agreement drawn up for handling war crimes in Sierra Leone, blending local and foreign judicial traditions, is preferable to the one-size-fits-all approach taken in designing the International Criminal Court. The former is designed to solve real problems and get real results on a case-by-case basis. The latter, unfortunately, aims at more rarefied ambitions.

Here suddenly is a ‘transnational issue’ – genocide in Sierra Leone – which needs to have its ‘generic, universal solution,’ – the rules of law – synthesized through an abstract deductive process uniting foreign and local judicial ‘traditions.’ Seems like a lot of hula-hoops to me, but it turns out there is a terribly good reason that determining ‘universal solutions’ on a ‘case by case’ basis is policy of the US Govt:

Fourth, the administration takes a view of international law that emphasizes democratic accountability, plainly linking the authority of international officials to constitutional sources of political authority that are essentially national in character. Other nations contemplate and encourage much broader delegation of sovereign powers, where only the initial delegation need occur through a democratic process, so that international officials can have greater freedom of action. Hence the U.S. government believes that the International Criminal Court, as a permanent yet essentially stateless entity, might grow ever more distant from the democratic sources of legitimacy that are an essential source for its claimed right to administer global justice.

Whatever motives the administration has for denying legitimacy to the ICC, Zelikow is being as obtuse as he can about the justifications. In simple language this means, “If we can’t stack the court with presidentially appointed judges as we like, then blow your ICC – we’ll just set up entire legal structures from scratch, when/if needed (see Bay, Guantanamo).” If you think this doesn’t sound like an actual, you know, legitimate reason to abrogate treaties like Kyoto and undermine international courts, then I’m with you. Zelikow is free to argue that American interests are served by such policies, but he doesn’t really explain how this presents the next President with an “extraordinary” opportunity.

Zelikow:

Success #2: The Bush administration’s post-9/11 determination to confront incipient threats before they exploded on American soil has provoked an intense, but ultimately constructive, global debate.

And silly me thought that was a war going on, and here it’s just been a debate all along. Actually, Zelikow is much too focused on the philosophy of policy to care about a little thing like people getting killed – he’s actually here to defend his crowning glory manifest of neocon aggression – the doctrine of pre-emptive, aggressive (illegal), war. Oooh, but not actually defend it on the merits per se, just to declare that just having the ‘debate’ about whether bombing countries before they may/may not bomb you was a constructive facet of Bush foreign policy. Let’s see how ‘constructive,’ or even honest, this debate even is.

Like almost all contemporary right-wing commentators, he frames the debate in ways that obscure alternate lines of reasoning. His argument expands thus:

The statements on preemption from the National Security Strategy of 2002 can be debated on two sets of premises, one true and one false. The true premise is that the preemption statement sought, deliberately, to catalyze a debate about how to head off new threats before they materialized catastrophically. The key work on this part of the document was done in late 2001 and early 2002. It was dominated by axioms taken from the past — above all the recent, searing past: the lesson taken away from the 9/11 attack about the now-evident consequence of having tolerated the wasp’s nest in Afghanistan. As the 9/11 Commission put it later: “It is hardest to mount a major effort while a problem still seems minor. Once the danger has fully materialized, evident to all, mobilizing action is easier — but it then may be too late.”

Get it? The “true” premise of the pre-emptive argument is it is “hardest to mount a major effort while a problem still seems minor. Once the danger has fully materialized, evident to all, mobilizing action is easier — but it then may be too late.”

I am sure that it’s a total coincidence that the exact same point, using the exact same phrasing is expressed in the article “The Transformation of National Security (by Philip Zelikow), or that the author of the 9/11 Commission report was… (wait for it) Phillip Zelikow, and so disregarding that he cites himself in support of his own argument, lets think about that one for a second.

“It is hardest to mount a major effort while a problem still seems minor.”

Hard to truly parse this exactly. If he means it’s tough to politically justify bombing an entire city over a couple of dozen minor rocket attacks, I’m with him. He could be referring to how difficult it was to get support for going after Saddam Hussain, given what a minor problem he posed, but I bet that isn’t it. My best guess is that he means it’s difficult to marshal resources to battle an enemy before he poses an obvious threat, because, well, people don’t like going to war unless they need too.

Of course, another way to frame this is to define exactly what we are talking about when we say “problem.” There are really at least two distinctly different types of ‘problems’ we could be talking about, and it’s worth exploring both if we are to take Mr Zelikow seriously when he states that this is not a policy crafted specifically to address Iraq. The first problem would be the example of a rogue state, like Saddam’s Iraq or North Korea, that develops a nuclear capacity with the possible motive to use this capacity against non-aggressors. The second problem could be non-state terrorist who develop and intend to use WMD of some sort against a civilian population.

In the first scenario, well we seem to have plenty of evidence that goes against Zelikow’s contention. After all, we have pretty heavy surveillance on both Iran and North Korea, and it is out ability to track their progress that gives us leverage to negotiate inspections. In the case of big-state players like Iran, Iraq or North Korea, it’s not only the ability to create such weapons, but the ability to deliver them to a target that affects our national interests that makes them a grave threat. While Zelikow can try the ol’ “It may be too late” (que scary music and red security alerts) tac, it doesn’t really refute the basic fact that the timelines and infrastructure involved make it very easy for a military power like the US or even international arbitors like the UN to keep tabs on rogue state weapon development (see Blix, Hans). Not to mention that the tenets of MAD are certainly as true to the leaders of 2^nd world countries as they were to the USSR.

So if it’s not at all certain that “too late” will come, and that intervention can be avoided by other means, what about the second scenario, where a terrorist group either develops a weapon or obtains one from a rogue state? In this case, the “hard” in “harest to mount a major effort” has more to do with knowing where the enemy is and how far along with their plan than political considerations like gearing the country up for full-scale war, and at any rate, leaves one with the same problem of cooperative police action against the perpetrators (going after bombers in London) verses illegal cross-border attacks (Pakistan). Since neither of these scenarios is addressed by the doctrine, we can only assume that the Zelikow/Bush plan was meant, if not specifically for Iraq, than Iraq and similar states like Iran and North Korea. And if this is the case, I’d say that overall, the ‘debate’ over pre-emptive war has been anything but constructive, and definitely not something I’d consider an administration success.

I don’t have particularly much to say regarding Zelikow’s second post. He argues that tying humanitarian aid to an increased recognition of notions of human dignity by receiving governments is a positive aspect of Bush’s legacy, but I actually thought holding the Iraqi people hostage to Saddam by way of unaccountable international sanctions was a factor that got us into all of this, so what do I know.

In an effort to mitigate some of the fallout Zelikow must be getting over this obtuse, revisionist crap, he then posted a new blog, “What Bush Got Wrong.” Interestingly, there are only two items on this list (we wouldn’t want to get all crazy), and Zelikow’s reasoning here is almost as good as in his prior posts. Since its really hard to screw-up naming Bush’s faults, lets join in:

Failure #1: Having done so much to place governance front and center in tackling transnational issues, the United States then tended to define its desires with a rhetoric of democratization. Not only did this fail, the character of the attempt was so flawed that the result may even have been counterproductive. Why?

Uh, because other governments don’t like being lectured about civil rights violations and corrupt government by a country that illegally invades other countries, tortures and disappears people – even its own citizens – into gulags, violates settled human rights law, let’s a city fail and politicizes its legal system?

First, no government doctrine is better regarded than its policy exemplar. “Containment” had the Marshall Plan and NATO. Bush’s “democracy agenda” has the occupation of Iraq.

This is actually the most lucid thing I’ve yet read from Mr Zelikow, as well as a brilliant analogy that finally closes the loop on the whole “Bush’s Marshall Plan” thing that evolved as the second (third?) excuse to keep the war going.

…most of the rhetoric of democratization was too narrow in the way it spoke to the issues that plague modern societies. Responding to wrenching, often horrifying struggles, the administration seemed to offer up answers that evoked generic recipes from America’s political cookbook.

I don’t remember “Democracy is messy” as being anywhere in my cookbook. If we’re actually talking about Iraq here, then for a long time rhetoric does seem to have been the predominant response to all the “wrenching, horrifying struggles.” Unmentioned is that Bush caused quite a few of those struggles, too, but we’ll take the point.

Furthermore, the Bush administration’s studied indifference to moral issues in the treatment of enemy captives, especially during its first term, tore its credibility to talk to others about right and wrong.

Ya think?

The net result was that, around the world and in American politics, the administration fatally compromised its ability to shape the discourse about values in governance.

Ya. Ok. But doesn’t this undercut like, two if not all three of the things you said Bush got right in his presidency?

Not to get all transnational on you or anything, but pointing out that an opportunity exists, and then formulating policy response to a vacuum created by the dissolution of an older political order which calls for the restructuring of the moral/political matrix, posting the US as the new center does not get to count as a ’success’ if you then, like,  start wars based on bad-faith arguments, spy on your citizens  and torture people.

And again, if you try and take credit for starting an international debate on the merits of the doctrine of pre-emptive war, don’t you think the net result is null when your name becomes shorthand for a cautionary tale to other world leaders?

On the other hand, perhaps Mr Zelikow is counting on first Georgia’s, and now Hamas’ success at such doctrinal application to prove the validity of his thesis. Opps, did I say Georgia? I meant Russia. Oh, Israel. I meant Israel too.