Bush's Legacy

By Peter Feaver

Our sister blog, The Cable, reads the tea leaves and has concluded that President Obama has made his decision on Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 and is preparing for a roll-out sometime around the 19th or 20th of November. Senior officials are clearing their schedules, giving heads-up to allies, and generally girding their loins for a major public relations push. But a push for what?

McClatchey reports that, as expected, the president will split the difference between his warring advisors. He will embrace the counterinsurgency approach recommended by General McChrystal and other military advisors. He will reject the narrower approach favored by Vice President Biden and other political advisors. But he will not authorize the upper-bound of military resources McChrystal requested. If the McClatchey report is accurate, the final choice comes close to resembling the option dubbed "McChrystal light," but probably not light enough to avoid a political battle with the anti-war faction at home.

As slow and painful as the review process has been, the hard part is just beginning and the Obama team seems fully aware of this. According to the McClatchey report:

Administration officials also want time to launch a public relations offensive to convince an increasingly skeptical public and a wary Democratic Congress -- which must agree to fund the administration's plan -- that the war, now in its ninth year and inflicting rising casualties, is one of "necessity," as Obama said earlier this year.

"This is not going to be an easy sell, especially with the fight over health care and the (Democratic) party's losses" of the governors' mansions in New Jersey and Virginia last week, said one official.

Persuading the public to support his new strategy will be hard, and the clumsy review process has made it harder.  But it is not impossible.  President Bush faced far more daunting political odds in January 2007 when he opted for the Iraq surge. Some of the lessons the Bush team learned could be of value to the Obama team as they plan their roll-out:

• The media will focus on the numbers, but the President should focus on explaining the strategy and demonstrating his commitment to seeing it through because the numbers are likely to change. President Bush opted for the upper-most bound of the recommended surge of troops -- 5 Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) -- and yet when General Petraeus took over, he actually requested additional troops beyond those. Because Bush never publicly discussed the 5 BCT surge as the "uppermost bound," he could finesse these additional requests without triggering whole new "surge debates" each time. Obama should be careful not to paint this as the "last and final time we will send additional troops." That may be his fervent hope, but he should not handcuff himself to a hope.
• The president will need a convincing answer for why he is authorizing a smaller surge than McChrystal requested. It is the president's call to make, but the experience of the Iraq war is a painful one in this regard. Secretary Rumsfeld still faces scathing criticism for trimming the troop requests of the original invasion -- for appearing to have authorized a bit less than needed rather than a bit more than was required. Obama must persuade the public not to view him as a latter-day Rumsfeld.
• The president and his political appointees, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, should carry the lion's share of the political water in persuading Congress and the American public. But they cannot do it alone, because polls indicate that the public trusts the military far more than the president to "make the major decisions on overall military strategy and the number of troops needed" -- by a whopping 62-25 percent spread. That means that Obama will need General McChrystal to validate publicly Obama's decision, just as General Petraeus validated publicly Bush's surge decision. The Obama team must be ready to call the critics to account if the anti-war faction attempts to smear McChrystal the way they tried to smear Petraeus. As much as possible, the generals should be left to focus on the military fight and kept out of the political fight.
• The president should spend the political capital to preserve bipartisan support for the new strategy. Unfortunately, support for the Iraq surge came down to the slimmest of Republican-only margins (plus Senator Lieberman). Here Obama has a decided advantage and he should exploit it. Republicans are far more committed to a robust approach in Afghanistan than were Democrats in Iraq and Obama could bring them on board. To do so, he should drop the partisan trashing of the previous administration and finally deliver on his campaign promise to seek a genuine partnership with Republicans. On this issue, he will need robust support from the center and the right and he should take the requisite steps to secure it.
• The president will have to accept the unfairness of the media, which will scrutinize his proposal with excruciating rigor while giving a breezy pass to the alternative strategies promoted by his critics. The media never rigorously evaluated the proposals of the Iraq surge critics and so the political debate over the surge was never on a level playing field.  President Obama and his team should expect the same kind of treatment, and indeed may be facing the same chorus of critics. The opponents of the old Iraq surge are girding their loins to fight a new Afghan surge. The Obama team must do more than simply whine about it. Instead, they must take upon themselves responsibility for explaining the myriad problems with off-shore counter-terrorism, McChrystal Super Light, or any of the other alternatives that arm-chair generals promote. By and large, the watchdog media will likely give the critics a free pass.

Of course, the most important lesson is the most obvious one: pick the right strategy. President Bush was able to prevail politically over the surge opponents because, at the end of the day, the surge produced dramatic results on the ground. Had the surge not reversed the trajectory in Iraq, then no amount of domestic political resolve could have saved it.

If President Obama's choice is a similarly wise one, and if he devotes the concentrated effort to explaining his choice to a skeptical Congress and American public, Obama can reverse his Afghan slide. If not, our wartime Commander-in-Chief will face even more daunting decisions down the road.

NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

I received a couple high, hard, fast ones from fellow FP blogger (full disclosure: and old friend) Tom Ricks recently.

What provoked his ire was a blog post of mine which expressed concern about whether it was prudent to stick inflexibly to the withdrawal schedule. I noted that people whose judgment I respected were on both sides of the "is it safe to do this now" issue. I concluded that I hoped it was safe to do so but I also hoped it would not lead to a stampede for the exit that would leave Iraq in a far worse position. My policy conclusion, Tom conceded, was the same as his own.

So what led him to reach deep into his junior-high gym-bag for such rocks as "kool-aidish" and "repeat after me?" Apparently my sin was I referenced an article by Fareed Zakaria that was entitled (by Fareed, not by me) "Victory in Iraq." In my blog post, I did not use the word "victory" to characterize the situation in Iraq. Check that, I deliberately did not use the word victory. Instead, I wrote "the opportunity for a decent outcome in Iraq seems tantalizingly close." But Fareed did use the v-word and I did link to it, albeit with an explicit sense of irony, and I guess that was enough for Tom to revisit the central theme of his work: Bush (and people who worked for Bush) merit history's condemnation because they/we made mistakes in Iraq.

Tom is perhaps the most celebrated advocate of this view and, like all partisans in a fight, he is keen to see that his villains stay in the stockade. Thus, when a former Bush-staffer like me says that we should be careful not to undo the progress we have achieved since 2007 -- or when another former Bush-staffer like John Hannah (the other villain in his piece) says that after all the mistakes the Bush administration made in Iraq it would be a shame to squander recent progress with a hasty exit -- we must be condemned, even though those points are exactly the ones that Ricks himself makes.  

I don't have quite the same animus he has and feel more comfortable in the role of an umpire who just calls them as I see them. Tom and I agree that the Bush administration made mistakes in Iraq and that these mistakes have had tragic costs associated with them. Where we appear to part company is here: I think that the Bush administration also did some things right in Iraq, notably President Bush's surge decision, and that this means that President Bush salvaged some things in Iraq that the next team should seek to preserve. And Tom and I appear to part company on one further matter: I believe the other team is up at bat now, and so it seems proper to attribute to them the consequences of their choices, just as we did with the consequences of the previous team's choices.

I think Tom is persuadable on this last point, because it is the logical conclusion of an insight I read from a trenchant observer of the Iraqi scene writing in 2008: "...the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."

So was Tom chiming 13 when he went after me? The umpire in me says that this was less a 13th chime and more a good-old-fashioned bean ball. I can take a bean ball or two just so long as they don't tap into something deeper still.

By Christian Brose

I asked earlier this week what the Bush administration got right and wrong, and what Obama (and the rest of us) should take away. This discussion will continue I'm sure, but one theme has emerged that's worth commenting on. It's the idea that the Bush administration actually got many of the most important points right, but then through bad execution, partisan hubris, internal sectarian fighting, ethically-dubious policies, or just the merciless intervention of events, what was more or less right in theory failed in practice.

Kori offers a good example on defense transformation:

The administration billed transformation as the way it would cut defense costs: skip a generation of weapons, find ways to substitute technology for personnel-intensive tasks, and promote innovators. If a battalion now has the accurate firepower a brigade used to, we should be able to find savings. But the Administration didn't. 

This is undoubtedly right. Other policies, however, were not just flawed in their implementation; they were flawed by design, and seeing errors only of execution lets the administration off too easy.

Philip sees the focus on democracy as one.

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.

This dovetails with the question Peter raises about the "war of ideas."

While the Bush Administration deserves credit for seeking the struggle against Al Qaeda and the related terrorist network in a holistic sense, and not narrowly in military or in non-military terms, it is a sad fact that there was only modest progress in the war of ideas portion of the struggle. The President and many of his advisors rightly understood the problem and worked hard to advance the effort....

For whatever reason -- and I would argue that the reason was not lack of understanding -- we have left too much on the to-do list in this area for the Obama team. 

Here I think Peter's being a bit too generous. The "war of ideas" was for too long flawed as an idea, not just in the execution of it.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the administration cast the so-called "war on terror" as a "war of ideas," but for a majority of the time thereafter, conceived of it as public diplomacy. The problem with this is that public diplomacy is about explaining America, its values, and its policies to the world -- in short, trying to get people to like us. A worthy and necessary idea that, but when it comes to fighting Al-Qaeda, a misplaced one. Getting people to like us isn't the point. The point is stopping people from wanting to kill us. That's counter-radicalization, and it's not done through jazz concerts in embassies, well-written op-eds, and pressing the flesh and kissing babies on foreign trips. It's done by giving the angry young men who Al-Qaeda preys upon real alternatives to extremism. I'm still not sure there's a strategy to really do that broadly even now.

Broader still is the question of whether the administration was correct to treat the "war on terror" as the new organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. I'd argue that was another concept flawed in its design. In a world of failing states, rising and resurgent great powers, and globalization going off the rails, defining terrorism as the one issue around which our national efforts would revolve doesn't work. Indeed, what we have to accept, and what I think the Bush administration never fully did, is that there is no One Big Thing in our world today, a la the containment of communism, that can organize all of our foreign policy. That's just not the kind of world we live in today.

Where the question of execution flaws versus design flaws really rings true, I think, is in Bush's second term, where real changes were undertaken to the designs of many policies -- changes that, to me, were for the better; but to, say, John Bolton ... well, not so much. Either way, by then it was already mostly too late. America and the world had moved beyond the administration. And the great degree of continuity that will likely exist between Bush and Obama will be mistaken by many people for change, whether you believe in it or not.

And that, with respect to Jacob Weisberg, is for me the real Bush tragedy -- the sense of missed opportunity, of how far too often the administration's own actions set back the cause of the very ideas it correctly championed, and how by the time it rightly shifted course, it was mostly too late.

Iraq, thankfully, is turning around. But Afghanistan is an open question. North Korea has a nuclear weapon. Iran is on the doorstep. The window for a two-state solution is smaller. Liberty is a dirty word to many people, even many liberals. Talk of good governance, as Philip points out, is tainted by prisoner abuse. Free trade has become synonymous with rising inequality and financial calamity. And after one of the most self-proclaimed idealistic presidencies in recent memory, our public discourse is making a fetish out of pragmatism.

This judgment would seem harsh, were it not for the fact that it is based only on the very goals and standards that we set for ourselves.

By Kori Schake

Since the mistakes associated with the Bush adminstration's prosecution of the wars it waged is already well-covered ground, I'd highlight two areas from which many other problems flowed: defense spending and military advice.

First, the administration spent too much by making a mess of transformation.  We unquestionably had the world's best military forces in 2000, yet the adminstration nearly doubled its baselin budget. Even without counting the supplemental costs of the wars, we have a defense budget larger than the next 16 countries combined (14 of whom are U.S. allies), and that doesn't seem like a cost effective strategy, especially when other essential elements of successful national security (building capacity in non-defense agencies) are underfunded.

The administration billed transformation as the way it would cut defense costs: skip a generation of weapons, find ways to substitute technology for personnel-intensive tasks, and promote innovators. If a battalion now has the accurate firepower a brigade used to, we should be able to find savings. But the Administration didn't; they continued previous weapons systems and activities while funding a parallel and ineffectual transformation effort. Despite trumpeting the success of transformation, Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, when Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, couldn't identify a single thing our military no longer needed to do because it had transformed. 

Second, under Secretary Rumsfeld, the Bush administration created a leadership climate in which military officers were punished for giving unwelcome military advice.  Officers that raised concerns about either the substance or the process were ruthlessly marginalized. General Shinseki is an interesting case in point: He wasn't shoved out as Chief of Staff of the Army for his Congressional testimony on the force requirements for Iraq; his retirement had been announced by the Office of the Secretary of Defense six months previously. No, Shinseki was sidelined as early as the summer of 2000 for objecting to the Quadrennial Defense Review process that advocated significant cuts to the Army. 

But Shinseki is just the most visible example. The administration came in believing the military had grown too powerful and needed to be subordinated to civilian masters (witness Rumsfeld eliminating the term "commander-in-chief," or CINC, for U.S. regional combatant commanders), and that warfare had fundamentally changed, so that large armies were now an impediment rather than advantage. They treated uniformed men and women who didn't share their views as either pathetic dinosaurs or threats to civilian control.

Ultimately, you get the military advice you deserve, and the Bush administration created a climate in which they only heard echoes of their own views. Secretary Gates has gone a long way to redressing the problem, but we're still dealing with the consequences of this self-inflicted wound.

By Steve Biegun

As President Obama takes office, his ability to construct a successful foreign policy over the next four years will be a function of the earliest decisions he makes. Beyond the choice of personnel, (which appears thus far to be an orderly process that has drawn in highly talented and accomplished officials at the senior levels), he must also set priorities for his team to engage. Unlike the campaign, where a slogan of "Change" could be seen as an acceptable answer to how things will be done differently, the Obama administration must sort through and prioritize where it will use its capital, influence, and energy to achieve said change.

New administrations inevitably come into office with broad sets of goals.  The Obama administration is no different in this respect, though with the added weight of a serious, domestic and international economic downturn to overcome. In the limited amount of time that the new President will have for foreign affairs -- while grappling with serious economic issues -- it will be essential to prioritize among the many proposals. And, while the most productive way forward is to accept the world as it is on January 20, 2009 and move ahead, inevitably there will be a sorting through of what the previous administration had done.

When the Bush administration took over from the Clinton team in 2001 there was a self-satisfying feeling among many Republicans that the adults were back in charge. Discipline and experience would rule the day, and a more measured and humble policy led by the professionals would steer the ship of state on a true course. The advice of the Clinton team was seen as unnecessary, and divisiveness was the predictable outcome. Unfortunately, for Republicans this harvest was reaped when the realities of the world, the frailties and rivalries of senior officials, and events (credit due to Harold Macmillan) intervened.

There was a widely held view among Democrats that the early days of the Bush administration were in effect an exercise in doing the opposite of whatever the Clinton administration had done, as Peter discusses here. Likewise, there was a hypersensitivity that the Bush administration was quick to blame any early challenges it faced on the shortcomings of the previous administration. While both of these impressions were exaggerated beyond reality, as a result, many Democrats adopted a knee jerk opposition to anything the Bush administration did. Yet, especially in the early years of the Bush administration, Democrats would usually fall into line when their hand was forced, making them appear strident and weak at one and the same time.

There should be little doubt that similar tendencies will be a temptation for the incoming Obama team, and similar sensitivities will be exhibited by Republicans now that the shoe will soon be on the other foot. Pitfalls await both sides.

So, what will change with the next administration? Will U.S. troops be out of Iraq any quicker than the current trajectory? Will the United States lean on Israel to ignore Hamas rocket attacks on civilian centers? Will the United States push a peace process faster or broader than the democratically elected government of Israel would desire? Will Iran and North Korea really succumb to persuasion and end their nuclear ambitions? Will the oceans cease to rise?

Or, perhaps the Obama team, like the Bush team that preceded it, will self-satisfyingly believe that once again it will all be in the execution; that in their turn, the professionals will take over; that the adults will again be in charge; and that a humble and measured approach to the world will in and of itself be all that is necessary to steady the ship of state.

We will see. But beware the intervention of realties, the frailties, the rivalries and events -- above all events.

By Aaron Friedberg

Getting back to the question here, I’d like to begin with one big thing that the Bush administration got right before turning to something that it got wrong.

Whatever one thinks about the way in which it sought to address the problem, I believe that the administration’s post-9/11 assessment of the danger posed by the possible confluence of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction was essentially correct. Terrorists armed with crude nuclear or biological weapons might not be able to physically destroy an advanced industrial democracy like ours, but they could force us to fundamentally alter our way of life. The expansion in governmental powers and the challenges to civil liberties that followed 9/11 would look like child’s play after even a modestly successful WMD attack on an American city.

One of the toughest things about dealing with this threat is that it is extraordinarily difficult to assess its imminence. A recent bipartisan report to Congress concluded chillingly that “unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.”

But who is to say if this is right? And, if we can’t tell how great the danger is, or whether it is rising or falling, how do we know if we are devoting sufficient resources to the problem or whether the policies we are pursuing are making things better rather than worse?

The Bush administration rightly saw this as a large and looming danger, and their desire to forestall it was behind much of what they wound up doing over the last eight years: pressuring North Korea, Iran and (more successfully) Libya to abandon their nuclear weapons programs; trying to induce Pakistan (and Russia) to better secure their nuclear facilities; rolling up the A. Q. Khan network; creating at least the beginnings of a domestic capability for detecting WMD and defending against their use; taking an extremely aggressive approach to gathering intelligence against and attacking terrorist organizations; overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to deny al Qaeda a safe haven from which it could continue its efforts to acquire WMD; and, of course, invading Iraq in hopes of removing what was thought to be the most likely nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Did these measures, individually and collectively, lessen the threat or increase it?  Was whatever incremental increase in safety they produced worth the costs?  One can argue over whether the Bush administration got the prescription right, but I believe that its diagnosis was on the mark.

My biggest concern over the next few years is that we will mistake a temporary reprieve for a permanent cure or perhaps decide that the danger was never that great to begin with and stop taking some admittedly unpleasant medicine.  If that happens we could be in for some very unpleasant surprises.

By Peter Feaver

Another failure of the Bush administration, as promised here: 

Starting out with an ABC (Anything But Clinton) mentality. Like every challenger, candidate Bush drew as sharp a contrast with the incumbent in the 2000 campaign as he could. More so than most victors, however, the contrast mentality carried over to the first couple years of governing, so Bush policies were framed as dramatically different, even when they were not (for instance, the recognition that promoting democracy abroad reflected our national interests and not merely our national values). 

Apparently -- and I say apparently, since I was not inside at the time, so I do not know for sure -- these rhetorical flourishes were compounded with a systematic failure to consult with the previous administration (or at least a perceived systematic failure). Clinton era experts were dropped from bipartisan or non-partisan councils and the informal courtesies that nourish bipartisanship in national security were ignored. 

Part of my explicit mandate when Steve Hadley hired me in 2005 was to undo some of the damage that was done in this area, and I will let others judge whether we did a better job of reaching out across the aisle in the second term. But by then, as one very influential Democrat with a key role in the new Administration told me at the time: "I know what you are trying to do, Peter, and it is too late for that." We missed the chance to have stronger Democratic support for key policies like the continuation of the Clinton policy on rendition. And when some of the changes we did try to implement came a cropper, the schadenfreude from the bench was needlessly exacerbated.

So far, the Obama team followed the Bush playbook during the campaign, wildly exaggerating the degree to which "the last eight years have been a failure" in foreign policy. But they have wisely dropped the playbook, at least during the transition, and seem more sincere in their effort to adopt the best ideas, policies and personnel, whatever the branding.

By Peter Feaver

Continuing with the Bush administration post mortem, what did the administration get wrong?

Undeniably, lots of things, though perhaps not as many things as the blogosphere claims. I would mention two, one because it qualifies something I listed on the credit side in my other blog post on what the Bush Administration got right and the other because of its direct relevance to this blog and the incoming Obama Administration.

Uneven progress in the war of ideas. While the Bush Administration deserves credit for seeking the struggle against Al Qaeda and the related terrorist network in a holistic sense, and not narrowly in military or in non-military terms, it is a sad fact that there was only modest progress in the war of ideas portion of the struggle. The President and many of his advisors rightly understood the problem and worked hard to advance the effort. (At the risk of forgetting to give credit where credit is due, I would mention favorably in dispatches the NSC team of Juan Zarate, Elliot Abrams, Mark Pfeifle, Will Inboden, Michael Doran, Farah Pandith, and my own successor Mary Habeck.)

But we never overcame interagency stove-piping and organizational culture barriers - a legacy of the first Cold War - and so we were not able to do things that should have been done. The war of ideas requires playing offense and defense, on both "our" ideas and the enemy's ideas. Yes, this leads to academic political science's favorite totem: a 2 x 2 table. 

We must do:

Offense on our ideas: promoting a better understanding of American values and what we stand for.  This is the traditional bailiwick of public diplomacy and the State Department's public diplomats did this fairly well.  It also requires explaining U.S. (read: Bush Administration) policy, and this came less naturally to State culture.

Defense on our ideas: defending, rapidly and decisively, against attacks on our policies. Unfortunately, there was never enough effort devoted to this part of the strategy, though it must be admitted that the task was enormous, and it was not what the lead agency, State, does well because it can be construed as "divisive."

Offense on the enemy's ideas: even more divisive, this requires exploiting the schisms within militant Islamism and in particular exploiting the many ways that the terrorists undermined their own cause through their own barbarism. This seemed to be an entirely alien approach to the traditional public diplomacy culture, and it has only been very lately that the Administration, as a whole, has done this in a concerted fashion.

Defense on the enemy's ideas:this means identifying reasonable grievances that the enemy exploits and channeling legitimate aspirations into more constructive directions. This is the core insight behind the "promotion of effective democracies" portion of the freedom agenda. To do it well requires identifying and bolstering moderate Muslim voices. Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration identified this as a priority, but it proved exceptionally difficult to pull off.

For whatever reason - and I would argue that the reason was not lack of understanding - we have left too much on the to-do list in this area for the Obama team.