Two From Kevin Drum

Foreign policy? What foreign policy? I:

The Washington Monthly: THE END OF DEMOCRACY PROMOTION....Marc Lynch, after running down the evidence that the Bush administration has "effectively given up on democracy promotion" in the Arab world, makes the following observation:

On al-Arabiya last week, Hisham Milhem led a discussion on "Bush and democracy in the Arab world."....I was most struck by a remark by Amr Hamzawy. He pointed that the fact that most of the Arab media and political class were now discussing the "retreat" of American commitment to democracy demonstrates that at least at one point they were prepared to entertain the thought that there had been some credibility to that campaign. No longer, Hamzawy argued %u2014 America's turn away from democracy and reform had badly hurt its image and its credibility with this Arab political class....This seemed to be a well-received notion.

But that's really just a single piece of a broader, and even more remarkable turn of events: the Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There's virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left.

As near as I can tell, George Bush has learned that "There's evil in the world and we're going to stand up to it" isn't really adequate as a foreign policy for a superpower but is unable to figure out anything better to replace it with. So he spins his wheels, waiting for 2009. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left spinning with him.

Foreign policy? What foreign policy? II:

The Washington Monthly: THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE.... I've been remiss in not blogging about Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine.... Here's the situation right after 9/11: Al-Qaeda terrorists have just attacked the country; further attacks seem highly likely; our intelligence network is scrambling and nearly blind; we have good reason to believe that Osama bin Laden might be negotiating with Pakistani radicals to obtain a nuclear weapon; and credible reports suggest that al-Qaeda might also be on the road to manufacturing weaponized anthrax. What's needed at that point is firm action, and Suskind suggests that Bush and Cheney did a pretty good job of cracking heads during those scary first months -- especially so considering that those months were actually even scarier than most of us knew at the time.

But then the portrait starts to change. A year after 9/11, Bush and Cheney haven't adjusted their approach even though they know a lot more about the real threat than they did in 2001. Bush is still governing by instinct, Cheney is off in a world of his own, programs put in place during the initial emergency are continuing unabated, and political considerations -- often vicious ones -- are paramount in almost every area. Bush and Cheney are simply unable to adjust to a "long, hard slog," and the war on terror is treading water because there's no genuine, informed leadership from the White House. This arc is what makes reading the book worthwhile. It's not a hit job on Bush and Cheney. It's a portrait of two men....

The second point has to do with the "One Percent Doctrine" itself, the meaning of which is a little different than it seems at first glance. It originates with Dick Cheney, who explained early on that if a terrorist event had even a one percent chance of happening, "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." This is obviously a justification for taking a hawkish approach to terrorism, but Suskind says there's much more to it than that. After all, the Bush administration has obviously not reacted to every one-percent threat as if it were a certainty.... The single most defining characteristic of George Bush's personality is his belief in his own instinct and his corresponding disdain for serious policy analysis. For Bush, the One Percent Doctrine is tailor made. He is contemptuous of policy discussions, and the OPD is the perfect excuse to ignore them.

There's much more to the book, of course, and it's well worth reading, especially if you want to hear the story of the past five years from the point of view of George Tenet and other senior managers of the CIA.... But bewarned: if you take the threat of Islamic jihadism seriously, Suskind will not make you feel any safer. Quite the contrary...