Our Bipartisan Foreign Policy

I have often written here about what I call our “bipartisan foreign policy” (BFP), and cling to that concept even as we witness this ferocious partisan battle over Iraq. It helps to keep an eye on the prize: look around, over and through, under carpets and behind the bathroom vanity for any change in our Iraq policy since 1991. You won’t find it.

The BFP concept is not my own invention – I took it from a leading Democrat, the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. He was a Democrat known as a defense hawk who always emphasized that U.S. foreign policy could not be held hostage by either political party. “Bipartisan foreign policy” is one of those phrases that stuck in my head.

BFP seemed to adequately describe the raging debate that went on over Vietnam – that war went on through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon before finally being put to bed by Ford. Through it all, until Vietnam was finally bombed into the stone age, the war only grew more intense. Nixon promised to bring it to an end by means of a “secret plan” – it turns out that plan was a castle in the air. The debate raged on, the public became more and more disenchanted with the war, and all of this brought about one change, and one change only: Nixon figured that if he ended the draft, he could de-fang the student resistance. He was right – the Vietnam War went on into April of 1975, sans protests.

Keeping one’s eye on the prize, eliminating the static interference of public debate, it is easy to see now in retrospect that the Vietnam War happened in a vacuum, unaffected by elections and partisan wrangling. That’s our BFP at work.

There’s a simple reason for BFP – foreign policy is considered too serious a matter to be left to the whims of a political constituency that at one moment gives 80% approval to the Son of Bush, at another 25%. The U.S. public is fickle, frequently changes its mind, doesn’t understand nuance and certainly can’t think long term. Consequently our treaties and wars, invasions and bombings are carried out in earnest by one set of planners, and scripted for the public by another. The serious planners might check in now and then with the public debate, but are largely unaffected by it. Now and then the public has to be thrown a bone, usually only rhetorical.

Last night on TV, Bush threw us a bone. Troops are coming home, he says? Look closely – maybe a few, maybe by next July. Probably not. Nothing has changed from summer of 2007 to fall of 2007, but my oh my, look at the rhetorical sniping going on -why, you would think that the Democrats are actually opposed to the Iraq War.

Trust me. Save for their pesky left wing, they’re not.

Because most people don’t understand the nature of BFP, they tend to look at current policies as being the product of the current administration. But our Iraq policy, like our Vietnam policy, was the product of planning going back years, sometimes decades before. I trace our Iraq policy to the end of the Cold War – Iraq sat precariously in the shadow of the Soviet Union. The U.S. was constrained in its dealing with Saddam Hussein, having to placate him while he played the U.S. off the U.S.S.R with great skill. So the U.S. in the 1980’s armed him, sold him weaponry (including chemical and biological), and ignored his ugly crimes. It was a way of keeping him in our camp. And indeed he obliged us. For whatever reason that he invaded Iran in 1981, it served our interests mightily. Who could ask for more?

But Saddam was a troublesome child at best – he harbored illusions, like building unity within the Arab world. The threat of Arab unity had been a sticking point since the days of Gamel Abdul Nasser, the “Hitler of the Nile”. Arabs lived atop a gold mine of oil, and if they actually got their act together and unified behind one leader, the U.S. would be forced to play ball with them. We were stuck with the new Nasser, Saddam, until those fateful years 1989-1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

In 1990 it was a new ball game. There sat Iraq, exposed like a baby’s butt.

It was only a matter of time before the U.S. attacked, waiting for the opportune moment. It came about after the end of the Iran-Iraq war – Saddam was strutting about, thinking himself a conquering hero. He had other disputes to settle, one with Kuwait over an oil field that straddled the border between the two countries. Kuwait, in his view, was stealing oil from Iraq, and he wanted it to end. But being a prudent man, he first went to the U.S. ambassador, April Gilaspie, asking what the position of the U.S. was regarding his proposed invasion.

The U.S. had no position on the matter, he was told. Have at it.

Bait, trap, snap! Suddenly finding illegal invasions abhorrent (the U.S. itself had just invaded Panama for no apparent reason), the U.S. had Hussein cornered. H.W. Bush waxed eloquent about human rights while avoiding a diplomatic solution. He pinned Saddam down and ratcheted up the war machine. In early 1991 the U.S. launched a savage attack on Iraq, dropping massive tonnage on its cities, bridges, schools and farms, water and sewage systems and electrical grids, hospitals and dams. The country was devastated.

But there was a problem – Iraq was known to possess chemical and biological weapons, so a march to Baghdad was ruled out until a later date, after removal of the weapons.

What followed was the swan song of the first Bush Administration – murderous sanctions on food, medicine and supplies, no-fly zones, and routine bombing. It was left to the UN to remove the weaponry. George H.W. Bush left office; William Jefferson Clinton stepped in to his shoes. There was no change in our policy towards Iraq – Clinton carried out the sanctions, killing 500,000 kids in the process, while bombing Iraq for eight years. In the meantime, UN inspection teams scoured the country looking for weapons, removing, as it turns out, all of them.

The Bush policy was carried out in minute detail by Clinton.

Enter Bush II. Sanctions were left in place, bombing continued, weapons teams carried on their work, but were mostly done. The Clinton policy was carried out by Bush. Iraq was finally defenseless. It was time for an invasion.

Underpinning the invasion was what turned out to be a faulty assumption – that by removing the murderous sanctions, the Iraqi people would be grateful to the U.S. and quietly surrender. It wasn’t George W. Bush who misunderestimated here – it went back to his father. Sanctions in 1991 were seen to be a demoralizing weapon – a way of starving the Iraqis into submission. But they didn’t work.

All that has transpired since 2003 could have been predicted in 1991, had we crystal balls. I could not understand the meaning of the sanctions during the Clinton years – such overt punishment of innocent people made no sense to me, and didn’t until 2003, when I finally saw the rationale behind them.

Things have not gone well. Public opinion is not behind the war, but that is of no consequence. War planners will carry on with whatever strategy they think might work. If actual boots on the ground doesn’t work, they might pull back and go into full scale bombing mode – that would be a very dangerous thing for the Iraqi people – they did that in Vietnam, and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Ah, hindsight. The American public is forced to walk through history ass-backwards. The important point is this – military planning is going on right now that does not involve the political parties, and will be carried out now by Bush, and later by his successor, probably Hillary. Just as U.S. foreign policy did not change, Johnson to Nixon, Bush I to Clinton, Clinton to Bush II, things will not change, Bush to Clinton again. Foreign policy is an ongoing process, tweaked and fine tuned all the time, and without regard to the political debate.