What has happened in the last week? To use the American vernacular, how did the “good guys” suddenly rise to positions of prominence in this second Bush administration? Has the president changed, has the world changed–or have you and I changed?
Certainly, something has.
First, we have witnessed two official American trips to “Old Europe.” Butter could have melted on the snowy streets, the way Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and then President Bush greeted the Europeans.
What’s more, we now see at the top of both Rice’s and the president’s shops men and women who are consummate professional diplomats, while many of the radicals and/or neocons have noticeably slipped in public positioning. At the State Department, Rice’s top two deputies, economics genius Robert Zoellik and former NATO Ambassador Nicholas Burns, are as professional as they get. But above all, at the White House, Ambassador John D. Negroponte is Bush’s first director of national intelligence, a man of lifelong integrity and meticulous moderation.
I have known Negroponte, a man of quiet intellect and polish, in several incarnations since the mid-1960s.
If you look over his career, you see that he several times resigned over principle. Disagreements with Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council in the early ’70s, when Negroponte believed the deal we were making with the North Vietnamese did not give enough protection to the South Vietnamese, caused him to leave for his “Elbe” in the American Embassy in Ecuador. His moves were always made without fanfare, perhaps in the style of his wealthy Greek-American shipping magnate background.
He has never forgotten his bitter experience, either, as adviser to the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam, saying to friends that he carried those early memories of failure “in my Vietnam DNA.” He disagreed fervently with American generals arrogantly keeping the South Vietnamese in back of the fight. And when he became ambassador to Baghdad last year, he constantly insisted that the Iraqis take the lead, in part out of pragmatism, in part out of a show of respect.
One day in November 2001, just after he had been appointed ambassador to the United Nations, we spoke on the phone for some time about his views. When I looked up my notes, I found them to be revealing of the caliber and spirit of the man.
This was just at the beginning of the Afghan war, and he stressed that the Afghan forces should lead “because Afghans have not exactly taken well in the past to outside forces.” He praised the pragmatic moderates at the UN, such as former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi, who headed the civil government in Afghanistan and realistically insisted that the UN was simply not capable of military missions. Finally, he praised the United Nations, despite its lackings, as “a place where we can work with others and see what they want and what they say.”
Toward the end of the long talk, I asked him about his own philosophy regarding governance, war and peace, and the institutionalization of the world.
“This is a little theoretical,” he began, “but in my own idealized idea of world peace, there is first of all the crucial importance of the politically and economically individual nation-state. The next tier is a healthy regional grouping of those states–Europe today is the model, but there are others around the world. Then lastly, you have the international organizations like the UN, which deal with other problems.”
Reading these answers alone, apart from the context of the ideology of the neocon power-wielders around Bush over the last four years, you might not think Negroponte’s views were so exceptional–if only because they are so reasonable. In fact, that’s the point.
To have someone like this chosen by the president is stunningly at odds with the messages of the radicals and neocons. They believe in bypassing all international organizations, in using American power to strike out in the lead, in the power of the threat of death over the power of the hope of diplomacy.
Many of the neocons, of course, still infest certain parts of the government, and their next military targets are, as they have been from the beginning, Iran and Syria. How Bush will choose here remains uncertain. This week at a news conference in Brussels, Bush said: “This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous.” But then he added, in an obvious contradiction, “Having said that, all options are on the table.”
So how much these “personnel” changes will change policy is as yet impossible to know. But they certainly indicate a profound re-emphasis on pragmatic intelligence, a downgrading of the neocon cult, and a most welcome rise and return of the old professionals.
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E-mail: gigi(underscore)geyer@juno.com
