http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/10/neo_cons_have_hijacked_us_foreign_policy/THE COUNCIL on Foreign Relations is the epicenter of the American Establishment. Its top three officers are Republicans -- Peter G. Peterson (chair), the former commerce secretary under Nixon, leading investment banker, and opponent of social outlay who must chair half the boards in America; Carla Hills (vice-chair), a corporate power-lawyer who was US trade ambassador for Bush I; and Richard Haass (president), who recently stepped down as one of President Bush's sub-Cabinet appointees at the State Department. The council is best known for its journal, Foreign Affairs, ordinarily a fairly cautious and moderate publication. So it was startling to pick up the September-October issue and read article after article expressing well-documented alarm at the hijacking of American foreign policy. This is not how the council ordinarily speaks.
The must-read piece is "Stumbling into War" by former Assistant Secretary of State James P. Rubin. It documents that Bush's feint to the United Nations was a charade; that even as the administration was going through the motions of diplomacy, war had been already decided upon.
More important, Rubin documents that another path to ousting Saddam Hussein was possible, had the administration been more patient. Other nations, even France, were in fact prepared to use force against Saddam, but insisted on letting the inspections process work first. Rubin demonstrates that every major European nation "would have been prepared to support or at least sanction force against Iraq if it had not fully disarmed by
" The administration repeatedly rebuffed British entreaties to pursue this other course, which would have preserved a much broader coalition and shared responsibility for reconstruction.
So America's lonely quagmire in Iraq was entirely gratuitous. But it's still a well-kept secret that the vast foreign policy mainstream -- Republican and Democratic ex-public officials, former ambassadors, military and intelligence people, academic experts -- consider Bush's whole approach a disaster. In fairness, it isn't really Bush's approach. Foreign policy is not something Bush closely follows. Mainly, he fell in with the wrong crowd. A determined band of neo-conservatives far outside the foreign policy mainstream persuaded the president that invading Iraq would demonstrate American power to tens of millions shocked and awed Arabs. Instead, it has demonstrated the limits of American power (but limitless arrogance), and stimulated a new round of fundamentalism, nationalism, and terrorism.
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