A long while ago—1939 to be precise—George Orwell wrote that there are times when the first duty of honest men is to state the obvious. We’ve come a long way since then. Nowadays the first instinct of many otherwise intelligent men is to state the obviously false. Two cases in point have recently emerged from the scribblerati, one having to do with the February 12 Six-Party agreement on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, the other with the February 27 announcement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. government would sit with all of Iraq’s neighbors—including Iran and Syria—at talks proposed by the Iraqi government.

The first false blast was of the double-barreled sort. A collection of former Clintonistas, miscellaneous arms control prelates and, uncharacteristically, Thomas Friedman dubbed the Administration’s Korea deal perhaps too little, but certainly too late.¹1.
Friedman, “A Foreign Policy Built on Do-Overs”, New York Times, February 23, 2007.
The same deal, or a better one, they claimed, could have been had years ago. As Senator Joseph Biden put it in the February 14 New York Times, “North Korea’s nuclear program is more dangerous to us now than it was in 2002, when President Bush rejected virtually the same deal he is now embracing.”

The right barrel held that the deal was too much too soon (if ever), a replay of the despised 1994 Agreed Framework, or worse. Hardliners like the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, insisted that only regime change in North Korea can really solve this problem.²2.
A view also expressed before the deal in “A Conversation with John Bolton”, The American Interest, March-April 2007.
This is a logical position, but one without a practical rejoinder: There is no obvious and available way to change that regime without risking the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Nor do critics from the Right show how the United States, either directly or through China, could have mustered sufficient additional leverage to get a better deal.

The second false blast also came from left and right barrels. The left barrel argued that the Administration’s agreement to “engage” with Iran and Syria proved correct the prematurely spurned wisdom of the Iraq Study Group Report. The right barrel argued that any agreement to sit down with such governments would embolden them, legitimate them, and lead vast numbers of wind-sniffing Middle Eastern locals to discount American power and make deals of last resort with bad guys. As a consequence, they warned, the vulnerable pro-Western Seniora government in Lebanon was now effectively shish-kabob.

This latter worry is not without foundation, and one hopes the Administration considered candidly and carefully the trade-offs before agreeing to parley with Tehran and Damascus. Most of this criticism, however, was mistaken and much of it was overwrought—but it was not without at least some entertainment value. Some media stilletoists dripped with schadenfreude as they juxtaposed Administration “before and after” comments on both policy fronts. They entertained themselves, no doubt, but I was more amused by what they did not say. They did not mention their own before and after statements. After all, the whole point of years of partisan criticism of Administration tactics enshrined contradiction as a principle. Thus when the Administration avoided multilateral diplomacy over Iraq for fear of being constrained by it, critics excoriated it for not being multilateral enough; when it embraced the multilateral Six-Party formula for Korea, they criticized it for not directly and unilaterally engaging North Korea. It’s as if they had fixated on that Ira Gershwin lyric about potatoes and tomatoes, only without the nice music. As to any serious engagement with the Administration over these points of technique, they preferred just to call the whole thing off.

Nor did Administration critics mention that the decision to sit with Iran and Syria appeared to contradict months of fevered conviction, here and abroad, that the Administration had already decided to make war on Iran. Thus the always reliable Guardian in Britain wrote: “Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced.” The Sunday Times of London added its conviction that “up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.” Perhaps the most hysterical piece of all was Craig Unger’s March 2007 Vanity Fair essay, whose breathless tone was matched only by its penchant for error.

A certain entertainment also flowed from colliding criticisms. Thus while the Left ridiculed Secretary Rice’s pre-February 27 contention that negotiating with Iran would amount not to diplomacy but to “extortion”, hawks damned her with the faint praise that she had been right in the first place. No wonder the woman decided to get out of town on a more regular basis; and, after all, the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem is a pretty nice place.

Not that the Administration’s record on North Korea and Iran has been without blemish, but most recent criticisms of that record really do obviously miss the mark. Those who argue that the Korea deal could have been had three years ago misunderstand a key purpose of the Six-Party framework from the U.S. point of view: the nurturing of a fundamentally improved relationship with China, without which no progress on Korea could be expected.

It has long been clear that the only practical way to bring effective, perhaps decisive, non-military pressure to bear on North Korea is through China. Lacking any attractive military options, we can’t solve this problem by ourselves, but neither can we afford to ignore it. That predicament applies more broadly, as well, to Northeast Asia. The benefits of working with China to settle the Korea crisis could therefore expand to encompass the broader regional security environment, affecting the Taiwan issue, Japanese security, territorial disputes in the South China Sea and more besides.

This general approach has been implicit in U.S. policy since the October 2002 crisis over North Korea’s secret uranium enrichment program. It became explicit after Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State, not because Colin Powell saw things differently, but because he lacked sufficient sway within the Administration to get his way over Korea on any consistent basis. One purpose of Rice’s first Secretarial trip to Asia in March 2005 was to nudge China toward a more flexible view of the danger posed by North Korea. A careful reading of her speech in Tokyo would show this even now (but alas, a speech often can communicate no more than its audience is prepared to understand). Another part of the policy activated at the time was to attack North Korea’s “outlaw strategy for economic survival”, as Philip Zelikow, the former State Department Counselor, recently put it in the February 20 Washington Post. (Full disclosure: It’s true that I helped Secretary Rice prepare her March 2005 Tokyo speech, and I sat next to Phil Zelikow as we flew over a wide expanse of ocean. To those convinced that the Administration always lies because it is full of liars—pretty solid as tautologies go—that admission disqualifies this account ex ante. That can’t be helped, so let me just continue…)

This two-part effort took around two years to make any significant progress. One reason for delay was that it was never entirely clear how the North Korean regime would react to U.S. financial and other pressures and to a budding improvement in Sino-U.S. relations. But the main reason was the reluctance of the Chinese government to commit to a new approach toward North Korea. The Chinese claimed fear of chaos on their border from a collapse of the North Korean state. They particularly feared refugee problems of unmanageable scale, and in this they were joined and reinforced by the attitude of the South Korean government. American interlocutors pointed out that the longer the North Korean regime remained in place to devastate the society over which it so cruelly and ineptly lorded, the worse the eventual collapse and chaos would be. The Chinese, though moved to rethink the matter, still held out hope that North Korean reform would eventually follow a Chinese model.

Then came the mother of all diplomatic gifts: the North Korean nuclear test of October 9, 2006. It’s hard for normal people to know what the North Korean regime is thinking, because it is not remotely normal. But it’s not at all hard to figure out what the Chinese government thought about the Dear Leader’s October surprise. Indeed, the Chinese leadership adjusted its calculations and acted accordingly, providing the main impetus for the February 12 deal. To claim that the same deal was available before the North Korean test and consequent Chinese pressure on Pyongyang is like claiming that Christopher Columbus could have discovered America without boats, wind and Abraham Zacuto’s astronomical tables.

It is probably true that the U.S. government could have negotiated the shut-down of the Yongbyon plutonium facility three years ago, but only at a much higher price than the one agreed to in February. A deal is almost always possible, after all, if one is willing to surrender to one’s opposite number at the negotiating table. The Administration chose to wait in hopes of getting China (and the other parties, notably South Korea and Japan) to shoulder more of the burden, and that is what has happened. That’s why it is entirely justifiably for Ambassador Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator (also on the plane to Asia in March 2005), to stress that the agreement is not a bilateral but a multilateral one. This is not just a decorative political locution; it says something substantive about the array of pressures and incentives that made the deal possible, that define the distribution of costs and benefits to all parties, and that presage the next stage of action.

There is yet another reason why the Korea agreement was not possible three years ago. Several influential American hardliners, not least John Bolton, who criticized the deal from the outside (to which Secretary Rice replied, with uncharacteristic bluntness, “I think he’s just wrong”), were inside the Administration at the time. Even had the President decided back then that the time was right to engage directly with the North Koreans, the greater internal pressure against a deal would very likely have produced a less substantive product than we’ve now gotten. So, again, we could not have gotten this deal, and certainly not anything better than this deal, three years ago.

The Korea agreement, of course, is just a first step on a road not yet built, let alone paved. It could be parlayed into something useful, but skeptics are right to be doubtful. The North Korean regime will not cooperate in its own defanging out of the goodness of its heart, which it seems not actually to possess. And we do not know whether or to what extent the Chinese will continue to bring useful pressure to bear in future. Beijing will not push with all its might because they still wish not to collapse the regime. The Chinese seem focused not on “push” but on “pull.” They are trying to flood the place with cell phones and in other ways—low-level bribes, small-scale “joint ventures” with North Korean nabobs—loosen up the so-called hermit kingdom. Perhaps the North Korean regime will ultimately be neutered by slow-motion Chinese-induced reform—if China itself, that is, does not implode first from the yawning gap between its economic dynamism and its political sclerosis. Given the scarcity of attractive options on Korea, U.S. statesmen should be wishing the Chinese well.

If some critics were mistaken over Korea, more seemed close to paranoid over Iran. The key facts are not at issue. In December, the President authorized U.S. military personnel to neutralize Iranian forces inside Iraq bent on harming American soldiers. This decision had a history. Both the U.S. and British governments had warned Iran about its activities in Iraq several times over more than two years, and at several levels. Iran’s response was to escalate those activities. U.S. and British leaders concluded that their Iranian counterparts had taken their forbearance as weakness; hence the change in approach.

Then came the January 23 State of the Union address in which the President accused Iran of supporting terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. This thinly veiled threat was soon followed by the dispatch of a second carrier battle group toward the Persian Gulf, and Admiral William J. Fallon, whose specialty is naval air power, was named to head the U.S. Central Command. Meanwhile, too, intensified private U.S. remonstrations to banks and other financial institutions to squeeze the Iranian economy began to show results. Even journalists not particularly friendly to the Administration, but nonetheless professionally honest by training and temperament, noted the salubrious effect U.S. policy was having in Tehran.³3.
Case in point: David Ignatius, “U.S. Sanctions with Teeth”, Washington Post, February 28, 2007.

To many critics, however, all this presaged not an effort to lubricate Iranian reasonableness but an American attack on Iran—which all claimed would be an unmitigated disaster. Let me count the ways I loathe it, they said in effect, and count and recount them they did. Some even claimed that President Bush was preparing to use nuclear weapons against Iran. One group, calling itself the Velvet Revolution, took out ads to that effect, one on the op-ed page of the March 16 New York Times. The risks of allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, on the other hand, when noted at all, were fobbed away with blithe assurances that the fact of assured destruction always deters nuclear weapons use. In other words, Iran’s attempt to acquire nuclear weapons is not a problem, but our attempt to stop them is.

The dialectic of hysteria and denial over the Administration’s approach to Iran would have been comical, too, had it not been so perverse. Every time a senior Administration official—President Bush, Secretary Gates, Secretary Rice—tried to reassure everyone that there were no intentions of attacking Iran, the more some critics sounded sure there were such intentions. That led to a new round of denials, followed by a new outpouring of even more distended fears. Some critics assumed that the Administration lies either from habit or by its very nature, this following from their mistaken conviction that Administration officials knowingly lied about Iraqi WMD before launching the Iraq war. Some genuinely think, too, that both the President and the Vice-President are not entirely sane, the latter having been recently tossed on the doctor’s couch by Michelle Cottle in the March 17 New Republic. Undoubtedly, something about this whole business is at least a bit deranged, but it’s not necessarily the President.

Such critics could have saved themselves a lot of wasted effort had they taken the simple step of paying more attention to Henry Kissinger. Why? Well, for one thing, even at nearly 84 years of age he is still pretty sharp, but for another he is still influential where it matters most: privately. Not that this has always been such a good thing in the context of the Iraq war, but Kissinger did spell out several months ago a rationale for diplomacy that tracks with uncanny fidelity the Administration’s shift of approach toward Iran.

On January 21 Kissinger described the President’s “surge” strategy for Iraq as “the first step toward a new grand strategy relating power to diplomacy for the entire region.” Kissinger called again, as he had several times before, for the formation of a regional contact group to manage U.S. Iraq-related diplomacy.⁴4.
Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, “Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq”, Washington Post, January 25, 2005, and Kissinger, “How to Exit Iraq”, Washington Post, December 18, 2005.
“A balance of risks and opportunities needs to be created”, wrote Kissinger on January 21, “so that Iran is obliged to choose between a significant but not dominant role or riding the crest of Shiite fundamentalism.” Put a little differently, he saw that unless perceptions of U.S. weakness in the region were redressed, the U.S. government could not acquire in a negotiation with Iran anything worth having with respect to Iraq, if not also other issues. Kissinger dismissed as wishful thinking the idea, expressed in the ISG Report, that Iran would wish to help the United States in Iraq for fear of instability there, even absent any mustering of U.S. leverage against it. He stressed a more general lesson, as well: “[I]t is not possible to jettison the military instrument and rely, as some argue, on purely political means. A freestanding diplomacy is an ancient American illusion. . . . The attempt to separate diplomacy and power results in power lacking direction and diplomacy being deprived of incentives.”⁵5.
“Stability in Iraq and Beyond”, Washington Post, January 21, 2007.
In other words, power and diplomacy are complementary tools of statecraft, not mutually exclusive ones.

Then, barely 24 hours after Secretary Rice announced the U.S. intention to sit with Iran and Syria, Kissinger published a full-throated defense of Administration thinking. He deftly if still indirectly refuted those who read the Administration’s decision as a surrender to the Iraq Study Group: “The administration’s critics insist on an immediate resort to diplomacy without always defining what they mean by it”, wrote Kissinger. Then, summing up the ISG’s logic about as well as possible without actually naming it, he continued:

According to this view, diplomacy is fueled by demonstrating good will and must be fostered by a constant readiness to break deadlocks with new proposals. Military operations should be reduced or stopped as the price for entering into the diplomacy phase. . . . The contemporary debate over the Iraq war has ascribed an almost mythic quality to the desirability of bilateral negotiations with Syria and Iran as the key to an Iraqi settlement. Willingness to negotiate will not be sufficient, however, unless the principles and objectives of both sides can be brought into the range of tolerable compromise.

For that to happen, Kissinger again reminds his readers, “A successful diplomacy requires that American power remain relevant and available in support of a coherent regional policy.”⁶6.
“What An International Conference Can Do”, Washington Post, March 1, 2007.

It may be true that George W. Bush has already decided to start a war with Iran sometime over the next 18 months. But Occam’s Razor suggests a far more parsimonious explanation for recent events. Most likely, the President’s “surge” and related tactical adjustments are designed to redress the regional optic of American weakness in order precisely to enter negotiations from a better position. The Administration appears to have determined sometime back in December on the need to negotiate an “outer shell” in the region to protect an “inner shell” of a prospective Iraqi communal compromise. This dual project presages a major drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq—certainly if these two shells can be constructed, and perhaps even if they cannot.

If this assessment is correct, then it is fair to characterize current Administration motives as seeking to avoid defeat in Iraq. To do that Administration principals must lower the bar of expectations raised much too high four years ago, and raise the investment necessary to achieve its more limited goals. If the Administration cannot in due course fob off the reality of defeat, it can perhaps still do something about appearances. It can, with some justification, argue that the preeminent screw-up was not made-in-the-USA, but made in Iraq mainly by Iraqis. This may seem smarmy given how accident prone U.S. policy has actually been (some have dubbed the notion “blame and run”). Even so, it is smarmy in service to a worthy cause: upholding the reputation of American power. This is not the sort of thinking, in any event, that characterizes the state of mind of an Administration about to start a major war against Iran.

My criticisms of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy are no secret, and several have been expressed in these pages.⁷7.
“The Wrong Stuff” (Autumn 2005) and “Alone in a Crowd” (Spring 2005). The main item is this: However dangerous Sadaamite Iraq may have been or may have become, the United States should never have undertaken a high-profile, protracted and essentially unilateral occupation of an Arab capital for any reason, particularly not for a reason as delusional as establishing at gun-point a putative model of liberal democracy for the Arab world.

As mistakes go, this one’s a corker. But it has been followed, regrettably, by others. The Administration failed to establish effective unity of command from the start. It has at times pushed operational authority for the occupation down too far, contributing to serial bad judgment in dealing with insurgency and now civil war. It failed to anticipate the wider regional implications of U.S. decisions, not least concerning Iran and sectarian rivalries across the Muslim world. And all along the Administration’s dominant tone has privileged parochial U.S. interests, generated fear and exaggerated dangers to the detriment of U.S. global interests.

All that said, some domestic and certainly many foreign observers loathe George W. Bush and his Administration so much that the heat of their own hatred has melted the last shards of their rationality. It is no surprise that those who have never grasped the complementarity of power and diplomacy in the first place would misunderstand recent Administration tactics with regard to North Korea and Iran. It is not surprising that some observers should occasionally confuse interagency bickering for Presidential irresolution. The same data points some see as defining indecision can as reasonably be read as defining patience, the President preferring to let Six-Party diplomacy mature before committing to sit with North Korea, and EU3/UN modalities to play out before committing to sit with Iran. Time, archives and memoirs, presumably, will eventually sift the truth.

What is disconcerting, however, is the widespread assumption—as several reactions to the Scooter Libby verdict attest—that Bush Administration principals are generically different kinds of human beings from others: wholly malicious and deliberately mendacious. None of these critics thinks that he or she would act in such a way were they entrusted with public responsibilities, so on what possible rational basis—beyond presumptions of insanity—can such claims about others be justified?

Irrational hyperbole is in turn driving the destructive impulse to criminalize political judgment itself, an impulse propelled forward by a plague of lawyers who crave influence far more than they love the law. Republicans have been guilty of this as well as Democrats, and the Bush Administration’s dismissal in practice of bipartisanship in foreign policy certainly hasn’t helped. Still, the fact remains that while our current foreign and national security challenges are indeed serious ones, none is so serious as the erosion of rationality and respect in our domestic affairs. America is a great enough country to recover from its mistakes and misfortunes abroad. But, to state the obvious in 2007 as Orwell did in 1939, no country is great enough to recover from a collapse of character and civility at home. ?

1.
Friedman, “A Foreign Policy Built on Do-Overs”, New York Times, February 23, 2007.
2.
A view also expressed before the deal in “A Conversation with John Bolton”, The American Interest, March-April 2007.
3.
Case in point: David Ignatius, “U.S. Sanctions with Teeth”, Washington Post, February 28, 2007.
4.
Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, “Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq”, Washington Post, January 25, 2005, and Kissinger, “How to Exit Iraq”, Washington Post, December 18, 2005.
5.
“Stability in Iraq and Beyond”, Washington Post, January 21, 2007.
6.
“What An International Conference Can Do”, Washington Post, March 1, 2007.
7.
“The Wrong Stuff” (Autumn 2005) and “Alone in a Crowd” (Spring 2005).