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Realizing Mistakes, US Changes Policy |
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Monday, 12 March 2007CAIRO ÔÇö Reopening diplomatic channels with North Korea, Iran and Syria and engaging heavily in the Middle East peacemaking demonstrate that the Bush administration has finally realized its mistakes and is correcting them, former and current US officials have agreed.
"I think we've been slow in applying those means and seeing the reality of the situation," one former high-level Bush administration official told The Washington Post on Sunday, March 11.
"Ultimately, North Korea and Iran will be solved through diplomatic means," he insisted.
Negotiations with North Korean have progressed so quickly over the past two months following six years of US reluctance to sit at the same table with the communist, nuclear country.
Washington agreed last month to begin talks with North Korea that would lead to the lifting of financial sanctions as part of an agreement on ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons drive.
Officials from both countries met in New York last week to begin talks on normalizing relations.
And after months of trading accusations and warmongering, US officials sat in the same room Saturday, March 10, with Iranian officials at a much-anticipated regional conference on Iraq's sectarian violence.
"The overall mood was businesslike, constructive exchanges, nobody was pounding the table," said US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad.
The US has long refused high-level meetings with Syria and Iran, which it accuses of sponsoring terrorism.
"Bush's shifts are a recognition that the US will not succeed diplomatically unless it is willing to engage in a more serious fashion with the needs of other countries," Nikolas K. Gvosdev, editor of the National Interest, a foreign policy journal, told The Los Angeles Times.
"The cosmetic 'coalition of the willing' we had in Iraq isn't sufficient to get things done," he maintained.
Connecting the Dots
Diplomats believe Washington is finally heeding advice from its close Mideast allies to help restart the stalled peace process.
"There hasn't been any [peace] process since 2000 and the administration has only recently begun to understand that the stakes have gone up," one senior Arab official told the Post.
"They've begun to connect the dots between the different crises in the Middle East," he added.
According to the Post, Rice has been studying previous Middle East peace efforts, especially the effort by former President Bill Clinton just before Bush took office.
A senior European diplomat told The Los Angeles Times that a serious administration effort "would receive so much credit in the Arab world, in Europe and other places, for simply moving the process in the right direction."
Richard Haass, former senior official at Bush's administration, had said that the American era in the Middle East ended owing to the Iraq war and the unwavering support for Israel.
Latin America was also on the new foreign policy's agenda with Bush promising Latinos a new era of economic aid and prosperity.
Battling for the hearts and minds of Latin America, Bush has described his multi-leg regional trip a "goodwill" tour.
Hardliners Gone
"The change at the Pentagon helped," said Zelikow.
Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice until earlier this year, said the departure of hardliners in the administration has made the police shift easier.
"The change at the Pentagon helped," he told the Post.
Zelikow, now a history professor at the University of Virginia, was referring to the departure of hawkish Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary.
Diplomats and officials believe Rumsfeld had frequently intervened in foreign policymaking.
He used to argued that talking with North Korea and Iran would "reward bad behavior."
"But the political difficulties of the administration have strengthened Rice's willingness to join with the president in offering some strong leadership in this area," said Zelikow.
Officials say Rumsfeld's successor, Robert Gates, has eased some barriers to a shift toward greater diplomatic engagement.
He has been a Rice ally in the past and has argued publicly for greater engagement with Iran, they added.
"He's a team player and a realist in a way that clearly enhances what she's trying to do," Dov Zakheim, who was a senior Pentagon official early in the administration, told The Los Angles Times.
Unpopular
"They're bowing to reality and abandoning prior positions," said Dobbins.
The shift could be also attributed to plummeting Republican ratings and growing congressional opposition to Bush's foreign policy, basically in Iraq.
"Or gee, we're at 30 percent [public approval] and we've only got 20 months to go," noted the former high-level Bush administration official.
Weighed down by the unpopular Iraq war, which is about to begin its fifth year, and opposition to his troops surge decision, Bush had an approval rating of 35 percent in early March, according to an AP-IPSOS poll released on Friday, March 9.
James Dobbins, a former diplomat and Bush administration envoy now, agrees that Bush was trying to boost his ratings.
"There's a little more than a year and a half before the [presidential] election, and they recognize that they're in a hole," Dobbins, now at RAND Corp., told the Times.
"They're bowing to reality and abandoning prior positionsÔÇÐ. They're looking for a variety of ways to demonstrate that they're still relevant and still have room for accomplishment."
RAND is a leading nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through objective research on important issues such national security and public policy.
Adamant
Senior administration officials continue to deny that difficulties in Iraq and Bush's plummeting popularity have brought a shift.
"Everybody suddenly announced that this is a policy change," one official told the Post. "On the contrary, it's a sign of success."
"It is not just this sudden rush to engage with Iran," added a senior State Department official.
"Instead, we will selectively look for opportunities to leverage a change in their behavior. That is diplomacy."
Yet as recently as three months ago, Bush insisted that there was no reason to sit at the table with Iran on any subject unless it took the first step of suspending its nuclear program and stopped what he called support for terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere.
"These countries have now got the choice to make. If they want to sit down at the table with the US, it's easy -- just make some decisions that will lead to peace, not to conflict," he had said.
None of Bush's demands has been met.
Iran denies seeking atomic weapons, vowing never to bow to demands for a freeze on uranium enrichment.
"What has changed? That we finally like these people? That we finally have them where we want them?" asked the former high-level Bush administration official.
Islam Online
12 March 2007
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Monday, 12 March 2007
US
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