WASHINGTON — When it comes to the Bush administration’s foreign policy, it’s best to heed John Mitchell’s classic advice: Watch what we do, not what we say.
Richard Nixon’s attorney general, one of the architects of Watergate, was being realistic, not cynical, when he gave the press and public that cautionary advice early in the Nixon years. And it is only realistic to point out its applicability to the current administration.
This is a president who, in the space of a few weeks last spring, announced first that the United States would not intervene actively in the Middle East, then told Ariel Sharon to end Israeli occupation of the West Bank "without delay," and then, with the occupation still in place, told the Palestinians to change their government and oust Yasser Arafat, which hasn’t happened either.
But the clearest example is President Bush’s famous description of the adversaries he sees for the United States: "the axis of evil." That axis, he told the world in his last State of the Union address, was made up of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
Eight months later, as no one could have predicted from that speech, the Bush administration is preparing to send a high-level envoy to North Korea to pursue warming relations with that government, while lobbying Congress and the United Nations Security Council to approve going to war with Iraq. Iran has disappeared from the horizon, at least for now.
As several people have pointed out, North Korea has the raw materials for nuclear weapons and possesses missiles that could drop them on Japan, South Korea and U.S. troops protecting those countries. Iraq is suspected of seeking nuclear weapons it could use against its neighbors, but apparently lacks the raw materials now.
But Bush has had Iraq in his sights for months and will not be diverted. It was back on April 28 that Thom Shanker and David Sanger reported in The New York Times that Bush administration officials had shifted the timetable for moving against Saddam Hussein.
"Until recently," they wrote, "the administration had contemplated a possible confrontation with Mr. Hussein this fall, after building a case at the United Nations that the Iraqi leader is unwilling to allow the kind of highly intrusive inspections needed to prove that he has no weapons of mass destruction."
In the same article, they wrote, "senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions."
Ever since the major fighting ended in Afghanistan, the administration has bent its efforts to creating those conditions, and Bush seems determined to do just that — to begin engaging Iraq early next year.
The rationale for that war is as flexible as the president’s ever-changing justifications for his tax cut — sharing the surplus, stimulating the economy or just reducing the price of success. In the summer, Vice President Cheney and others said it was the imminent threat of Iraq acquiring nuclear weapons that required action. But when international agencies and allied intelligence services said they were skeptical that Iraq had the materials for such weapons, even if it had the desire, other explanations were forthcoming.
The president gave the United Nations a laundry list of Iraqi offenses, down to and including its failure to account for prisoners taken during the Gulf War, and indicated that Iraq would have to make amends for all of them to avoid military punishment.
And finally, when Democrats including Al Gore and Edward Kennedy suggested that a war with Iraq might cost us allies and energy for the war against terrorism, the administration discovered and publicized links between Saddam and al Qaeda.
Different versions of that linkage were offered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. But, as Karen DeYoung has reported in The Washington Post, others in the administration said it was a mistake to try to hang the war plans on such a connection. She quoted a senior official as saying, "You look for a consensus on (intelligence) analysis, but it’s very subjective."
What is not is not subjective or shifting is President Bush’s determination to do what he set out to do. He wants Saddam out of there and it is clear he is preparing to send American troops to accomplish that goal.
Watch what he does — not what he says.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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