Where Have You Gone, Condi Rice?

By Joe Klein

President Bush visited the marines at Camp Lejeune last week. He also visited the Coast Guard. The week before, he visited the Army; before that, the Navy. The speeches were pretty much the same: Saddam's finished, victory is assured, hurrah for our courageous troops. Cheerleading is a plausible presidential function, I suppose, but an odd thing has happened to Bush as the war has progressed. He has not grown in stature or gravitas, as wartime leaders usually do; he may have diminished. He seems imprisoned in a bleak, hortatory rhetoric of simple sentences and simpler ideas. Freedom good. Tyranny bad. We Tarzan, world Jane.

It may seem petty to quibble over presidential style as the troops storm Baghdad and the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime appears imminent, but this war hasn't been nearly so simple as Bush has pretended--and his simplicity may be doing significant damage to America in the world. The military campaign has been a success, but it is far from clear that victory in Iraq will be a net positive in the larger war on terrorism or even, ultimately, that it will be seen as an American foreign-policy success. Indeed, two of the basic rationales for the war--that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraqi people were eager to be liberated--have proved more complicated on the ground.

Iraq may well be found to have stashes of chemical and biological weapons, perhaps even a nuclear program, but the fact that such weapons haven't been used in the field is not insignificant. It cuts into the American story line: that this was a dangerous, outlaw regime ready to go to any lengths to stay in power. Saddam's minions have gone to some lengths--car bombs, false surrenders, using civilians as shields--but these have become the standard ceremonies of terrorism, the coin of the realm in that part of the world. And if no major stashes are found--a vial here, a warhead there simply won't do--America's credibility will be severely damaged.

As for the Iraqi people, it just isn't clear that they're particularly happy about all this. The Kurds are thrilled; the Shi'ites will not lament Saddam's passing--but there is understandable caution and fear about what comes next. There may well be jubilation when the last of the Baathist thugs has been routed, but those scenes have already been neutered in the Islamic world by the--outrageously distorted--images of American violence and, more problematically, by the plain fact that infidels have made war on an Islamic state. (One imagines that even the Kurds and Shi'ites have understandable qualms about our intentions.) Meanwhile, America's stature has been diminished in a number of ways by the psychological "shock and awe" campaign early on that didn't produce a coup or surrender or mass defections, by the constant quibbling over whether the images of Saddam were real or not, and by the very use of the term coalition to describe a force that was plainly Anglo-American. I suspect that we will long be haunted by the prediction of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak last week: that this war may produce "a hundred [Osama] bin Ladens."

All these complexities argue for subtle, careful postwar diplomacy. That seems unlikely. The Pentagon has control of the post-war plan, which makes some sense in the short term: the U.S. military is the only institution that can restore order to Iraq. But it seems plain that an extended military occupation--and, particularly, an interim government run by a retired American general with interim ministers including James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, and other assorted neoconservative bravos--will further alienate our allies and lead much of the world to suspect that imperialism was our purpose all along.

In the Clinton Administration, and in every other Administration since Eisenhower, this sort of issue was the special province of the President's National Security Adviser. "We found that giving a reconstruction program over to one government department simply didn't work," says James Dobbins, a former NSC staff member who worked on Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo (and on Afghanistan, for the Bush Administration). "The Pentagon never wanted any part of peacekeeping or nation building, and it wouldn't cooperate when State tried to run the reconstruction programs. The orders had to come directly from the White House, from the President's foreign-policy coordinator, the National Security Adviser."

That is not happening now. Condoleezza Rice seems to have disappeared. There are two theories about this. Some say she's been overwhelmed by the more senior Administration titans; others say she has come to favor the hawkish Cheney-Rumsfeld side. But there is a more likely possibility: Rice is simply doing her job, reflecting the style and wishes of the President. And that style, as we have seen over the past weeks, is increasingly simple in a world--and a war--that seems increasingly complex.