Neocons to Bush: Saddam or Else?

There is a specter haunting neocon-land, and that is the specter of a Bush wimp-out in the Middle East.

The conservative claque of Washington was aghast. George W. Bush trashed his own Bush Doctrine (we go to war against terrorists, we don't talk to them or anyone that does, and we treat all parties who harbor terrorists as terrorists) by pressing Ariel Sharon to cease his offensive against the so-called 'terrorist infrastructure" in the West Bank and by attempting to restart political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. As William Kristol and Robert Kagan put it in the Weekly Standard, Vice President Cheney's "recent trip [to the Middle East] marked a detour from the Bush Doctrine; the president's recent statements pressuring Israel to stop its campaign against terrorism, a retreat; [Secretary of State Colin Powell's] trip so far risks turning a retreat into a rout."

Bush did not heed the advice of the Kristolites, or the religious right, or prominent Democrats (such as Senators Tom Daschle, Chuck Schumer, Joe Lieberman) -- who all defended Sharon's actions in the West Bank and urged Bush to back these strikes. Instead, Bush dispatched Powell to the region to lean on Sharon and to coax Israelis and Palestinians back to the table.

On his way to Israel, Powell said, "I think we are all in agreement, and the world is in agreement, that the solution will not be produced by terror or a response to terror ... What will get us there are political discussions, and the sooner we can get them the better."

Well, the world may agree, but few, if any, political players in the United States do. From William Bennett to Jerry Falwell to Hillary Clinton, practically every mainstream voice of note here has said that the immediate solution should be supporting Sharon's "response to terror." On the Middle East, Bush -- who usually adopts the role of a unilateral, screw-the-allies cowboy -- is acting as if he is part of the European Union.

"There is lots of concern in our circles," says an aide to a leading Washington hawk who advocates letting Sharon run free. "And criticism. Lots. This is not the Bush we've been cheering." The best the Sharonistas could hope for was that if Powell mission founders, a frustrated Bush would say, "I tried being even-handed" and return to a go-Sharon-go stance.

History informs the disappointment of the hawks. During the first Bush reign, Daddy Bush and James Baker, his secretary of state, were seen by foreign policy conservatives to be less-than-ardent supporters of Israel. Bush the Elder, for instance, tried to force Israel to cut back the settlements in the West Bank. Some conservatives wondered if the Bush/Baker clan's ties to Big Oil caused them to be sympathetic to the Arabs. During the 1992 election, a group of hawkish foreign-policy types -- including Paul Nitze, Samuel Huntington, R. James Woolsey, Martin Peretz, and Morris Amitay -- endorsed Clinton over Bush -- in part, as one columnist noted, because Bush had been "unsympathetic in tone and nuance to Israel." (Clinton later rewarded this bunch by appointing Woolsey to be CIA director.)

W's lineage was much on the mind of foreign policy hawks when he entered the 2000 presidential contest. "For years, there has been a split," explains Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, "between the old Republican establishment of, say, Brent Scowcroft and the first President Bush; and more Reaganite and neoconservative folks like Paul Wolfowitz [the deputy secretary of defense] and Donald Rumsfeld." To boil it down, the establishment sorts are motivated by realpolitik and balance-of-power global politics. The neocon/Reaganites are driven more by ideology and causes. "In the 2000 campaign," Wittmann says, "George W. Bush was presented to the right as being part of the Reaganite school and as someone not sharing his father's foreign policy proclivities. He was sold as not his father's son." Now Wittmann and others worry Bush might be punking out, not sticking with the hang-tough crowd and, instead, following his genes.