A who's who of doves and hawks
Forget the glib descriptions of the battle between Pentagon hawks and State department doves. The key to understanding the confused process of Bush administration decision-making is to understand that hawks and doves flock and fight all across Washington. Even before the North Koreans came along to spoil the party, there was no single institution of state that could claim an in-house consensus. Here's a bluffer's guide to the state of play.
The Pentagon. Civilians like Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and under-secretary Doug Feith are total hawks. The military men are more dove-like, complaining of overstretched forces, unclear missions and the problems of urban warfare. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard Myers (who flew 600 combat hours in Vietnam) has to contend with an air force that thinks it can win the war on its own, a navy that thinks war is far too important to be left to the air force, a marine corps that wants newer equipment and an army that is dubious about the entire enterprise. The Joint Chiefs' casualty estimate for a full-scale invasion and contested entry into Baghdad is 3,000 dead and 10,000 wounded, most of them army.
State department. Colin Powell is somewhere between a pragmatic hawk and an aggressive dove, depending on whether he is speaking to foreigners or fellow members of the administration. His deputy and old friend, Dick Armitage (a weightlifting fan who boasts of bench-pressing 330lbs six times in a row), is loyal but more hawkish. Under-secretary John Bolton is the Bush loyalist imposed on the department to keep an eye on things. He would like to invade last week, preferably having flattened Paris and Berlin en route.
CIA. Director George Tenet is a Clinton appointee who has been so determined to prove his loyalty to the Bushies that complaints are starting to surface about the political bending of intelligence. But Tenet has been forced into a dovish camp because he spends half his time fighting off the hawkish analyses of the Pentagon's own small intelligence group, run out of Doug Feith's office, who claim the CIA's product is bureaucratic and mushy. Tenet has no time for Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Committee, and helped squash the Rumsfeld-Feith plan to recognise them as a government-in-exile.
The White House. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who plays a mean piano at the Camp David singalongs (Old Man River is a favourite), is the Vicar of Bray. Responsibly diplomatic when she has her daily talk to David Manning, her counterpart in Blair's office (who will soon be our man in Washington), she can talk macho with the boys, including sports. She's a Cleveland Browns fan and keeps a football helmet in her office. Her mentor was Brent Scowcroft (he did the same job for Bush the elder) who taught her to remember that she is a staffer and not a policymaker. For that reason she almost always goes with the majority-witness her neat about-turn last August on working through the UN.
Condy's count goes like this: Powell is a gang of one. Rumsfeld and Tenet are a gang of two. And Dick Cheney makes three. The vice-president is the most hawkish of all and his chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby watches eagle-eyed over Condy's shoulder. But even while Powell and Tony Blair were pressing Bush to go through the UN in August, the key figure was the one guy Bush always listens to: political adviser Karl Rove. When Rove provided polls showing that Americans did not want to go to war alone and liked the idea of a UN mandate, the decision was made.
The Democrats. The squabbling and demoralised backstabbers who are supposed to be the official opposition party are as divided as the Bush administration. Senator Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore's running mate, is a super-hawk. One of his likely challengers for the presidential nomination next year, Florida's Senator Bob Graham, was one of 21 Senate Dems who voted against the Iraq war resolution. And as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Graham knew what he was doing. If the battle of Baghdad goes pear-shaped, this may serve him well.
The Defence Policy Board. Curiously, the most ambitious hawk strategy-to use the liberation of Iraq to unleash democracy across the Arab world-got a crucial early push from two Clinton-era Democrats: ex-CIA director Jim Woolsey, and Ron Asmus, who ran the Nato enlargement shop of Madeleine Albright's State department. Woolsey is a member of the ultra-hawkish and very influential Defence Policy Advisory Board, chaired by the prince of darkness himself, Richard Perle, assistant defence secretary under Reagan. Perle reckons he has more influence now outside the administration that he would at anything but cabinet-level inside it. Other board members include Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich and George Shultz.
What about Taiwan?
Iraq is not the only thing they think about. At a Potomac party given by a well-connected European think-tanker, one National Security Council official was presented with this scenario: just as the US military gets waist-deep in Iraq and knee-deep in Korea, suppose the Chinese choose that moment-when the aircraft carriers are all off-station-to invade Taiwan. Does the National Security Council worry about that? Not more than twice a week, came the reply.
