Washington watch

June 19, 2003

Why Garner had to go

The appointment of Jerry Bremer as new Viceroy in Iraq (replacing former General Jay Garner) has baffled those who see all Washington in-fighting as part of the endless war between Pentagon and state department. Not this time. State and Pentagon combined to knife Garner, despite his old friendship with Secretary of State Colin Powell. The diplomats complained that Garner seemed to have no Iraqi contacts beyond the Kurds and exiles like Ahmad Chalabi. But the real problem was the Pentagon. Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki steps down in June, and the favourite to replace him is General Tommy Franks, the allied commander in Operation Iraqi Freedom. But Donald Rumsfeld also has his eye on two younger men: Lt Gen John Abizaid, Franks's deputy commander (and Arab speaker), and Lt Gen David McKiernan, the land forces commander. The one thing that all three soldiers could agree on is that they and the US Army are not going to take the blame for the total failure to establish even basic security in Baghdad. So all three recommended that Garner had to be the fall guy. Tumbler predicts that Franks gets the Pentagon job, Abizaid replaces Franks at Central Command and McKiernan goes to Europe to re-deploy US forces.

The outrider

Is Iraq a one-off? Many European Atlanticists fondly hope so. Surely, they say, America now has enough on its hands with the occupation of Iraq. It is just such people that Richard Perle loves to provoke. And at a conference in Venice in early May he was enjoying his favourite sport. The loudest gasp of horror came when he calmly said about Iran. "If Europe really thinks that Khatami is a negotiating partner then our ways will certainly part." He said this, of course, in the full knowledge that the EU has been talking to Khatami about trade issues for years and just this April opened a second round of more controversial political talks on human rights, terrorism and Israel.

The Democratic primary race

Hoping that the flat economy will help one of them topple Bush the Younger, as Bill Clinton felled Bush the Elder after the first Gulf war, the Democratic party hats are piling up in the ring (with the exception of Hillary Clinton, who is waiting for 2008). But there is a shake up in the primary process which could help throw up something unexpected. It used to be a stately march from New Hampshire at the end of January to Super Tuesday in the south in March, next the industrial states of Michigan and Illinois, then New York in April and ending up in California in June. Then they invented the Iowa caucuses, ahead of New Hampshire. But this year everyone wants to get into the act early, forcing the Democrats to warn that any state pre-empting Iowa (19th Jan) and New Hampshire (27th Jan) will lose half their votes at the party's summer convention. But we now have South Carolina, Delaware, Missouri, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma voting on 3rd Feb, Michigan and Washington on 7th Feb, and Maine, Virginia, Wisconsin, Idaho and Utah by the end of the month. Then on 2nd March a dozen states, including the big ones of New York and California, should see the Democratic candidate firmly selected.

That makes early momentum very important, which should benefit the front-runners, Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina and Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri. But the Iowans are interested in former Vermont governor, Howard Dean, the anti-war candidate. And a Vermonter counts as a neighbour in New Hampshire, so the first Democrat nightmare is that Dean gets a flying start and the party ends up reliving the McGovern campaign of 1972, when he lost to Nixon everywhere outside DC and Massachusetts.

The second Democratic nightmare relates to DC, whose Democrat-controlled city council has voted to hold its own primary on 13th January, two weeks before New Hampshire. This is now known among Democrat heavies as the ASEE-DC, or the Al Sharpton Empowerment Event. This race-baiter from New York sees himself as the heir to Jesse Jackson, the man with the hold on the black vote-which in DC is more than enough to win. With the launch pad of a DC primary, Sharpton could go down south and lock up the black vote there. But the Democrats are building a firebreak, otherwise known as the least distinguished one-term senator in the history of Illinois-Carol Mosely Braun, whose one advantage is that she can split the black vote.

Goodbye Garfinkle

We can explain the otherwise baffling decision of owner Conrad Black to sack Adam Garfinkle, the highly regarded editor of the journal The National Interest. Black periodically grumbled about the need for "more economics, more political economy, more commercial appeal for glossy ads." But he always hastened to add that he didn't want to tamper with TNI's prestige and its reputation as the one place where the Bush administration and the intelligentsia could meet and understand each other. The real deed was done by Dmitri Simes, the Russian exile who attached himself to ex-President Richard Nixon and now runs the Nixon Centre think-tank, to which TNI was linked. Simes saw Garfinkle as the obstacle to an increasing takeover by the Nixon Centre, so he had to go.