NYT
WILLIAMSBURG, Va.
Robert Gates has been a godsend. After a bombastic defense secretary, we now have a candid one. After ego, we have self-effacement. After domination, we have a man who welcomes discussion.
Gates was decisive during the Walter Reed hospital fiasco. He is honest and trustworthy on Iraq. And on Monday, at the World Forum on the Future of Democracy at the College of William and Mary here, Gates delivered a speech that could define the center ground of American foreign policy.
He ran through the history of the never-ending debate between realists and idealists. He noted that this debate began just after the founding of the Republic. Thomas Jefferson saw the French Revolution as a triumph for liberty. John Adams saw it as reckless radicalism.
Throughout the messy years that followed, Gates explained, we have made deals with tyrants to defeat other tyrants. We’ve championed human rights while doing business with some of the worst violators of human rights.
“It is neither hypocrisy nor cynicism to believe fervently in freedom while adopting different approaches to advancing freedom at different times along the way,” Gates said.
Two themes ran through his speech. First, the tragic ironies of history — the need to compromise with evil in order to do good. And second, patience — the need to wait as democratic reforms slowly develop.
This was not a realist speech — Gates has evolved since he opposed the Helsinki Accords on human rights while serving in the Ford administration. But it was a long way from the soaring rhetoric of George Bush’s second inaugural. From a senior member of the Bush administration, it was remarkable.
After the speech, I asked him about the best ways to spread democracy. “We have a variety of tools. Not all of them are hammers. Ronald Reagan deployed more of the array than many,” he said. Reagan used forceful rhetoric, but also small displays of force — shooting down Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra — to demonstrate American resolve.
“I don’t think you invade Iraq to bring liberty. You do it to eliminate an unstable regime and because sanctions are breaking down and you get liberty as a byproduct,” he continued. I asked him whether invading Iraq was a good idea, knowing what we know now. He looked at me for a bit and said, “I don’t know.”
I asked him if it was a good idea to encourage elections in the Palestinian territories. He didn’t directly address the question, but he noted: “Too often elections are equated with democracy and freedom.”
I asked about how we can promote freedom in Iran while taking care of security threats. He emphasized soft power. We have to remind the Iranian public of where their regime is falling short of its own rhetoric.
Then we spoke about the speech President Bush gave in London in 2003, declaring that the U.S. should no longer settle for stability in the Middle East. “The status quo was unacceptable,” Gates agreed, while noting ruefully that in many countries early free elections led to victories for extremists.
Again and again, he returned to the importance of soft power. The U.S. “made many mistakes after the end of the cold war,” he said. Two of the biggest were shrinking the Agency for International Development and dismantling the U.S. Information Agency.
I asked if the military could perform this sort of nation-building, as it is in Iraq. “That’s very short-term stuff. Hooking up water mains. That’s not job creation or institution-building.”
I asked if it was a mistake to put the Pentagon in charge of postwar reconstruction in Iraq instead of the State Department. He thought for a long time but didn’t say anything.
When Bush first interviewed Gates for the Pentagon job, he told his staff he wanted to make sure Gates was not Scowcroft, meaning, not a hard-core realist. Bush satisfied himself that Gates is not.
But neither is Gates the Bush of the second inaugural. Yet the final thing is that on the key short-term issue — troop levels in Iraq — there is no daylight between the White House and Pentagon. Gates says there were serious disagreements among the generals about troop levels before the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra in February 2006, but not so much now. He initiated various internal reviews of Iraq, and they all came back roughly where Gen. David Petraeus is now.
“How often is a policy announced without a leak from the Pentagon?” he asks, as proof of unanimity.
Over the long term, Gates represents a shift in the foreign policy center of gravity. Over the short term, he is, to use a phrase he borrows from the historian Joseph Ellis, “improvising on the edge of catastrophe.”
David Brooks’s column normally
appears on Fridays.
No comments:
Post a Comment