THE WANDERER, DECEMBER 18, 2003

JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH

Listening to Dad

     In a surprising move, President Bush has appointed 
his father's secretary of state, James A. Baker III, as 
his personal envoy to restructure Iraq's huge debts. 
"Secretary Baker will report directly to me," Bush 
announced.

     What does this mean? One speculation is that Baker 
will also have the unofficial diplomatic duty of winning 
multilateral support for the troubled U.S. occupation of 
Iraq. With direct access to the president, he won't be 
subordinate to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 
the rest of Bush's hawkish team.

     This suggests that Bush is edging away from the 
neoconservatives who have favored unilateral American 
military action in the Mideast. Baker is an old bete 
noire of the neocons, among whom he has long been 
detested not only for his multilateralism, but more 
specifically for making insistent distinctions between 
American and Israeli interests. They haven't forgotten 
that he urged the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir to 
give up its dream of a "greater Israel" (annexing the 
occupied territories).

     Has the younger Bush been taking advice from his 
father? Has he decided that the neocons' pro-Israel 
agenda has gotten him into a political and diplomatic 
mess from which an older generation of moderate 
Republicans can help extricate him? Or is he merely 
hoping that Baker's savoir-faire in international 
relations will come in handy for the time being?

     This may be my own wishful thinking, but I suspect 
that Bush, like previous pro-Israel presidents, has 
gotten a bit weary of being used, evaded, and defied by 
the Israelis and their Amen Corner in this country.

     At any rate, the hawks' optimistic scenarios for the 
conquest and occupation of Iraq have turned out to be 
seriously misleading, and it's time for U.S. foreign 
policy to return, if not to the "isolationism" of the 
Founding Fathers, at least to adult supervision. 
Sometimes there's no substitute for a practical man who 
knows the ropes.

     I was never an admirer of the first President Bush 
and I was opposed to the 1991 Gulf War, but at least he 
had a clear and limited war aim: driving the Iraqi army 
out of Kuwait. At the time, the neocons criticized him 
harshly for seeking less than a total conquest of Iraq, 
including regime change. In his 1998 memoir, A WORLD 
TRANSFORMED, he answered these critics:

     "Trying to eliminate Saddam ... would have incurred 
incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him 
was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to 
occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... There was no 
viable 'exit strategy' we could see, violating another of 
our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously 
trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the 
post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus 
unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would 
have destroyed the precedent of international response to 
aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the 
invasion route, the United States could conceivably still 
be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

     These words prompt the columnist Paul Craig Roberts 
to comment, "In the thrall of warmongering 
neoconservatives, George Bush the son has managed to 
achieve every dire consequence against which George Bush 
the father warned."

     Amen. But maybe the son is belatedly trying to take 
some of his father's advice. Better belatedly than never.


Angry Voices

     It would be an overstatement to say that President 
Bush has roused a sleeping giant, but at least he has 
annoyed a dozing dwarf. The WASHINGTON POST reports that 
conservative leaders are getting upset, and vociferously 
so, about his spending habits. Federal spending has shot 
up 23.7% since he took office, discretionary spending 
6.5% -- and now he has also won passage of a Medicare 
increase that will soar into the trillions of dollars 
over the next two decades.

     Among the angry voices on the right quoted by the 
POST are the WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, 
Paul Weyrich, Bruce Bartlett (of the National Center for 
Policy Analysis), and Stephen Moore (of the Club for 
Growth). Not to belittle them, but these are 
intellectuals whom Bush probably figures he can afford to 
disregard. Big spending wins elections, and the victors 
are usually long gone when the bills come in. No 
political career has ever foundered on the disapproval of 
economists.

     Nor does the amnesiac voting public hold long 
grudges against the profligate spenders of yesteryear. 
King Louis of France is remembered for his prophetic 
words "Apres moi, le deluge." The motto of democratic 
rulers is "Apres moi -- who cares?"

     It would be another stretcher to say that the 
Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the Party of 
Thrift, but they are at least using, if only in 
desperation (or perhaps for comical effect), a rhetoric 
of fiscal responsibility which the Republicans have 
abandoned. We never expected Ted Kennedy to lose sleep 
over big deficits. Well, politics has always made strange 
bedfellows (and in Massachusetts they can now get 
married).

     The Babe Ruth of big spenders remains Franklin 
Roosevelt. Of course in a literal sense most of his 
records have been broken, but you have to remember that 
he set those records, as it were, in the Dead Ball Era of 
federal spending. It took a lot more energy to waste a 
dollar in those days than it does today. Bush is better 
compared to Lyndon Johnson, who begat Medicare in the 
first place while waging war abroad.

     At one time the Republicans at least put a certain 
inertial pull on the growth of government. Federal 
spending kept mounting under Republican presidents too, 
but you could assume that the Democrats (with perennial 
majorities in both houses of Congress) and their 
established programs were providing the impetus. That is 
no longer true. The Republicans control the White House 
*and* Congress, and behold!

     What's more, the trillions that Medicare will suck 
out of us won't be "discretionary." In a few years, Baby 
Boomers will retire and become eligible for government 
benefits in numbers equivalent to the population of a 
very large country -- Germany, say. That is, roughly 
80 million taxpayers, who have hitherto supported the 
tax-consumers, will move to the other side of the ledger, 
becoming tax-consumers themselves. A dwindling productive 
population, thinned out by contraception and abortion, 
will have to support them.

     But neither party seems daunted by the prospect of 
transferring an entire generation, and a particularly 
numerous one, from the private economy to the welfare 
state. Bush couldn't have chosen a worse time to add 
explosive new entitlements to the welfare state's 
burdens.

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                                        --- Joseph Sobran

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