The centerpiece of President Bush (news - web sites)'s foreign policy
-- the effort to transform Iraq (news - web sites) into a peaceful
democracy -- has been undermined by a deadly insurrection and broadcast
photos of brutality by U.S. prison guards. On the domestic side,
conservatives and former administration officials say the White House
policy apparatus is moribund, with policies driven by political
expediency or ideological pressure rather than by facts and expertise.
Conservatives have become unusually restive. Last Tuesday, columnist
George F. Will sharply criticized the administration's Iraq policy,
writing: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot
be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts."
Two days earlier, Robert Kagan, a neoconservative supporter of the Iraq
war, wrote: "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see
that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in
Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now."
The complaints about Bush's Iraq policy are relatively new, but they
are in some ways similar to long-standing criticism about Bush's
domestic policies. In a book released earlier this year, former Bush
Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill described Bush as "a blind man in a
room full of deaf people" and said policymakers put politics before
sound policy judgments.
Echoing a criticism leveled by former Bush aide John J. DiIulio Jr.,
who famously described "Mayberry Machiavellis" running the White House,
O'Neill said "the biggest difference" between his time in government in
the 1970s and in the Bush administration "is that our group was mostly
about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney], [Bush
communications strategist] Karen [Hughes] and the gang seemed to be
mostly about politics."
