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CIAO DATE: 02/04
Beward the Soft-Line Ideologues
David Frum and Richard Perle
On The Issues
January 2004
Introduction
Under the leadership of President George W. Bush, two approaches to American foreign and security policy have emerged. One approach is founded on vigorous, decisive action, including a readiness to use military power, against the terrorist enemy. Its exponents are the hard-liners. You know the names: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams, and so on.
The other approach holds that diplomacy and international organizations like the United Nations are the key to defeating terrorism. Supporting this camp of soft-liners are: the professionals at the State Department championed by Secretary Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage; some veterans of the first Bush administration like former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft; and some current and former intelligence and military officials.
There is nothing unusual about divisions of this sort among the president's advisers. And President Bush has made shrewd and discriminating use of the advice he has received. What is unusual is that while the hard-liners have won most policy battles since September 11, the soft-liners have won nearly complete control of the way those battles are reported. Pick up almost any newspaper account of the war on terror—such as the worshipful profile of State Department adviser retired Gen. Anthony Zinni in the Dec. 22 Washington Post—and you'll learn that the hard-liners are "ideologues," bent on democratizing the Middle East through war, heedless of the dangers in their way. The soft-liners are "moderates," "pragmatists," "realists," whose hesitations, fears, and resentments are represented as subtle, nuanced foreign-policy wisdom.
Yet the truth is the opposite. It is the soft-liners who are driven by ideology, who ignore or deny inconvenient facts and advocate unworkable solutions. It is the hard-liners who are the realists, the pragmatists.
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