Bush Consults the Experts

by emptywheel

This is curious.

Bush just called all the living Secretaries of State and Defense to the White House for a pow wow on what to do in Iraq. You'll see what I mean by curious when you look at the headline:

Bush Listens to Suggestions on Iraq

And the lede:

President Bush promised to "take to heart" suggestions on Iraq he heard Thursday from former secretaries of defense and state who have disagreed with his approach there.

Consider. Bush invited Democrats to this meeting. Maddy Albright, Harold Brown, and William Perry. And Robert McNamara, too, but I suspect that was just a ploy to freak Rummy out, kind of like making him look at the Ghost of Christmas Future. Anyway, Bush doesn't take advice from Democrats.

Now, I'm not the only one that is skeptical Bush is actually going to listen to these raving loonies.

But Bush offered no evidence he plans any significant changes in strategy.

Still, the whole meeting really fascinates me. Either it was intended as a photo op. In which case it didn't work, because the best photo that came out looks like it should be titled "Sleeping Dick and Nauseous Condi."

Or, Bush genuinely wanted to get some advice. I kind of fancy that Bush has just begun to realize how big of a mess he's made over in Mess of Potamia, and he really wants to rethink the entire Great Game.

I kind of wish he had invited the National Security Advisors, too, because I think Zbig--and even Kissinger--might be able to provide some real perspective. And Scowcroft, I'm sure, could have added the gravitas that the sleeping Dick couldn't provide.

Speaking of Scowcroft, I wonder, whether inviting Democrats to the meeting simply provided cover for the people Bush really wanted to get advice from. Daddy's guys. Colin Powell, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger. A pretty elaborate cover, I'll grant you. But things are not what they used to be in Poppy worship.

No matter. From the looks of things neither Dick nor Condi were convinced. Which I presume means we'll just continue our same old strategy of catastrophic success.

Update: Kicked William Cohen out of the Democratic party, back to where he belongs--thanks to Excessive Bastard. I got fooled by that damn bipartisan trap!

Update 2: Maddy gets testy:

His predecessor, Madeleine Albright, was a bit riled after hearing an exceedingly upbeat 40-minute briefing to 13 living former secretaries of state and defense about how well things are going in Iraq. Saying the war in Iraq was "taking up all the energy" of President Bush's foreign policy team, she asked Mr. t Bush whether he had let nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea spin out of control, and Latin America and China policy suffer by benign neglect.

"I can't let this comment stand," Mr. Bush shot back, telling Ms. Albright and the rare assembly of her colleagues, who reached back to the Kennedy White House, that his administration "can do more than one thing at a time."

And yes, it was utterly and totally a photo op:

Those who wanted to impart more wisdom to the current occupants of the White House were sent back across the hall to meet again with Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. But, as several of the participants noted, by that time Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had gone on to other meetings.

When cameras were in the room, though, Mr. Bush was appreciative. "I'm most grateful for the suggestions that have been given," he said. "We take to heard the advice, we appreciate your experience and we appreciate you taking the time out of your day."

Comments

[emptywheel]

Egads. Now that I read this I'm wondering if he was just inviting the rich consultants in to ask them for a loan.

Oh wait. He forgot to invite Kissinger. Never mind.

[emptywheel]

I'm also curious about how they determined seating protocol. Bush at the center, then current and most recent Secretaries, then declining order?

[chris]

IMHO, this looks like Rove is OUT and Hughes is IN.
Hughes is repackaging the little twerp as dynamic, bipartisan listener.
But it is all fluff- no substance. No policy will change.
The neocons are still determined to agitate for WWIII.
This is government by perception.

Somebody is spending a lot of time and effort on Rice's image lately.
She's had lots of carefully choreographed photo-ops- especially hand shaking ones with her reaching out in tortured friendliness. Notice that in this photo the flags are behind Condi- not behind GWB. Hmmm- is Hughes running her in 2008?

I don't know if this is an attempt to woo female voters or if it is the revenge of the jilted Hughes who now wants to prove that "Girls can do it better." Hughes also seems to be dragging Laura Bush out more often lately. Laura and Condi are going to do the Liberian presidential inaguration later this month.

[Mimikatz]

Bush is striving for the figleaf of bipartisanship to cover this pig. I doubt it works. It must really stick in his craw to have to listen to these people. I agree about the Condi makeover. Terrifying thought.

[emptypockets]

George W. Bush, 2000:

I am going to be surrounded by the best that any president has ever brought to Washington, DC.

Maybe that's why he invited the Democrats.

[emptywheel]

chris

Yeah, you might be onto something.

Pity. It'd be nice to believe that, at some point, Bush would realize he needs help.

[emptypockets]

In fact, I would appreciate if anyone can find a succinct quote from Bush saying that he will make sound foreign policy judgments because he will have such great expertise in his cabinet, to contrast with today's event.

The sentiment was strongly in the air in 2000 as I recall. From early 2001, for example:

The Bush campaign also defused concerns about the candidate’s wide swaths of international ignorance with assurances that Bush would surround himself with qualified experts.

And this one from Bush's own lips in 2004 isn't bad:

It's really important for a President to surround himself with smart, capable, strong people. I like being around smart, capable, strong people. I've got a great Cabinet. These are good, decent, experienced Americans who know what they're doing. Colin Powell is one such person. (Applause.) And it's hard work to work in Washington. It's asking a lot for people to serve their country. It's a tough town and the hours are really long, really long.

Can anyone find a better caption for one of these pow-wow photos, in Bush's own words?

[jonnybutter]

wide swaths of international ignorance

Hilarious phrase. Almost Zen.

I got plenty o' nuthin'/'n nuthin's plenty fo me

[SaltinWound]

Kissinger was a Secretary of State. Was he not there?

[Rolfyboy6]

I can't tell from the underlying article if there were closed door meetings as part of this dog-and-pony show. If there were then the policy hustle could be somewhat other than a photo op just to make George look like he's got support and seeks advice.

Is he soliciting support here or is this window dressing. If there was a closed door session, then is he solicting ways of getting out, or for escalation?

Let us all hope this was a dry photo op, anything else might be a bad result. The photos don't look like anything was accomplished. I hope he wasn't seeking support for attacking Syria and/or Iran.

Jeez, everybody at the table knew they were smarter than George.

[John Lopresti]

*NB_____________________________________
A political essay. Skim reading only:
Sure, they vetted his non-lawerly ideas on foreign policy. Maybe you have the benefit of soundtrack from some of the visible mikes in your image at the top of the article. Foreign policy was his nemesis from the outset in his first minority presidency. Kissinger's absence is significant, although he is quite elderly and may have had physical reasons to be in absentia; if that was the only reason for his empty place you might have a text contribution from him later; such a conservative he was, but had a grasp on the middle east problems and how to do the dance to keep the middle east safe. Rice realizes this is different from the Berlin iron curtain debate; these politics embrace more than Sino-Soviet relations. I would expect the side conferences might discuss where this president has taken the executive, judiciary and congress; what a salubrious summit, if, indeed, the SoSs met those ways. Which of them would have guessed the president would nominate Alito, the theorist who designed a way to blue pencil through legislation after Congress passed it. Which of them would have imagined the clandestine services practices would surface in the Department of Justice memo authorizing torture. Which of them would have thought a jocund brand of TX 1st-term minority president rhetoric would have pushed the Arabs into fostering a global terror network.
Which of them would have imagined the proxy wars in Vietnam, to Iran-Iraq, to Afghanistan, would have segued into fostering a global terror network. Which of them would have dreamed that an energetic free enterprise based global economic system would produce a cash-strapped global leading economy, that of the US, tied ever more tightly to its looming trade imbalance with the burgeoning China, even while China makes every effort to curb population, and long before the US even begins to conceptualize whether its own ethos will ever permit forthright control over growth of its own population. Which of these mostly religious former secretaries of State would have dreamed a modern president would need to rely on the orthodoxy of an extremist religious element in his party to obtain near-majority at the polls and in the US Congress, thus bringing religion perilously near the forbidden heat of politics from which it is firewalled by our constitution. What former secretary of state would have anticipated an election such as the one in 2000 would have been resolved by the Supreme Court in a moment of fear that the FL legislature would contravene its own state's vote outcome and appoint partisan electors promised to support Bush. Which of the secretaries of state would have anticipated the Katrina disaster in New Orleans would meet tepid bureaucratic response from president on down to the Federal Emergency Management agency. And who among them would have thought that the president would continue to argue his "unitary executive" authority, Alito's favorite catchphrase, would be tauted as the justification for four years of datamining voicemails of American citizens without even consulting the star chambers court established in 1978 as FISC, the post-Watergate remedy for wiretapping by executive order. Which secretary of state who bargained into many nights in Geneva would have anticipated the attorney general and president would declare their work in support of conventions for handling prisoners would evanesce and be disregarded and the president would withdraw from that treaty without consulting congress. Who would have thought the president would have walked out of the UN's bartering sessions on controlling global warming in Kyoto, in Brazil, and just last month in Montreal. What former secretary of state would have thought he or she could retain his or her job if the price of oil and gasoline and natural gas trebled within five years of their president's being in office.
These are demure, affable, kultured folks, these former secretaries of state. They eschew polarized views such as my rhetorical questions above. Perhaps they worry about the Help-America-Vote-Act's forcing flawed voting machines on the nation to guarantee some kind of dynasty rule by whomever Bush picks next. Times change, but, oh, how change has accelerated. How would they respond to the current bureaucracy around the president if they had to serve as the chief of the State Department in these times. Where would they have looked for documentation that the Iraq war plan was justified based on a secretary of state's conjuring the image of nuclear war prosecuted by a global terror network on US soil. What do these secretaries of state think of the administration's arranging to pay journalists to report on planks in the platform and draft laws for which the administration is lobbying.
I wonder if any of the secretaries of state think the wholesale picture of serving a president has changed much; but I would expect several among those present to be very worried about these matters. Well they should be.

[dws]

Neither picture shows Bush listening to anybody but himself.

[emptywheel]

Duh. I always think of Kissinger as NSA, because that's where the power is. I forgot his moonlighting job/demotion.

And I agree, his absence (he's not mentioned in the article) is remarkable. Remember, he's the smartest man in the world.

[emptywheel]

dws

You think that's why Condi's nauseous and Dick's asleep?

[grytpype]

Look, this was just to make it look like Bush is getting advice from outside of his inner-circle loyalty network.

The criticisms of Bubble Boy have percolated through the outer layers of the bubble and are influencing the PR strategy.

[neurophius]

Have any of the Democratic appointees made independent statements about the pow wow?

[grytpype]

Dear Leader has a blog post on this meeting, click on my name...

[emptywheel]

LOL gryptype

So how do you get 13 former Secretaries to drop what they're doing to participate in a photo op? These people are beyond the thrill of the White House, aren't they? Or did they just get tricked into attending, and that's why Kissinger decided not to show, he could see right through the trickery, the crafty old bugger.

[grytpype]

e.w., I'll bet it took a lot of negotiating. I find it remarkable that none of the participants have said much about the meeting. They probably had to take a vow of silence.

So why did they do it? Maybe because they hoped to influence Bush in a more sane direction. Can't blame them for trying.

[Excessive Bastard]

emptywheel, one little correction: William Cohen is a Republican, not a Dem, although it was Clinton who named Cohen to Sec Defense.

[Ryan]

Excessive Bastard is right. As usual, AP gave Bush way too much credit re. the partisan breakdown of his meeting, calling it "split nearly evenly" when the ratio was in fact 8:5 or 9:4 depending on how you count Cohen. See here.

[marysz]

Condi's nauseous, Dick's asleep and Colin looks like he'd like to slug somebody. Everyone else at the table seems to have bought at least a pencil and paper to make notes. Not Powell. He came empty-handed. He knows what a farce this meeting is--that they're all being set up to take the (future) blame as conditions continue to deteriorate in Iraq. Condi has a leather notebook in front of her, but it's unopened and she shows no signs of either taking notes or sharing its contents with the others. She's a closed book.

I agree with Chris that this meeting has Hughes' fingerprints on it. She's very big on giving the appearance of "listening," even though in this photo it's Bush who is blabbering away.

[semper fubar]

I think this is nothing more than Poppy pulling strings with his old pals (and his new best friend Clinton's pals) and forcing The Idiot Son to suffer through being lectured about how he screwed the pooch on this one.

Poppy's hoping he can still pull the Boy King out of the shitter before he destroys the Bush name completely.

I'll bet W was in one hell of a bad mood after being put through this annoyance. I expect more unexplained facial wounds next time we see him.

[emptywheel]

You know what? I knew one of the Williams was a GOP. But then I forgot which one.

I have an odd time thinking of McNamara as a Dem, too. But unfortunately he is one of ours.

[mab]

I heard they were to have met for an hour. First on the agenda was a "briefing" of how well things are going in Iraq and I think Afghanistan too.

So first he tries to snow the experts. And then there's, what? Maybe half an hour for comments? So 3 minutes per expert? I'm sure there's a lot for the Hick Tator to digest.

[bleh]

I don't know about Hughes-up-Rove-down. Yes, it makes Bushie look like a listener, point to Hughes. But it also spreads the blame, point to Rove.

Pretty no-lose all the way around.

Kissinger was a Sec State and wasn't there. Ditto William Cristopher. And it also included Sec Defs, among whom was not Cap Weinberger.

Flags are behind Condi only because of the angle of the picture. Mostly I think they wanted Bush looking both dynamic and not idiotic, which is probably a pretty small fraction of the available pictures.

I'm betting all they got out of it was a photo op, though. All those guys are too smart to have said anything that would allow Rove/Hughes to have trotted them out in front of the cameras as co-owners or endorsers or whatever. Failure, after all, is an orphan.

[tjschill]

They interviewed his Presnit on the gathering of his roundtable:
".... see I was rasslin with this big ole cedar, on my ranch in T'xus, and it whopped me upside the head real good, and I got to thinking hey, suppose I applied my fave movie flick Shane to real life... well heh heh... it jus came to me...I would be Starret and the cedar would be Iraq, and it just came to me I needed a Shane for my lil' problem... so I got to figgerin' who would be Shane... well I'd need some help chopping those roots out, ya know Iraq is like a big ole root... so I 'vited in some guys who would be like Shane... cept not light in the loafers, heh heh... to tackle the root of the problem... now thats what happened..." And we're making progress... me and all my Shanes, heh heh...

[tjschill]

They interviewed his Presnit on the gathering of his roundtable:
".... see I was rasslin with this big ole cedar, on my ranch in T'xus, and it whopped me upside the head real good, and I got to thinking hey, suppose I applied my fave movie flick Shane to real life... well heh heh... it jus came to me...I would be Starret and the cedar would be Iraq, and it just came to me I needed a Shane for my lil' problem... so I got to figgerin' who would be Shane... well I'd need some help chopping those roots out, ya know Iraq is like a big ole root... so I 'vited in some guys who would be like Shane... cept not light in the loafers, heh heh... to tackle the root of the problem... now thats what happened..." And we're making progress... me and all my Shanes, heh heh...

[Marco Polo]

Oddly, I think this means that they _do_ plan to announce something like a change in direction fairly soon. Maybe fire Rummy, or move Rice into Dick's office, or bring in Rush Limbaugh to replace Rove, or nuke Basra, or whatever. No, of course, this wasn't about "advice" but it was about looking like they listened to advice before going ahead with whatever disaster they have in store for us.

[JohnGabriel]

John Lopresti: "I would expect several among those present to be very worried about these matters."

I expect the several Democrats who got roped into this shindig were all thinking to themselves:

"Fuck. I'm being used for a *photo op*. Never again. Christ Almighty, will he ever shut up?

(Pause)

Hmm. I guess he really is *that* stupid.

(Pause)

I wonder if the NSA is listening in?"

[WebmasterInSeattle]

You missed the best part of the NYT article: the guests only had 5 to 10 minutes to talk with him! ("Mr. Bush allowed 5 to 10 minutes this morning for interchange with the group") A full 40 minutes of the time was used up by Bush giving a pep talk on Iraq.

[John Casper]

I saw Madelaine Albright and James Schlesinger on the Newshour tonite. Schlesinger in particular was dead serious about the situation and neither mentioned the word "Victory." Schlesinger kept talking about "security forces." I am less optimistic now than I was before I heard Albright and Schlesinger that a full scale destabilization of the Middle East can be avoided. Neither of them expressed support for Bush attacking, but neither of them supported an immediate and total withdrawal.

[Redshift]

I heard some of the NewsHour tonight, too. I thought Schlesinger was kind of weird; he seemed almost robotic in his refusal to deviate from his few points, including the one about the security forces. He may not have said "victory" but he kept talking about how "we must succeed" and "we don't have a choice now." He was asked a rather decent question about Bush talking about victory, and how do we define victory, or success, and he pretty much just repeated the same stuff over again.

With all the talk of "we have no choice, we must succeed now," I felt like saying "If you've been driven off a cliff, you can flap your arms and say 'I have no choice, I must fly', but that doesn't mean it's going to happen."

[michael72]

a slight correction: it's Warren Christopher who was the secr. of State under carter. he wasn't there, apparently, nor was kissnger. not that it really matters. and I do wonder why democrats let themselves be sucked into these photo ops.

I do suspect that stephen hadley, who heads the NSC, got a real earful from many if not all of these people about the catastrophic success in Iraq, which is threatening to sink the luxury liner USS America.

[p.lukasiak]

This appears to have been a "photo-op" gone awry.

I'd bet big money that the original plan was to have all these hotshots attend the meeting, then file out and stand behind Bush as he made some relatively innocuous and meaningless statement. The meeting was set up solely for the "message" that would be sent by such a picture --

Democratic and Republican Former Secretaries of State and Defense Stand Behind the President

and I bet that a couple of the participants balked at the planned photo-op (notably Maddy Albright, who seemed pretty testy), so they had to call it off.

[4jkb4ia]

Democratic Secretary of State lineup
Carter--Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie for 1979-80
Clinton--Warren Christopher, Albright

[Valtin]

This was a collection of loyal servants of the miltary-industrial complex. They came at the bidding of one of their own. They had to know it was a phony photo op, or their egos couldn't resist another moment in the spotlight. Only Madeline Albright had any balls to speak an iota of criticism and truth. For that, she was treated with heavy distain by ex-Secretary of Defense and would-be felon, James Schlesinger on Jim Lehrer on Thursday evening. Lehrer referred to her as Secretary Albright, while Schlesinger, who could barely withhold his distain for her, repeatedly referred to his disagreement with "Mrs. Albright". (Schlesinger may have been pissed, too, because Lehrer seemed so deferential to Secty Albright, and interested in pursuing her critical opinions on the Bush Iraq War fiasco. He pointblank asked Schlesinger, (approx. quote) "So you basically think that what Bush says about the war is correct." Schlesinger, somewhat taken aback, "Uh, well, uh, yes, I guess I do. That's right."

[Valtin]

This was a collection of loyal servants of the miltary-industrial complex. They came at the bidding of one of their own. They had to know it was a phony photo op, or their egos couldn't resist another moment in the spotlight. Only Madeline Albright had any balls to speak an iota of criticism and truth. For that, she was treated with heavy distain by ex-Secretary of Defense and would-be felon, James Schlesinger on Jim Lehrer on Thursday evening. Lehrer referred to her as Secretary Albright, while Schlesinger, who could barely withhold his distain for her, repeatedly referred to his disagreement with "Mrs. Albright". (Schlesinger may have been pissed, too, because Lehrer seemed so deferential to Secty Albright, and interested in pursuing her critical opinions on the Bush Iraq War fiasco. He pointblank asked Schlesinger, (approx. quote) "So you basically think that what Bush says about the war is correct." Schlesinger, somewhat taken aback, "Uh, well, uh, yes, I guess I do. That's right."