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My Man Pervez!How Bush makes foreign policy too personal.

By Walter ShapiroPosted Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 10:36 AM ET

Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush Compared to presidents named Bush, Dale Carnegie was a slacker when it came to cementing instant friendships with a crinkly smile and a firm, manly handshake.

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Bush Sr., of course, entered the Oval Office with the best international Rolodex since Metternich. By contrast, the inexperienced George W. Bush had to create a global buddy list the old-fashioned way: one world leader at a time. Luckily, this President Bush is blessed with an uncanny knack for dividing the world into white hats and black hats. After his first meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin, Bush declared, "I looked the man in the eye ... I was able to get a sense of his soul."

The Bush style is to overpersonalize geopolitical complexity, judging an entire country on the basis of whether its leader is tough, reliable, and can enjoy towel-snapping locker-room banter. For the president, the map of the world boasts individual faces rather than a range of pastel-colored shapes. Mexico is best amigo Vicente Fox. Britain is the ever-ingratiating Tony Blair doing his best Margaret Thatcher imitation. And Israel is personified by Ariel Sharon, a general so relentless that Bush can probably imagine him brandishing a rifle at the Alamo.

Bush is indulgent toward his friends, as Sharon can testify, letting them run their little corners of the world largely free from meddlesome American lectures about prudent conduct. But it is the relationship with Pakistani military leader Pervez Musharraf that best illustrates the limitations and dangers of Bush's habitual cult of personality.

After Sept. 11, any president would have welcomed Pakistan as an indispensable ally. But for Bush, the personal goes hand-in-hand with political necessity. When the two leaders met at the United Nations last November, the American president laid on a charm offensive. Beyond the expected praise for Musharraf as a leader of "courage and vision" in confronting "the evildoers" (remember them?), Bush also revealed that the Pakistani general possesses "an education vision which I find to be enlightened." At a time when the Northern Alliance was poised to capture Kabul, it is gratifying to picture the general and the Texan talking animatedly about phonics and standardized testing.

Musharraf's image, both in the press and in the Situation Room at the White House, is that of a reform-minded military leader standing tall as our only bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism. This heroic portrait meshes perfectly with the Bush team's one-dimensional friend-or-foe worldview. What makes this nuance-free interpretation so persuasive is that no one in the upper reaches of the administration seems to have had much prior firsthand experience with Pakistan. Take Christina Rocca, the near-invisible assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, who won her spurs as a Senate foreign-policy staffer for Sam Brownback, R-Kan., a legislator unlikely to be mistaken for William Fulbright. Rocca, who spent 15 years at the CIA, speaks four languages. Unfortunately, none of them is Urdu, the language of the vernacular Pakistani press.

Now that Musharraf has been anointed as Our Guy, he has virtually unlimited withdrawal rights from the Washington favor bank. (That is, unless Pakistan's request for tariff protection conflicts with the selfish demands of the domestic textile industry as Franklin Foer recently documented in the New Republic.) When Musharraf arrived in Washington for a mid-February state visit, Bush personally rewarded him with a coveted "Get Out of Democracy Free" card. At their joint White House press conference, Bush gushed over the general's "vision of a Pakistan as a progressive, modern, and democratic Islamic society." But when it comes to free elections, Bush believes that friends shouldn't pester friends for details. Empowered by the president's bland indifference about any timetable for a return to democracy, Musharraf confided to Pakistani reporters, while in Washington, that he intends to stay in power for at least three years. Even now that the general has mandated an unconstitutional April 30 plebiscite to ratify his one-man rule, the administration doesn't even bother to ask, "Is that what you mean by a democratic Islamic society?"

With scant curiosity about the internal workings of other nations, Bush is a natural believer in the Great Man theory of history. It is questionable whether the president understands, even now, that Pakistan's leading democratic parties—OK, they're corrupt—are secular and pro-Western rather than Islamist. But in fairness, Bush is only latest in a long line of presidents who have been gulled by promise-America-anything foreign leaders.

Remember that the supposedly sophisticated Bill Clinton invaded Haiti to restore that selfless democrat Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Clinton, like George H.W. Bush before him, was also seduced by corrupt Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his three degrees from Harvard. Even as it was emerging that Salinas was implicated in covering up a political assassination, the Clinton administration was still backing him for president of the World Trade Organization. George Bush Sr. was not blessed with flawless X-ray vision when it came to reading men's souls either. His long-standing personal ties to Manuel Noriega dated back to his days as CIA director, but all through the 1988 presidential campaign, Bush piously insisted that he never, ever suspected that the Panamanian strongman was involved with any drug stronger than Bufferin.

Hubris helps explain why presidents come to believe that they are capable of reading the truth about their international counterparts after as little as a single meeting. In reality, the shrewder judges of character may be the foreign leaders sitting across the table. Roy Jenkins' new biography of Winston Churchill recounts a comment the British prime minister made after the war. "No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt," Churchill said. A similar seduction seems to have taken place when Gen. Musharraf pulled the pashmina over George W. Bush's believing eyes.

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Walter Shapiro has covered the last seven presidential campaigns and just completed a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He can be reached at .

Photograph of Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush by Win McNamee/Reuters.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

Satish Desai said "In politics, what matters is that we achieve our goals. It really does not matter whom we praise and whom we denounce"—a view shared by many posters—and he concluded that this was "a triumph for cowboy diplomacy." Anarchist tx compared U.S attitudes unfavorably with those of others: "We do not truly represent those values we claim to embrace."

Reader Comments From The Fray:

To pursue al-Qaida into its Afghan sanctuary, the U.S. leaned on Pakistan to reverse overnight years of support of the Kabul Taliban regime aimed at securing Pakistan's western border. Musharraf lined up strategically with the U.S., fired dissident generals, cracked down on Islamic radicals, provided intelligence, basing and other indispensable war-fighting capabilities to U.S. forces, and continues to oblige his government's agents to cooperate with the U.S. in tracking and apprehending al-Qaida suspects within Pakistan. On top of all that, he restrained Pakistan's response to Indian saber-rattling over Muslim Kashmiri attacks, no doubt timed to disrupt Musharraf's pro-U.S. actions… In what way does this tell us that Bush has been played the fool by Musharraf? It seems to me to be proof positive of assertive but astute and sensitive handling of the American relationship with Pakistan.

--Publius

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This is not the first time this has happened--during World War II, Stalin was portrayed as kindly, lovable "Uncle Joe," until the moment he stopped serving our purposes; there is probably no evidence whatsoever that Roosevelt had taken a real shine to Stalin, nor that the Cold War was precipitated by a tragic falling-out between the two men. A similar PR campaign is probably taking place today with "Uncle Vlad," as Jiang Zemin frantically tries to get his own invitation to Crawford. One could hardly imagine Bush cozying up to Musharraf prior to Sept. 11th; it seems more plausible that his "friendships" are driven by politics than vice versa. At least, one would hope so.

--Captain Ron Voyager

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George H. W. Bush, Jr., believed that it was America's role in foreign affairs to protect the little people, like Taiwan and South Korea, from the dominance of the Communist juggernaut. Leaving aside the question of America's role in creating the nations he hoped to save, and their role in the American intelligence network, which for years revolved around the KCIA, the Mossad, and the British, Taiwanese, and South African secret services, the elder Bush had at least the courage of his conscience. It was a simple policy, however much it was overtaken by world events, and understandable.

The problem with the younger Bush is not so much that he doesn't have the courage, but that no one knows where the conscience lies, beyond a vague and overarching desire to rid the world of terrorism. When he linked Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an axis of terrorism, a phrase whose axis participle had a clearly defined and self-identified history in the Axis of Powers from the Baltic to the Mediterranean in World War II Europe, jaws dropped all over the world. All of a sudden the main problems were not hidden cells of clandestine terrorists operated by eccentric madmen, but nations with no clear ties to each other and no programs in common cause, and against whom we have no clear policies. The policy shifts as the operations expand, and we run the risk of alienating all our new friends with every new enemy we declare.

Bush the elder stood by his friends, the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, and the Kuwait he booted Iraq out of. Does Bush the younger intend to stand by Afghanistan or merely to dump it as soon as it has served his purpose? What is his purpose? A clear purpose does not mutate with every new-found inspiration.

And glad-handing with every good old boy on the world stage has its limits. Flattery will take you everywhere; it just won't take you far.

--James N. Ackerman

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(4/17)

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