"He's No Decider, He's a Ditherer


By Daniel Benjamin
Sunday, July 6, 2008; Page B03

Conventional wisdom holds that George W. Bush's foreign policy failed because the president -- who famously called himself "the decider" -- is too, well, decisive. Bush's reckless, impulsive decision to invade Iraq, the argument goes, opened the door for Iran's ascendancy, distracted the United States from pursuing al-Qaeda more effectively in Afghanistan and Pakistan, diverted Western attention from a worsening relationship with Russia and so on.

There's a lot to this assessment. But you can't fully comprehend the Bush record without understanding another Bush problem: a chronic failure to reach decisions or implement those that are made. On one key issue after another, from the Middle East to North Korea to the Department of Homeland Security, Bush has proven himself to be a dawdler, a foot-dragger who can't make fundamental choices or press his team to follow his commands. Call him the non-decider.



This image of Bush the ditherer is obviously hard to reconcile with his long-cultivated image as a strong executive, a self-described "gut player" with unyielding determination and unfailing clarity of purpose. In his scathing memoir "What Happened," former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan writes that the president sought to present himself as "a disciplined leader who focused on making hard decisions and wisely delegating responsibilities, in the manner of an effective corporate CEO." Bush seems to have hoped to emulate the crisp, effective process run by his father and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft; Bush certainly tried to strike a contrast with President Bill Clinton, whose team's deliberations Gen. Colin L. Powell (somewhat unfairly) said resembled "graduate-school bull sessions."

But as many veterans of the Bush administration have made clear, the president's CEO style has more to do with a fanatical punctuality (he once locked Powell, his first-term secretary of state, out of a Cabinet meeting because he was running late, according to McClellan) than true resolve. This picture of an indecisive, ineffectual leader is being painted not by the predictable Bush haters but by his own former aides -- career civil servants and political appointees alike. After reading "War and Decision," the new memoir from the arch-neoconservative Douglas J. Feith, former assistant secretary of defense Bing West quipped in the National Review that the former Pentagon aide's book should have been titled "War and Indecision" -- perhaps a fitting epitaph for the Bush era.

So why has Bush vacillated so often? Here are some of his key management lapses.

Leaving fundamental disagreements to fester. For all his insistence on moral clarity, Bush has failed to bang heads and create clear policies. That has made for an administration persistently riven by sharp differences of view and personal antagonisms.

The outstanding example here is Iran. More than seven years into Bush's tenure, it's still not clear whether he advocates regime change in Tehran or favors a negotiated deal to stop the ayatollahs' suspected nuclear program. The failure to decide has been a guarantee of failure. After all, we can't have it both ways: The Iranians are hardly going to bargain with us to stop developing the ultimate weapon if they think we want to do away with their government.

But this is just what the Bush administration expects them to do. The United States has joined with European countries to jump-start a set of negotiations with Iran, even asWashington is appropriating $75 million for democracy-promotion programs that underwrite opponents of the regime in Tehran -- which the Iranians understandably view as promoting regime change. The confusion goes to the very top: Last month, Bush derided the notion of talking to the Iranian leaders as appeasement, while National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley insisted that the administration was pursuing a "diplomatic strategy" with Iran. Go figure."...


WaPo