At the beginning of 2004, President Bush was loudly scolded by an assortment of conservative institutions ranging from the Heritage Foundation to the National Review to Rush Limbaugh's radio show for his profligate domestic spending. With the advent of a heated general election battle against Senator John Kerry, conservatives have begun to curtail their formerly sharp criticisms of the spendthrift Republican candidate. Even staunch conservatives may rationalize supporting Bush as the lesser of two evils, at least in the economic sphere.
But Bush's most significant failure as President, from a conservative standpoint, has been his foreign policy. His approach has been neither traditionally conservative nor neoconservative, and he has failed to combine the two approaches in any meaningful way.
We've recently learned from former Bush counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke that Bush took office with a foreign policy team focused largely on containing communist China and establishing a ballistic missile defense system. But Clarke (and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill) have also revealed that the Bush team was strongly inclined towards an invasion of Iraq long before the Sept. 11 attacks made such an invasion politically feasible.
Administration neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advocated a full-scale invasion of Iraq, followed by the establishment of a secular democratic government in place of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. This new Iraq would act as a catalyst, destabilizing extremist regimes across the Middle East and eventually spreading peace and progress from Iran to the Gaza Strip.
Bush abandoned the traditional conservatism of his campaign and signed on to the neoconservatives' ambitious plan. The Iraq invasion became a neocon policy solution waiting for a problem. After Sept. 11, the problem was what Bush termed the War on Terrorism, and he immediately sought to shove the Iraq invasion through the now open "policy window" of political opportunity.
Bush's repudiation of conservative principles was especially glaring when his prewar claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaida failed to pan out. Scrambling to offer a compelling reason for war in the absence of a military threat from Saddam, Bush and his team at last began to argue for the neocon strategy of democratizing Iraq and ambitiously transforming the Middle East, a politically risky theme almost entirely avoided by the Bush team in the months before the war.
An even heavier emphasis was placed on the human rights benefits to the Iraqi people. Bush's journey from Reaganism to near-Clintonism was immortalized on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, where host John Stewart led a satirical "debate" between candidate Bush (staunchly against nation building and policing international human rights in 2000) and President Bush (explaining that the Iraq war would be fought "for the good of the Iraqi people" in 2003).
The aftermath of the Iraq invasion has left an overextended U.S. military far less able to bring its might to bear on the greater and more immediate threats building in North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere. Add this to the costs imposed by the ongoing occupation of Iraq and the long term costs of low military reenlistment and morale, and one gets an idea of how damaging Bush's pursuit of the neocon dream has been to the traditional Republican concept of a muscular but conservative foreign policy.
Yet, as much as Bush has failed by being inconsistently conservative, he's failed as much or more by being inconsistently neoconservative. Whether or not the Iraq invasion was the best use of military resources in the post-Sept. 11 world, a flourishing democracy in Iraq would indeed have hugely beneficial long-term consequences in the Middle East. Which is why the Bush administration's failure to adequately plan for a post-Saddam Iraq or to devote adequate resources to the immense task of rebuilding and democratizing the devastated country is so troubling. The June 30 deadline set by Bush for the transfer of sovereignty to a provisional government lacking in legitimacy is a deeply irresponsible, transparently political attempt to remove Iraq from the electoral radar screen in time for the November presidential elections. Once again, Bush will succumb to political pressures and commit the sin he has promised not to commit in speech after speech: He will cut and run.
Bush has pursued neither principled conservatism nor vital neoconservatism, but rather a poll-driven, muddled amalgamation of the two. For this, Bush's post-9/11 foreign policy should be recognized by conservatives and hawks of all stripes as an almost total failure.
