At Least Do No Harm

July 21, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, International Affairs 

For the last several months and more President Bush has faded ever deeper into the shadows of his own presidency — even forgoing visibility as he appears to have forsworn leadership.

At first, after all the sturm and drang of the Clinton years, it was great to have a President who just did his job and didn’t feel that he had to be on the tube and in our faces 24/7 with the soap opera of his life and his need for approval.

But there can be too much of a good thing. For most of his second administration, Mr. Bush seems to have receded into his certainty that God is his witness and history will be his judge and all the rest is talk.

That has been a problem for a people in wartime looking for leadership, and for his supporters looking for inspiration. But at least the President and his administration were either doing the right things or doing nothing (which is frequently the rightest thing to do).

But the last few months have seen some disturbing slippage. In the new Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes sets out some chapters and verses as regards our dealings with the regimes in Iran and North Korea.

It has been a dispiriting few weeks. Several conservative political appointees have said that they are embarrassed to be working in the Bush administration. One called the new policies “preemptive capitulation.” Another suggested that whatever credit the Bush administration deserved for keeping Americans safe in the seven years after 9/11 would be offset by the blame the administration will have earned for emboldening America’s enemies with its reflexive weakness. And a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice said: “This is stunningly shameful.”

Of course it’s possible that there has been a lot of creative and productive back channel work going on, and that the recent accommodations (removing North Korea from the list of State Sponsors of Terror, and sending Undersecretary Burns to Switzerland without the Iranian government having suspended its enrichment program) are in fact ends in themselves rather than the inexplicable means to unexplained ends.

Perhaps the President, his NSC adviser, and his Secretary of State, are skillfully executing a complex strategy that it’s not yet prudent to disclose. Or perhaps not. And the way things work these days in Bushland, God only knows and only history will reveal.

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