Another Bush hawk is brought down

Another Bush hawk is brought down
By Edward Luce
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: May 18 2007 22:12 | Last updated: May 18 2007 22:12

Few missed the coincidence of Paul Wolfowitz resigning from the World Bank on the same day Tony Blair was bidding farewell to Washington. Nor did the travails of Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney-general, who faces a vote of no confidence in the Senate next week, and who is closely associated with the alleged US excesses in the “war on terror”, escape parallel.

Seven Republican senators have joined the Democrats in calling for Mr Gonzales to go over the alleged politically motivated firing of eight federal prosecutors late last year. One way or another most of the hardliners who dominated the first Bush administration have fallen by the wayside in the past 20 months – although for largely unrelated reasons.

The first was Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for defence, who attained notoriety for predicting that Iraqis would greet US soldiers with flowers but who will also be remembered “as the stupidest [expletive] guy I ever met”, in the unfortunate words of Tommy Franks, the general in charge of the invasion.

Mr Feith now works in the same Georgetown University building as George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, who in his recent memoirs attempted – with limited success – to refute the charge that he informed the White House Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme was a “slam dunk”.

Then came Scooter Libby, the chief of staff to Dick Cheney, who resigned last year when he was indicted by a grand jury for perjury over the leaking of the name of a serving CIA officer in an attempt to discredit her husband’s finding that Iraq had not been seeking nuclear weapons.

The trial, which led to Mr Libby’s conviction in March and which he is appealing, arguably found its genesis in 10 Downing Street, which supplied the notorious “sixteen words” about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons programme that were included in George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

Next to go was Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, who was abruptly ejected from the Pentagon by Mr Bush last November the day after the Republican party’s heavy defeat in mid-term congressional elections. Mr Rumsfeld will be remembered for many phrases. But his “stuff happens” description of the incipient Iraqi insurgency may linger for a while.

Like Mr Rumsfeld, who had resisted a crescendo of resignation calls, John Bolton appeared to draw energy from the increasingly strident clamour of his detractors. But the Democratic victory in November removed any prospect Mr Bolton would be confirmed as US ambassador to the United Nations, a body from which he did little to conceal his disdain. He resigned in January.

Others, including J.D. Crouch, the neoconservative deputy national security adviser, who announced last month that he would be stepping down, are quitting the Bush administration for uncontroversial reasons, such as fatigue or the desire to earn a decent salary. The roll call of departures includes moderates, such as Meghan O’Sullivan, Mr Crouch’s colleague, and Tim Adams, the number three at the US Treasury.

Nor do the departures of so many hardliners mean the Bush administration has none left. Health permitting, Dick Cheney will stay with Mr Bush until he leaves on 20 January 2009. And few expect Elliot Abrams, Mr Bush’s hawkish Middle East adviser, to move to an investment bank.

Meanwhile, Zalmay Khalilzad, the new US ambassador to the UN, was a former protégé of Mr Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the early 1990s.

But there is little disguising the neoconservative despondency over the fate of Mr Wolfowitz whom friends see as a victim of a European plot in revenge for his role as the “architect” of the Iraq war. In spite of copious documentation, they reject as bogus the World Bank executive board’s reasons for requesting his resignation.

But, arguably the real thread linking Mr Wolfowitz’s ejection to those of his peers is not ideology but managerial incompetence, says a former White House official. Many Republicans also level that charge at Alberto Gonzales, whose recent stonewalling at separate hearings on Capitol Hill outdid anything Mr Wolfowitz or Mr Rumsfeld had to offer in terms of sang-froid.

In one hearing, Mr Gonzales said “I don’t recall” 64 times. On Tuesday Jim Comey, the former acting attorney-general, testified that in 2004 Mr Gonzales visited John Ashcroft, the former attorney-general, on his sick bed in hospital in a fruitless effort to get him to sign an order to permit the continuation of warrantless wiretapping.

Whether Mr Comey’s dramatic revelation proves to be the final nail in the attorney-general’s coffin, Mr Gonzales has very few defenders left in Washington.

“Alberto Gonzales should go, not because he’s an ideologue but because he is incapable of running a department,” said the former official. “That is what ultimately caused Paul Wolfowitz’s downfall.”