Muddled Bush Foreign Policy Stirs Confusion

by Jim Lobe

Serious U.S. analysts, too, are scratching their heads at the incoherence in the administration's public statements about its policies or even about reality itself.

Such incoherence has been made especially manifest over the past ten days at nearly opposite ends of the world: the Middle East and Venezuela.

Thus, as Secretary of State Colin Powell, believing that he had been given a mandate to demand an immediate Israeli withdrawal from devastated Palestinian towns and camps ("Enough is enough," said Bush), meandered around the Middle East, senior officials back home, including Bush himself, continued blaming Palestine Authority (PA) chief Yasser Arafat for the violence.

In the middle of the trip, the White House sent the Pentagon's hawk-in-chief, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to address a pro-Israel rally outside the Capitol organized by right-wing Jewish and fundamentalist Christian groups around the theme of "Yasser Arafat Equals Osama bin Laden."

Wolfowitz shared the podium with former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who has said he believes the incumbent, Ariel Sharon, is too soft on the Palestinians.

"When I saw Wolfowitz stand in Washington and say, 'I support Sharon' while we were meeting with Secretary of State Powell, this told me something," noted Saeb Erekat, a top PA negotiator. "We don't have neon saying 'stupid' on our foreheads."

And when Bush greeted Powell back at the White House Thursday, he went out of his way to praise Sharon as a "man of peace" although the Israeli premier had -- for nearly two weeks -- defied Bush's demand that Israel withdraw its troops without delay.

By contrast, UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, who surveyed the devastation of the Jenin Refugee Camp on the same day, concluded that "Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict."

It was left to unnamed "senior officials" to explain to White House reporters that there really was no contradiction between Bush's early demands for an immediate Israeli withdrawal and Bush's praise of the man who had so ostentatiously stiffed him. "Don't nuance it to death," one official told the New York Times.

A similar dynamic emerged after the collapse of a military coup d'etat against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias, which top administration officials had initially greeted with undisguised rapture.

As tensions mounted in the days before the coup, Washington warned publicly that it would reject any interruption of the democratic process that would violate the new Inter-American Democracy Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS).

Once the coup got under way, administration officials not only accepted as fact the coup-makers' self-serving account of what had taken place but broadcast that version and even suggested that Cuban troops might be supporting Chavez without the slightest offer of evidence or proof for any of its assertions.

The administration now says its initial account was based on the best information available at the time, and was absolutely not intended to encourage the coup's success. Yet, in contrast to the OAS Secretary-General who headed a fact-finding mission to Caracas after the coup fell apart, no senior U.S. official has publicly denounced the military's role in the attempted takeover or even referred to what took place as an attempted coup.

At the same time, the administration has insisted not only that it had no role in what took place, but also that it had no prior knowledge that something was afoot. "Let me now say, categorically, the United States did not participate in, inspire, encourage, foment, wink at, not at, close its eyes to, or in any way leave the impression that it would support a coup of any kind in Venezuela," said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Lino Gutierrez this week.

Yet, it appears that somehow the coup-makers, a number of whom met personally with U.S. officials here and in Caracas over the past several months, got a different idea, and that U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro repeatedly advised the self-declared interim president, Pedro Carmona, against his dissolution of the Venezuelan Congress in order, apparently, to maintain an aura of legality around what Washington preferred to call a change of government.

"The signals were obviously mixed at best," said Bill Spencer, director of the non-governmental Washington Office on Latin America. "And you don't send mixed signals to people who are talking about overthrowing a democratically elected government and then embrace them when they do it."

In the Venezuelan case, "mixed signals" clearly translated as a "green light" to the coup makers. "You have to be categorical and clear about it; if you're not, you're opening yourself to all kinds of interpretations," said Spencer, adding he worries the administration's continuing refusal to admit that a coup was attempted in Caracas last week will encourage future coup-plotters.

In the Mideast case, the problem of "mixed signals" was even clearer, making it much easier for Sharon to believe that he had a "green light" for continuing his attacks on Palestinian communities all over the West Bank despite Bush's demands for an immediate withdrawal.

Thus, while Powell was consistent in echoing those demands, other officials, notably Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, made clear their lack of enthusiasm for the mission.

At the same time, Bush, his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice either went silent or said different things at different times about the urgency with which Bush expected Sharon would comply with his wishes.

In both cases, Washington found itself completely isolated from its traditional allies, who criticised the administration not only for incoherence and/or cynicism, but also for insisting on interpretations of reality that were so patently at odds with the real thing.

Latin American leaders acted as one in denouncing Chavez's ouster as a coup the same afternoon that U.S. officials said there was no reason for a fuss. Similarly, Washington's European allies made little secret of their own disgust and distress at the administration's refusal to criticise Sharon even as he flouted Powell and wreaked havoc on the Palestinians.

This pattern is becoming a notable feature of the Bush administration. Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley describes it as a tendency to "construct an alternative reality on some topic, and to regard anyone who objects to it as a sniveling dweeb obsessed with 'nuance'."