The Democracy Agenda

Ross thinks I've been too hard on Bush's democracy agenda:

Meanwhile, both Matt and Hamid make the point that when Bush really wanted a policy course pursued - namely, the invasion of Iraq - the opposition from the professionals in the State Department and elsewhere was steamrolled. Which is true enough, and I don't think there's any question that invading Iraq was a higher priority for Bush than the larger reorientation of American diplomacy in a more pro-democracy direction. But I think the contrast between how Iraq played out and what's happened to the freedom agenda doesn't just speak to Bush's priorities; it also speaks to the unfortunate truth that it's become easier for an American chief executive to invade a foreign country than to control the more banal, day-to-day workings of his own diplomatic corps.

I really don't think that's right. To understand the difference here, let's take a look at this slice of Peter Baker's original article, something Ross labeled a "depressing bureaucratic anecdote[]":

Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.

"It's our policy," the official said.

"What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked.

"Read the president's speech," the official said.

"Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."

The bureaucrat is sounding silly and, well, bureaucratic here, but in a fundamental sense he's exactly right. The president gave a speech about the democracy agenda, but he never put a democracy agenda together. In all policy areas, but especially in foreign policy and diplomacy, saying things isn't the same as changing policies. Like if you want to cut taxes, you can't just say "let's cut taxes" you need to submit budget documents, work with members of congress, do some calculations, etc. Even an operation as slipshod as Bush's domestic policy team manages to get this much done.

On democracy promotion nobody bothered to say which policies, exactly, were changing. Presumably Bush didn't mean that the CIA should start arming Saudi opposition groups. But what did he mean? That Egypt should have its aid cut if it didn't hold free and fair elections? Well, he doesn't seem to have proposed any such legislation. These are complicated issues and I sometimes think people have unfairly criticized Bush for not "doing something" about autocracy in Pakistan but when it's not clear what should be done, but that's just the point it's not clear what should be done and if the president wanted a democracy policy he needed to, yes, have some meetings and figure out what that policy was.

Comments

"It's our policy," the official said. . . "Read the president's speech."

"Bring it on": It's more than a bit of rhetoric--it's policy.

Posted by RSA | August 22, 2007 4:23 PM

It's like when the Prez declared the America was now in the War On An Abstract Noun.

Saying something pretty doesn't mean you have any sensible policy or roadmap to get there. There were plans to invade Iraq, plans to cut taxes mostly on rich folks, plans to limit s-CHIP, and (failed) plans to privatize Social Security. There were even plans, if they can be called that, to act like a dick with regards to North Korea and thereby encourage them to make nukes.

By contrast, "democracy promotion" was all slogan and no agenda. The bureaucracy didn't hinder the demcracy promotion agenda, because it didn't exist to be obstructed.

Posted by Warren Terra | August 22, 2007 4:30 PM

From the article:
But it was all ad hoc. "There was no blueprint here," said Joshua Muravchik, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who serves on Rice's democracy advisory panel. "No one knew how to do this. People at the State Department felt they were groping in the dark."

At the White House, aides that summer tried to create a formula. An interagency group divided nations into three categories: newly democratic with weak institutions, such as Ukraine and Georgia; authoritarian with reformist tendencies, such as Pakistan; and reform-resistant, such as Belarus and Uzbekistan. Altogether, they identified 49 countries for attention.

But funding did not track those priorities. Bush's budget slashed money for democracy programs in Russia and the former Soviet Union, where civil society was in retreat.

It sounds to me like a) Bush never had much of a plan, b) what plan he did have, he didn't secure funding and resources for, and c) where there was State Department pushback, Bush never used his power of, you know, being IN CHARGE of the State Department to see that his directives were carried out.

It's ridiculous to blame obscure bureaucrats for failing to magically implement an obscure goal stated in Bush's speeches. What happened to the mighty power of the Unitary Executive? He has no qualms about firing US attorneys for not doing enough for Team Elephant, but he's totally helpless when it comes to his most heartfelt policy? Give me a break.

Posted by Royko | August 22, 2007 4:50 PM

another way to say this would be:

policy *is* what emerges from interagency meetings,
but that doesn't mean that it is not *also* what the president said in his speech.
it can be both.

policy *has* to be hammered out within or between agencies,
because only such meetings can develop the fine-grained, detailed implementations and directives.

and what emerges from those meetings can be exactly what the president said in his speeches,
put into workable detail, *if the president cares enough to make it happen*.

it's not as though interagency meetings are necessarily rebellious to the executive's will; in a functioning executive, the president lays down the broad lines, turns it over to subordinates to hammer out details, and then *makes sure that the results reflect his vision*.

it's how the executive branch has functioned for centuries.

either what we got here was another example of executive dysfunction under bush,
or bush got pretty much what he wanted.

in which case, he pretty much wanted a policy of democracy non-promotion.

Posted by kid bitzer | August 22, 2007 4:50 PM

All this boils down to is that Dear Leader ain't much of a leader. That is exactly what the bureaucrat's quote highlights. Expressing a vague desire is not enlightened leadership. Planning and organization and guidance is. Bush did none of those things on diplomacy. Sure, an executive shouldn't micromanage, but there needs to be some sort of guidance. Otherwise your vision quite naturally won't be implemented.

Posted by bubba | August 22, 2007 4:52 PM

Senate GOP Senate Leader and President Bush: U.S. Would Pull Troops if Maliki Wants Them Out

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Sunday on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" that the United States would "certainly" leave Iraq if the Iraqi government were to ever decide it wanted U.S. troops out of the war-torn country.

"If the Iraqi government ever decides they want us to leave," said McConnell, "then certainly we would comply with their wishes, they are a duly elected sovereign government."

Even though the issue has not yet come to a formal vote, a majority of the members of the Iraqi parliament signed onto a resolution earlier this month calling for the United States to get out of Iraq. McConnell's comments were prompted by Stephanopoulos asking: "Shouldn't their wishes count here?"

(snip)

In an interview last month with PBS's Charlie Rose, President Bush said the U.S. would leave Iraq if asked to do so by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"This is a guy," said Bush of Maliki on April 24, "who has been elected by the people. And it's a sovereign nation. And we're there at their request. The truth of the matter is, if they said 'get out now, we're tired of coalition presence, the U.S.'s presence is counterproductive,' we would leave."

I wonder how the latest rumors of coup and moving away from the "democratic agenda" in Iraq plays into these comments made just a few months ago?

Posted by Jimm | August 22, 2007 4:57 PM

It's hard for me to imagine why the bureaucrat is in any way wrong.

Speeches are PR. Actions require more than the vague idea that democracy is good. If the president never gives any direction as to how to implement a policy, then the bureaucracy will conclude, properly, that the speech is mere happy talk.

After a presidential speech on democracy, is the State Department supposed to come out the next day and call out Pakistan? That would be a subversive act.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 22, 2007 4:58 PM

I'm not sure whether I should admire Matt for consistently writing patient, reasoned responses to asinine conservative comments, or whether I should pity him. Anyone over the age of 12 with even the vaguest conception of how the world works should have understood that the bureaucrat was the one speaking sense in Baker's anecdote, not the Bush official. Douthat's a bright guy. He shouldn't need to be held by the hand and walked through Public Affairs 101.

Unfortunately, it IS easier for an American chief executive to invade a foreign country than to control the more banal, day-to-day workings of his own diplomatic corps. This is because the military has an efficient chain of command and is specifically trained to perform a variety of tasks that don't require much diplomacy, such as blowing shit up.

However, any policy agenda that's more subtle than blowing shit up (such as rebuilding a country) requires a functioning bureaucracy with a clear understanding of what administration policy is and detailed instructions for how the policy will be carried out. As far as I can tell, nearly the entire modern Republican Party has decided that such unglamorous functions of government are beneath them, and therefore they prefer to make airy campaign speeches about policy, put their idiot cronies in charge of government agencies, and act surprised when chaos theory dictates the policy outcomes.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 22, 2007 5:06 PM

Having wasted so many lives and resources re-eneacting the Flight of Icarus in Iraq, the Bush Adminstration can't do anything BUT make speeches.

This anecdote is another depressing measure of President Bush's catastrophic failure. Sometimes, hapless bureaucrats fail to grasp that making speeches IS the policy.

Posted by Jalmari | August 22, 2007 5:10 PM

The Pres said we're going to Mars. Is that the policy? Is NASA supposed to grant contracts and train astronauts based on the speech? Of course not. There are lines of authority from the president on down. If he wants something done he works through them. He doesn't expect government managers to catch the news at 7 and start implementing new programs the next day.

The "bureaucrat" - ie the government employee - is silly only to naive people who have no idea how the government works. This is a criticism of government on a par with "the IRS regs are 10,000 pages but God only needed 10 commandments." It's astonishing that a Post reporter would accept it.

Posted by Bloix | August 22, 2007 5:16 PM

I agree with Elvis. The bureaucrat doesn't sound silly at all. He is making a cutting observation about what policy actually IS as opposed to what the president claims it is to the public.

Posted by mpowell | August 22, 2007 5:25 PM

You can make a speech about losing weight. If you don't have a plan on how you're going to lose weight, whether it's eating less or exercising more, it's not going to happen.

Seems simple to me.

Posted by stm177 | August 22, 2007 5:43 PM

There's a simpler bottom line: Anyone who took Bush's second inaugural speech to be anything but the symptomatic ravings of an unhinged executive was a fool and is someone who should never be taken seriously and never allowed to waste any of our time again.

Posted by elle loco | August 22, 2007 5:59 PM

All good points, but the main reason democracy promotion never went anywhere was that Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld weren’t on board. They were always the ones skilled at the dark arts of rolling the bureaucracy, not Bush and Gerson.

Of course, had they been on board they surely would have fucked up the actual policy, just like they fucked up the policy everywhere else. So it’s probably all for the best…

Posted by RC | August 22, 2007 6:01 PM

The problem is that the president and his supporters believe that public relations is reality.

When they complain that the liberal media lost the Vietnam war they literally believe it. When they tell Senate Democrats to just shut up for 6 months (like Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman did) they actually think that's a strategy for success.

And when war bloggers like Victor Hanson and Jonah Goldberg suggest that their battle on the home front is as important as the that of soldiers taking enemy fire, they're not kidding.

Posted by Jinchi | August 22, 2007 6:07 PM

This kind of gets to the heart of what I think is the primary problem with the Bush administration - lack of strong leadership from the President.

I used to think Bush was fairly autocratic, maybe because it's an image he tried to promote. But the more I hear from inside the administration, the less I think so. I think Bush has, in fact, been a very indecisive and weak head of the Executive branch.

The problem is that he signed on all these formidable personalities to his team: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, etc. And then pretty-much left them to their own devices to squabble amongst themselves for dominance. We've had multiple instances of senior cabinet officials being completely undermined and contradicted publicly by other administration figures, and the President sat by and did absolutely nothing.

The problem isn't that Bush is a bully, it's that he's basically an absentee landlord in his own administration. He just seems unwilling to play referee. As a result, it often looks like his various underlings are running the show more than he is.

Posted by Rathje | August 22, 2007 6:26 PM

The bureaucrat is sounding silly and, well, bureaucratic here, but in a fundamental sense he's exactly right.

I believe the usual idiom is this: 'Talk is cheap.'

Though in fact talk can be quite expensive, given the consequences of certain Bush speechwriters deciding that phrases like 'Axis of Evil' and 'Bring it on' sound good on the teevee.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | August 22, 2007 6:37 PM

Clearly a policy is more than simply what "emerges" in interagency meetings, since presumably the executive branch still possesses something approximating an organizational chart. Policy plans and proposals might be developed in interdepartmental meetings, but at some point some official to whom the respective department heads all report has to sign off on the proposals before they become policy, unless the authority to fully develop and implement the policy has been pre-delegated to those departments.

With all due respect to the importance of the "bully pulpit" I think it is quite clear that policy is in no sense simply what a president says in speeches. The president is the chief executive of the United States, and the role of bloviator-in-chief is only about 2% of his job. No disciplined organization bases its policies on what members of various departments might read in the papers about what the chief said somewhere in public. A pronouncement is not policy until you get the official word through the chain of command, and it is unpacked and spelled out in a reasonably concrete, non-rhetorical form. And actual policy may in some cases be in significant tension with, or even contradicted by, a president's public statements.

The president is supposed to meet continually with the principals of the major departments and agencies, listen to arguments and disagreements, ask questions about challenges in policy implementation, attempt to harmonize differences, make executive decisions on what policy should be, demand subsequent progress reports, and monitor and adjust the policy based on those reports.

I think whatever one thinks of the Bush administration agenda, one has to admit that Bush himself is a manifestly weak and cowardly leader. From the beginning of his administration he has had officials of various agencies and sub-agencies running around contradicting each other, visibly working against one another, getting into very public spats and turf wars, and generally confusing the public, our allies and our enemies about exactly what our national policies are, as they all play a "who's up? who's down? guessing game. My sense is that this is a guy who is simply incapable of saying "no" to any of the principal figures in his administration upon whom he is apparently quite dependent for daily ego-affirmation and emotional support. He thus let's everyone do what they want, even when what they want is to go in several different direction.

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 22, 2007 6:58 PM

Ross needs a sterner talking to than this. He can't possibly believe what he wrote - he either didn't think about it and just blindly groped for a way to help the side; or he's a dishonest hack.

Posted by david | August 22, 2007 7:01 PM

Ross Douthat is not a person who should be taken seriously on anything.

I understand Matt can not say that but I hope everyone not on the Atlantic payroll can and does.

He is Jonah Goldberg basically.

Posted by Armando | August 22, 2007 7:55 PM

oh, there's no doubt that douthat is a dishonest hack.
that's been clear ever since he first went into print.

his ideology is the same vicious mix one finds at the national review,
and his standards of integrity are no better.
it's just a shame that MY has to do the intellectual garbage pickup.

Posted by kid bitzer | August 22, 2007 8:12 PM

My first wife taught me a valuable lesson. She kept telling me she loved me. I believed her because...well, I wanted it to be true. And probably she wished she loved me. But she didn't.

When someone says something declarative about themselves and their plans, pretend you are deaf. Judge their intent by their actions.

Bush lies. Unfortunately--he lies to himself before he lies to us. So, as it says in the Good Book--'the truth is not in him'.

Posted by JohnMcC | August 22, 2007 8:45 PM

I would add to the above that it's actually desirable, at least in some cases, for there to be a difference between rhetoric and policy. It's negotiating 101 that public positions aren't always the same as what's said behind closed doors. You neither expect nor want the president to run around saying, "Sometimes dictatorships are the best way to protect our interests," whether or not that happens to be our actual policy. (Note: I'm not saying that should be our policy.) And as a practical matter, you obviously can't have mid-level diplomats all working off their own interpretations of presidential speeches.

Posted by Ben | August 22, 2007 11:02 PM

You liberals don't understand. The administration creates reality. Not a week after Bush's State of the Union in 2002, North Korea, Iraq and Iran signed the Tripartite Pact Part Deux. The North Koreans were charged with assisting Scot Evil while the Iranians set about cloning mini Persian cats. Saddam was told to entice the Americans into invading Iraq.

Posted by Basil Exposition | August 23, 2007 3:55 AM

What amazes me is that this is the same President who fired U.S. Attorneys for not trumping up enough bogus voter fraud indictments.

The idea that the important-sounding "Freedom Agenda," whatever that means, would be even slightly deterred by a decadent, nameless bureaucrat from State, is ridiculous on its face.

Posted by Jalmari | August 23, 2007 4:32 AM