BAKER MUSTN’T BE ALLOWED TO ‘DO IN DOMESTIC AFFAIRS’ WHAT HE HAS ‘DONE IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS’

(Washington, D.C.): For serious
monitors of the Bush Administration’s
security policy record, last Sunday’s
generally stultifying debate among the
presidential candidates had one
singularly horrifying moment. It came
when Mr. Bush announced the role Chief of
Staff James Baker would play in a second
term:

“What I’m going to do is say
to Jim Baker when this campaign
is over, ‘All right, let’s sit
down now. You do in
domestic affairs what you have
done in foreign affairs.‘”

As the Center for Security Policy has
assiduously documented over the past four
years, what Jim Baker has
“done” in foreign affairs has,
in important respects, been a disaster
for long-term U.S. national interests.
The following href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
are among the many dubious achievements
for which Mr. Baker bears primary or
important responsibility:

Propping
Up Gorbachev

Baker personified the Bush
Administration’s unwavering commitment to
the Gorbachev regime — a policy
followed even as the latter engaged in
ever more blatant and repressive behavior
utterly at variance with its professed
reform agenda. Notably, in the midst of a
violent Soviet crackdowns in Azerbaijan
and the Baltic nations, Mr. Baker
empathized with Gorbachev’s need to
“maintain order.”

The net effect of policies
advocated by Mr. Baker in
support of the Gorbachev regime
(including: undue diplomatic support,
denying political legitimacy and
assistance to Moscow center’s democratic
opponents, major economic concessions,
billions in wasted Commodity Credit
Corporation (CCC) credits and other
financial assistance, access to
militarily relevant technologies, etc.) was
simply to perpetuate Gorbachev’s misrule.
In so doing, the Administration
contributed to the continued
viability of the instruments of communist
power in the Post-Soviet era —
forces that present a persistent threat
to the triumph of democratic and free
market reforms in the successor states.

As a result of extending the
Soviet Union’s lease on life —
both through unilateral action and by
acquiescing to German demands in the G-7
(and elsewhere) for more concerted,
preferential multilateral action — the
Bush-Baker team has actually added
to the costs of undoing the
immense political, economic and
environmental damage inflicted by Moscow
center. It has also virtually ensured
that the American taxpayer will have to
write-off billions in
unrecoverable CCC loans.

Mismanaging Relations with
the Soviet Successor States

Not surprisingly, having invested so
heavily in Mikhail Gorbachev and having
eschewed his democratic rivals, Mr. Baker
resisted the call to help the reformers
secure and consolidate their positions
after the August 1991 coup. Fully three
months passed between Gorbachev’s
resignation and the Bush Administration’s
decision to advocate a program to assist
the successor states. Another six months
passed before Congress adopted the
“Freedom Support Act” and the
Administration grudgingly agreed to
engage in inevitable multi-year debt
relief negotiations.

Then, after stonewalling various forms
of assistance needed to promote systemic
transformation in the former Soviet
Union, Mr. Baker made matters
immeasurably worse by going to the other
extreme — advocating an essentially unconditional
approach to aid to the Soviet successor
states. Tragically, this undisciplined,
non-transparent approach was adopted just
as the reformers’ hold on power and
commitment to structural change has
become more tenuous. Thanks in part to
Baker’s lobbying, the Freedom Support Act
passed by Congress imposes only a modicum
of conditionality on the Bush
Administration’s assistance program;
without strengthening such economic and
political conditionality the United
States is denying itself, and genuine
reformers in the former USSR, urgently
needed leverage to promote real
structural change there.

Preserving the Yugoslav
Empire

Mr. Baker played a pivotal role in the
tragic conflict in the former Yugoslavia
from its outset. He insisted that
Slovenia and Croatia remain part of an
empire forged by tyranny unless and until
such time as the Serbs were willing to
let them go. This constituted — and was
read as — an unmistakable signal to
Belgrade that Washington would not oppose
its violent efforts to preserve the
“territorial integrity” of
Yugoslavia.

Worse yet, Baker’s hand seems at work
in the transparently political
calculation not to insist upon military
intervention to thwart Serbian aggression
at least until after the election.
This decision has, in all likelihood,
condemned hundreds of thousands of
innocent Bosnians and Croats to death
this winter from exposure and
malnutrition. The degree of State
Department complicity in this crime was
revealed in today’s Washington Post by
George Kenney, the acting State
Department desk officer for Yugoslavia
who recently resigned to protest Baker’s
inaction in the face of genocide. Kenney
disclosed that State deliberately and
massively low-balled the number of known
Serbian atrocities in its recent
submission to the United Nations
documenting war crime evidence,
presumably in the hope of minimizing
pressure for intervention.

Iraqgate

Mr. Baker is personally implicated in
a number of the most embarrassing — and
potentially criminal — aspects of U.S.
policy toward Iraq prior to the invasion
of Kuwait, activities that the Bush
Administration has apparently been going
to great lengths to conceal. After all,
his State Department was:

• the architect of
  the benighted policy of
  “trying to bring Iraq into
  the family of civilized
  nations;”
• the prime mover
  behind National Security
  Directive 26 which provided a
  presidential blank check toward
  this end;
• the principal advocate
  — together with Dennis Kloske’s
  bureau at the Commerce Department
  — for selected transfers of
  sensitive “dual-use”
  technologies to Iraq’s
  military-industrial complex and
  associated end-users; and
• the originator
  of April Glaspie’s infamous
  instructions to advise Saddam
  that “the United States has
  no opinion on the Arab-Arab
  conflicts like [the] border
  dispute with Kuwait” —
  guidance that was, not
  unreasonably, construed by the
  Iraqi despot to mean that even
  his invasion of his neighbor would
  entail no substantial costs.

What is more, then-Secretary of State
Baker and top aide Under Secretary of
State Bob Kimmitt personally
intervened to quash opposition from
Agriculture Department officials to the
extension of a billion dollars in
commodity credit guarantees to Iraq in
November 1989. They did so even though:
there was reason to believe such funds
were being misused to buy weapons; there
was little prospect that such loans would
be repaid; and Saddam’s belligerent
objectives were by that time reasonably
well understood within the relevant
executive branch agencies. That
decision cost the U.S. taxpayer
conservatively $1.9 billion in
debts that are being — or will shortly
have to be — written off.

Coddling Assad

In his single-minded pursuit of a
Nobel Peace Prize for Middle East
diplomacy, Mr. Baker has been a
principal architect of the Bush
Administration’s policy toward Hafez
Assad of Syria — a virtual
reprise of its earlier appeasement of
Saddam Hussein. Key elements of this
policy are:

• facilitating Syria’s arm
  build-up — both through
  selected transfers of militarily
  relevant technology and by
  ignoring Damascus’ acquisition of
  weapons and strategic
  technologies from third parties;
• ignoring Syria’s heavy
  involvement in international drug
  dealing at the same time as the
  U.S. is investing billions to
  fight the drug war;
• looking the other way on Syria’s
  sponsorship of terrorism
  even though U.S. citizens, assets
  and allies are frequently the
  targets of terrorist
  organizations operating under
  Syrian protection;
• disregarding the ominous
  strategic implications of the
  alliance being forged between
  Iran and Syria (featuring
  cooperation on weapons
  acquisitions, policy, terrorism,
  etc.);
• failing to object to Syria’s
  brutal conquest and subsequent,
  effective de facto
  annexation of Lebanon;
  and
• cooperating quietly in a multilateral
  effort to resolve Syria’s debt
  arrearages with the
  World Bank and to catalyze new
  money flows — despite the fact
  that such assistance to a
  state-sponsor of terrorism is not
  permitted under U.S. law.

The United States risks an even
more serious strategic debacle
than that precipitated by its reckless
courtship of Saddam Hussein if it
persists in appeasing Hafez Assad. The
latter is speaking of peace while
preparing for the most devastating war
yet known in the Middle East. This is not
the policy of a foreign leader the United
States can rely upon — or someone to
whom it can responsibly insist Israel
make concessions.

Coercing Israel

Mr. Baker appears to have taken
particular pleasure in his role as
point-man for the Bush Administration’s
campaign to improve relations with the
Arab states at the expense of America’s
historical ties to Israel. This campaign
has featured initiatives calculated to
coerce the elected leadership of a
friendly democratic state into making
concessions on its claim to disputed
territories — despite the absence of
corresponding concessions from its Arab
enemies and at the expense of homeless
immigrants. Failing that, the Baker
policy was unmistakably intended to
topple the Israeli government.

Baker’s zeal in pursuing policies
inimical to the Jewish State may be
explained by his widely reported
hostility to Jews in the United States;
perhaps it simply reflects the antipathy
both he and President Bush palpably felt
for former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Whatever the motivation, lingering damage
has been done to the crucial relationship
between the United States and its most
important ally in the Middle East —
damage that cannot be erased by the
cynical and manipulative pre-election
release of loan guarantees for Israel.

Alliance Leadership

Mr. Baker’s reputation as the
consummate deal-maker and compromiser
also led to disastrous results in
alliance relations. His elitist instincts
— shared by the President — favored a
“Skull and Bones,”
non-transparent approach to G-7
deliberations, largely at the expense of
the affected populations. (In this
regard, consider U.S. concurrence with
the collapsing Maastricht effort to
create a European super-state.)

Mr. Baker did not hesitate to jettison
the carefully crafted “special
relationship” with the United
Kingdom (epitomized by the
Thatcher-Reagan relationship) in favor of
“contracting out” leadership on
European and NATO matters to a Germany
increasingly bent on pursuing its own,
ever more ominous agenda. In this
connection, Baker acquiesced to thinly
veiled Franco-German efforts aimed at
deep-sixing the Atlantic Alliance in
favor of such demonstrably failed,
European-dominated institutions as the
Western European Union, the European
Community, the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe and the
Franco-German corps.

Big Deal(s)

Even Mr. Baker’s pride and joy — his
successful completion of major arms
control and other international
agreements — amount to substantially
less than he claims for them.
Specifically, his contribution to the Conventional
Forces in Europe (CFE) and Strategic Arms
Reduction (START) Treaties was to agree
to terms that substantially dilute the
strategic value of these accords
and that greatly exacerbate difficulties
inherent in verifying the former Soviet
Union’s compliance.

In fact, Mr. Baker’s penchant
for deal-making and unwarranted
compromise — facilitated by a
remarkable disinterest in and
unconcern about the contents of the
agreements he takes such pride in
fashioning — has had a predictable
effect: These qualities have obtained for
the Bush Administration a long list of
arms control accords, trade agreements
and other documents even as they have
greatly reduced, if not vitiated, their
actual value to the United States.

The Bottom Line

In short, if Jim Baker is permitted to
“do to domestic affairs” what
he has “done in foreign
affairs,” there is reason to believe
that the national interest would be
doubly disserved. At a time when U.S.
economic policy and political renewal
requires vision, discipline,
transparency, integrity and constancy as
rarely before, Mr. Baker is clearly the
wrong man for the job.

– 30 –

1. The
items in this bill of particulars are
adapted from an analysis released last
week by the Center for Security Policy
entitled Security Policy in
the Bush Administration: A Critical
Retrospective ( href=”../studies/bush92.html”>No. 92-127,
8 October 1992). Copies of the full Retrospective
may be obtained by contacting the Center.