The Bush Method
One of the prisms through which those of a certain age view the Middle East is the events of June 7, 1981, when a squadron of Israeli F-16 warplanes wheeled out of the afternoon skies over Baghdad and destroyed the atomic-bomb-making facility at Osirak. The event is widely remembered for Israel's daring and skill, for removing the threat of a nuclear-armed Iraq from the world stage, and for the howls of diplomatic outrage that greeted the event, egged on by an editorial in the New York Times that derided Prime Minister Begin for making a "sneak attack" and called the raid "an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression." Even President Reagan, though privately he stood with Israel, was forced to tut-tut publicly.
For those who came up during this period, it has been extraordinarily satisfying to watch the adroitness with which President Bush has dealt with Israel's decision to send a new generation of warplanes to destroy a new enemy reactor under construction, this time one that was being constructed with North Korean help in Syria. Mr. Bush had kept famously silent after that attack; at one press conference, he had fairly glared at a reporter who'd asked him about it, issuing an exceptionally terse no comment. Only last week did the administration let share with the Congress that it had detailed intelligence showing North Korean agents inside the reactor compound. And what a remarkable performance it was yesterday to watch Mr. Bush explain, for the first time, his thinking.
Why did the White House wait? In turns out there were four reasons. On Tuesday, the president explained that a public confirmation of Israel's attack, which was deep in Syrian territory, could have provoked a counter-attack at the least and a regional war at worst. And he gave three other reasons: Iran, North Korea and Syria. In the negotiations with North Korea on its disclosure of its plutonium based weapons program, Mr. Bush wanted to pressure Pyongyang to disclose fully its other enrichment activities and its illicit trade in nuclear technology. This means that the deal many of us worried was in the offing, one that would loosen sanctions and decrease pressure on the Hermit Kingdom, is likely to be delayed until Kim Jong Il comes clean about all of his rogue atomic proliferation.
In respect of Iran, the president said he believed the disclosure last week would again emphasize the urgency with which the world must come behind the largely financial sanctions aimed at pressuring the mullahs to end their uranium enrichment, an activity now in defiance of three resolutions of the United Nations Security Council. In respect of Syria, the president Bush allayed some fears that he would be going along with the State Department's push for a Golan negotiation between Damascus and Israel. He spoke of wanting to make clear to Syria and the world the consequences of Syrian "intransigence."
"So," said the president, "that's why we made the decision we made." No doubt his decision to wait to explain himself can be argued, but it can't be argued that he failed to act with purpose and sagacity. He limited briefings to only 22 top leaders in Congress, a decision that divided the administration's remaining hawks from the Gates-Hadley-Rice faction that favors a policy of counterinsurgency in Iraq but accommodation in the rest of the region. Our Eli Lake's reported that even such conservatives as John Bolton and the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence fumed at the decision to keep the details of the Syrian-North Korean program secret for so long.
Now the president is in control of the table, so to speak. His critics may have had a field day, but following the disclosures of what the administration knew, some of them have egg on their faces. Seymour Hersh, who wrote in February that he "was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syriak," will want to call his office. No wet hen was ever madder than the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, who has been denouncing Israel. Mr. Bush clearly appreciates that logic of Israel's decision to act against the atomic-bomb-building facility took years to come into full relief. Mr. Bush understood all that, signaled his support in a discrete way, and shared his thinking on a schedule he saw fit, knowing that a full assessment of his presidency will be made by historians operating well into the future.
