THE PROBLEM OF STATE

TTP, April 21, 2004

Historians and commentators often refer to “The Reagan Doctrine” as the policy or strategy of “The Reagan Administration” to support anti-Soviet freedom fighters and dismantle the Soviet Empire.

The reality was that there was a continual war within the Reagan Administration between advocates of the Reagan Doctrine and those opposed to it — bitterly and rabidly.

Take what has become the most famous speech of the Reagan Presidency, delivered by Ronald Reagan at the Brandenberg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987 — famous for containing the now-legendary line:

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev: Open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev: Tear down this wall!”

This line — the most memorable in the entire history of the Cold War — was written by presidential speechwriter Peter Robinson in the initial draft. You have no idea how much everyone at State from SecState George Schultz on down in the vetting process fought to take it out.

The draft for a presidential speech comes out of the speechwriters’ shop and goes through several layers of approvals — legal department, any and all administrative agencies involved, NSC (National Security Council), senior White House staff — before it gets to the President. Someday, one of the Reagan speechwriters should write a book on all the tricks they used to bypass the vetting process for a speech they knew the president wanted but would never see unless they could get it to him directly.

The “Tear down this wall!” line was immediately stricken by the vets at State. The pin-stripes were horrified by its audacity. One of the speechwriters found out and told Paula Dobriansky, Eastern Europe expert on the NSC, who was able to quietly tell the President about the line and its being struck. Reagan promptly told his aides to put the line back in.

Yet when the president was given the final draft just before he was to deliver the speech in Berlin, somehow, the line had been struck again.

Ronald Reagan personally wrote the line back in the speech in his own handwriting.

This story should help put in perspective the problem the State Department is causing in the War in Iraq today. Squishiness is endemic to Foggy Bottom.

There’s something that oozes out of Foggy Bottom that emasculates people. Richard Armitage, for example, is a powerfully built weightlifter who intimidated a lot of folks when he was at the Pentagon. Once he became a State bureaucrat, he’s just another sissified pinstripe whimpering about how the Mullah Dictatorship in Iran is really a special kind of democracy.

The problem is epitomized by the old joke about the State Department disease of “clientitus.”

The place regionalizes the world in terms of “Desks” such as the Bureau of Near East Affairs. The bureaucrats who run these Desks almost invariably become sympathetic advocates for the governments in their region — as if they are defense attorneys and the foreign governments are their clients. Thus the joke that what the State Department needs most is an American Desk, with America as the client.

It’s a good idea, but a better one would be to abolish the entire Desk system, starting with that of the Near East, which encompasses North Africa from Morocco to Egypt, and the Middle East from Israel and Syria to the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Iran. It is too infested with anti-Israel pro-Arabists to be simply fumigated. Dismantle the whole thing, and start with firing its Assistant Secretary, William Joseph Burns.

Burns is already busy undermining President Bush’s public assurances to Israel that there will be no “Right of Return” of Palestinian “refugees” and no return to pre-1967 borders. His diplomats are frantically assuring Arab governments that the President didn’t really mean what he said.

Burns continues his petty, childish, and disastrous vendetta against Ahmad Chalabi (see “Childishness in Iraq,” Behind The Lines, August 7, 2003), the one Iraqi leader capable of uniting Iraq — and continues to push his own man, octogenarian and Saudi royal family stooge Adnan Pachachi. At Burns’ hysterical insistence, the Marine attack on Fallujah was called off and Pacahchi sent in to “negotiate” — once again giving hope to the Jihadi Terrorists we are as weak and irresolute as they say we are.

As calamitous as State Department policy in Iraq has been, it’s worse in Iran. The pinstripes have a toxic allergy to regime change. No matter how awful a government is, they always want to “negotiate” with them, just like with the terrorists in Fallujah, in order to demonstrate that their superior diplomatic skills trump military force.

You have to be blind, retarded, or a State Department bureaucrat not to understand that the government of Iran is dedicated to preventing stability in Iraq and is playing the pinstripes like they were rubes off the turnip truck. Michael Ledeen has a typically brilliant analysis of this in his TTP column this week, “Who Do They Think We Are?”

Who We Are are a people better than what Foggy Bottom thinks. Who We Are are a people with the courage and foresight to elect leaders like Ronald Reagan. We can falter, as we did with Bill Clinton, when we thought we were safe after winning the Cold War. But when the chips are down, we live up to ourselves.

And when the chips are down enough, someday, hopefully soon, we’ll get a pro-America State Department.