Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The storm over Iraq now gripping Washington has profound consequences for the politics of the United Kingdom. With General Petraeus claming that the surge is working, Democrats finally speaking out for a “pivot” towards Tehran while the administration speaks darkly of Iran waging a “proxy war”, we can expect the worst of a wasteful, bullying and, for all its legalism and lawyers (and sometimes thanks to them!) an often criminal political system. I want to return in another post to Gordon Brown’s relationship to it, his Iraq withdrawal policy and his remarkable visit to Camp David. But first, to Washington itself.
The best starting point is Tim Garton Ash’s most recent Guardian column. Tim’s last book, Free World argued for a a European president 'Blairac', i.e. a combination of Blair and Chirac, to unite critically with the USA. He would have preferred a President Kerry, but nonetheless with Bush because “have to start from where we are” (all quotes from the 2005 postscript). The aim would be to create a partnership that would initiate a global version of Atlanticism, centred on Washington as the necessary power, in a framework shaped by European intelligence and entente rather than trans-atlantic opposition. The fundamental premise was that, however mistaken Bush himself may have been on the war or with respect to his other polices such as climate change, the USA was the working heart of the free world. Tim is the most sophisticated and honest pro-American advocate we have.
Last week he came close to joining his foremost opponent Tom Nairn. He asked why the decision making over Iraq was so incompetent. “What a way to run a government. With a hands-off president, a weak national security advisor, an overmighty baron at the Pentagon, and a conspiratorial vice-president exercising unprecedented power…”
This view was commonplace on the left, dangerously so because it opens the way to blaming the war on the Bush clique. Now a step change seems to have taken hold of Tim, thanks to a retired US military officer who in despair compared Washington to the Vienna of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. This was famously satirised as Kakania by Robert Musil. The point about Washington as "the new Kakania” as Tim puts it, is that “Even with a stronger president, more attuned to foreign realities and more in command of the detail, there is a chronic problem of strategic coordination and of implementation”. In other words there is a larger problem. Tim writes,
The minute involvement of Congress in the entrails of government, the disproportionate influence of lobbyists and funders, and an absurdly frenetic election timetable, all further contribute to what Musil called "kakanian conditions". A new president spends his (or maybe next time her) first year getting his (or her) political appointees confirmed by Congress and their staffs put in place. Then the administration has a year to do something. Then it's the mid-term Congressional elections. Then the next presidential race begins, so a first-term president is already running for a second term, while a second-term president is a lame duck. Congressmen and women, meanwhile, having to stand for election every two years (a ludicrously short term), are no sooner re-elected than they have to start raising money for their next campaign. That also means doing favours, earmarking Congressional appropriations for clients in their districts, and other kakanian practices that the US would never dream of promoting in its development and democracy programmes around the world. (Do as we say, not as we do, is the motto.) What a way to run a country.
He could have mentioned a suborned Supreme Court, an election system that hands power to someone with significantly less votes than the winner, Guantanamo Bay and, a big one this, the US media... Is it possible that Tim could become a healthy anti-american-power? He now sees that there is a system problem at the centre of his free world. The irony is that one of Tim's critics is Tom Nairn identified some time ago the seemingly ineradicable incompetence of Whitehall by following the same apt Musil comparison. He dubbed it Ukania. Now, we have its larger, twin star, Usania.
