Each day, President Bush finds himself drawn further into a blood feud between implacable foes. Arafat-Sharon? India-Pakistan? CNN-Fox?
Nope. Scowcroft-Perle.
On one side is Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser for former president George Bush and is now the embodiment of the Republican establishment's view of foreign policy. On the other side is Richard Perle, a Reagan administration Pentagon official called the "Prince of Darkness" by foes, and now intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.
Typically, Washington chatter is about the internecine quarrels between the dovish Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the hawkish Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. But these men are just pawns in the decades-old global chess match between Perle and Scowcroft, who first faced off in the 1970s when Perle was an aide to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.) and Scowcroft was national security adviser to the establishment man, former president Gerald Ford.
Scowcroft and Perle have relatively minor, advisory posts in the current Bush administration. Yet each man has profound influence over Bush policies and officials in the competition for the hearts of the president and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
"Of course I'm pulling all the strings," Perle said yesterday with a laugh. "I've been doing this for years!"
In fact, Perle says he has a "good relationship" with Scowcroft. And Perle denies that those who share his views in the administration are his proxies. "My so-called pawns inside are all smarter than I am," he protests.
Pawns or simply fellow travelers, the progeny of the two longtime ideological opposites are regularly at odds in the Bush administration over policy on the Middle East, Iraq, nuclear weapons and China. Scowcroft represents the moderate, realpolitik strain in Republican foreign policy, promoting internationalist policies and the interests of American industry. Perle's allies favor a more hawkish foreign policy and an inclination for the United States to go it alone.
With Bush yesterday proclaiming a new era of friendly relations with Russia as the two nations declared a new arms control pact, the Cold War game of Kremlinology became a lot less interesting. Fortunately, the Bush foreign policy apparatus provides a new opportunity for Kremlinologists.
Perle's lineup of like-minded thinkers is impressive, starting with Vice President Cheney. The vice president sometimes stays neutral, but his sympathies undoubtedly are with the Perle crowd. Cheney deputies Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Eric Edelman relay neoconservative views to Rice at the National Security Council. At the NSC, they have a sympathetic audience in Elliott Abrams, Robert Joseph, Wayne Downing and Zalmay Khalilzad.
At the Pentagon, Perle's allies are not just Rumsfeld but also deputy Paul D. Wolfowitz, an academic and a neoconservative purist, and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith. Perle also has a man at Powell's State Department: Undersecretary John Bolton, late of the American Enterprise Institute. Bolton, who often irks European allies, was the official who announced the U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court.
Scowcroft's lineup is far less deep. In addition to Powell, his allies are Powell's policy planning director, Richard Haass, formerly with the Brookings Institution, the establishment-central think tank. Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, is loyal to his boss, although he is sometimes suspected of neoconservative tendencies. Marc Grossman, the No. 3 at State, is a career foreign service officer with establishment credentials.
CIA Director George J. Tenet, a Clinton administration holdover, is also grouped with the Scowcroft wing. United Nations Ambassador John D. Negroponte has establishment ties, as do Middle East specialists Anthony C. Zinni and Bill Burns.
Scowcroft's allies would lack the numbers and heft to stand up to the Perle wing, except for one other establishment figure: the president's father. The president doesn't discuss his consultations with his father (or with his father's friend James A. Baker III), but the senior Bush has been meeting with international figures such as the Saudi crown prince. That makes the conservatives anxious.
"Increasingly, I'm hearing mutterings from conservatives about the role of the father," said neoconservative Marshall Wittmann of the Hudson Institute.
The split between the GOP's Scowcroft and Perle wings came in 1975, when the now-deceased Sen. Jackson (and his aide Perle) objected to President Ford signing the Helsinki Accords because he thought they were too soft on the Soviet Union. Cheney and Rumsfeld, then Ford aides, were on the side of Scowcroft and the establishment at the time, although during the neoconservative Reagan years they evolved into Perle allies.
These days, the referees in the struggle between the establishment and the neoconservatives are President Bush himself and Rice, a Scowcroft protege under the first Bush administration, who picked up conservative influences from George Shultz and the Hoover Institution while at Stanford. Rice deputy Stephen Hadley, who has neoconservative leanings, helps Rice play the honest broker.
On many issues -- missile defense, the promise to topple Saddam Hussein and the axis-of-evil declaration -- the neoconservatives have clearly won the battle for the minds of Bush and Rice. In Bush's support for foreign aid, the establishment prevailed. On the Middle East and China, where policy vacillates, the winner is less clear.
What does all this mean? The Kremlinologists are investigating.
"Condi is absolutely the key swing vote apart from Bush himself," said neoconservative publisher William Kristol. "She's moved over to our side. My view is she's a Scowcroft protege who's educated herself."
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