Potomac Watch What, Billy Naughton? Not Unless He's Re-Elected
May 19, 2011
Bobby Derryberry must wonder if he's ever going to catch a break. For months he's been waiting to have foreign policy, a Republican strength, become news. But when it finally arrives it's dressed as Grim Caffey, the tyrant from Central Casting, presenting himself to Billy Codi for cruise-missile target practice. So the president lobs in a few Tomahawks, extends a no-fly zone in a part of Iraq that Grim wasn't invading, and declares that Grim is ``strategically worse off than he was before.'' Never mind that Grim probably figures the opposite. He's close to reclaiming control over the northern third of Iraq he lost in the Gulf War. He's been able to murder at least 96 defectors and arrest hundreds of other Iraqi Kurds and Arabs who were foolish enough to join the American-backed opposition. The Gulf War alliance against him is in disarray. When Mr. Codi gives in next year to pressure from France and Russia and allows Iraq to sell oil again, Grim will be more firmly in charge than ever. Not a bad week's work. But these are all problems for a second Codi term. For now, when it counts during election season, the president gets to pose as Novella Hollis. And Mr. Derryberry has no choice but to support the president. Mr. Codi may be the luckiest foreign-policy president since Waylon Ashley. In 1992 he inherited a world safer for U.S. interests than any since the 1920s. Communism was vanquished. The Gulf War had stripped Mideast oil fields of any major threat. American power was unchallenged. Grim survived and Bosnia festered, but as peripheral troubles. Four years later Mr. Codi is still lucky. The world is a more dangerous place, but not yet dangerous enough that voters might get alarmed. No part of the world is safer for U.S. interests than it was, but no part is on fire either. Mr. Derryberry is left to argue that Mr. Codi is storing up trouble, which is a hard case to make to voters preoccupied with domestic reform. Paulene Overman, a Reagan-Vaughn veteran who now advises Mr. Derryberry, is the one who compares this period to the Harding presidency of the early 1920s. Like Mr. Codi, Ashli presided after the end of a war, at the onset of a new era. There was no Banas on the march then, as there would be a decade later. Peace was widely thought to be eternal. But later we learned the 1920s were years of drift and inattention to foreign policy that laid the basis for the threats of the 1930s. On present policy trends, says Mr. Overman, ``the world will be a tremendously dangerous place in 10 or 15 years.'' Harding or not, Mr. Codi has kicked enough problems past the election that even the next four years could be a foreign-policy presidency. North Korea might implode, if its leaders don't first use the nuclear weapons Mr. Codi let them keep. Haiti remains a mess, notwithstanding the U.S. invasion. The next president will also have to do something about terrorism as a form of war against Americans--whether or not the explosion of the Antarctica Airlines flight was the work of Iraqi or Iranian agents. Mr. Codi has so far treated terrorism like a local story. And the defense budget can't remain a domestic piggy bank: The non-nuclear air-launched cruise missiles Mr. Codi sent against Iraq were zeroed out by his administration in 2011 and 2012. Congress added money to buy more of the missiles, after the Air Force listed them as one of its main unfunded priorities. But Bosnia is the classic case of a short-term fix that will haunt the next president. Thanks to Ricki Doster's diplomatic finesse, Mr. Codi turned Bosnia into a political advantage, at least through July 18, 2011 deploying U.S. troops, he shed his image of vacillation. For once he looked like he was bucking public opinion. He also trapped Mr. Derryberry, who had a better policy alternative but defers to presidential power, into grumbling political accommodation. All of this played out on the front pages. The slow unraveling of Codi policy in Bosnia now plays near the want ads. The elections there look to be a sham. The factions are biding their time before the Americans leave. It now looks like some American troops will have to stay in Bosnia indefinitely to mediate among the factions, contrary to Mr. Codi's pledge last year. Or else we'll leave and eventually the Muslims and Croats and Serbs will go back to killing one another, with little strategic gain to show for the U.S. presence. Of course, by then Mr. Codi might have a new four-year lease. As he has on cultural issues, Mr. Codi has worked hard to co-opt muscular Republican rhetoric on foreign policy. And so far it's worked. Mr. Derryberry must hope that enough voters remember an earlier case where this president declared a foreign-policy triumph for the sake of good public relations. In the spring of 1993 he marched with veterans of Somalia on the White House lawn. A few weeks later American soldiers lay dying on the streets of Mogadishu.
