Bush Team's Counsel Is Divided on Foreign Policy
By JANE PERLEZ
ASHINGTON, March 26 — Two competing foreign policy camps are emerging in the Bush administration — an ideologically conservative Pentagon and a more moderate State Department — which have already provided President Bush conflicting advice on central issues.
At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is collecting a hard-line group of advisers who have supported arming the Iraqi opposition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, and who are deeply skeptical of the European effort to form a rapid deployment force alongside NATO.
On the other side of the river, at the State Department, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell stepped out in front on Iraq with ideas to modify sanctions, but found his policy belittled at the Pentagon. Although he is a product of the Pentagon, he has usually been a cautious warrior.
In a sign of the back-biting, European diplomats were told by Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary for defense and one of the most avid backers of the Iraqi opposition, not to consider the State Department's description of sanctions policy the last word and to be wary of its more accommodating stance on the European force, officials said.
On other issues, the State Department appears to be more open than the Pentagon to possible missile negotiations with North Korea. On Russia and China, too, General Powell is likely to place more emphasis on working with allies than is Mr. Rumsfeld, who has a history of supporting a unilateral approach.
"At some point the president is going to have to decide what foreign policy he wants, because he is not going to get consistent options on many issues," a senior administration official said.
In an ideal world, there is nothing wrong with the president's receiving clashing recommendations — as long as the differences are discussed in private and the president's decisions, once made, are carried out, this official said. Indeed, all administrations endure policy debates, but try to prevent them from becoming public ideological cleavages.
Although the administration is still in its relatively early days, there is evidence that the disputes are unlikely to be kept quiet, in part because of the strong ideological undercurrents.
Word has gone out to conservative writers and think tanks from administration hard-liners to "keep up the pressure," a think tank policy analyst said.
Mr. Bush, who is inexperienced in foreign affairs, has acknowledged that he will rely on his most senior policy advisers. So as the competition among them intensifies. Vice President Dick Cheney, who collected his own foreign policy specialists, more powerful than any gathered by previous vice presidents, is likely to be an important arbiter.
From the State Department, at least, Mr. Cheney is seen as leaning more toward the Pentagon, where he served as secretary of defense under President Bush's father.
The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who has projected herself as a policy coordinator rather than a policy maker, also prides herself on having Mr. Bush's ear. So far, Ms. Rice's predilections in the interdepartmental rivalry are not clear.
As Mr. Rumsfeld selects a markedly conservative group of officials to serve under him and as General Powell chooses a more moderate lineup heavily dominated by career Foreign Service officers, the battle lines seem sharply drawn.
Mr. Rumsfeld, for example, has selected Douglas J. Feith for the chief policy job at the Pentagon, officials said. Mr. Feith, who served in the Reagan Pentagon, is close to Richard Perle, a neoconservative who served the Reagan administration and is on the board of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative defense analysis group. The position of assistant secretary for international security affairs has gone to Peter W. Rodman, a staff member at the Nixon Center who is viewed as a conservative on Russian and European issues.
In contrast, General Powell chose Richard Haass, an advocate of sanctions reform and an opponent of arming the Iraqi opposition, as the head of policy planning at the State Department. Mr. Haass is another veteran of the previous Bush White House and served as director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
For the most part, General Powell has turned aside suggestions of hiring ideologically driven Republican loyalists for the State Department.
"It is very clear that Rumsfeld wants a Pentagon populated with a conservative team who see themselves in a policy clash with Powell — and they are gearing up for it," said Robert Kagan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and columnist at the conservative Weekly Standard.
"It's fair to say that this is shaping up into a Shultz-Weinberger battle royal of the Reagan administration," he said, referring to the policy and personal frictions between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.
In the current situation, though, the principal players — General Powell, Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice — have by all accounts maintained cordial personal relationships going back a long time. There is none of the personal animosity that permeated the Shultz-Weinberger relationship, colleagues say. The three players have been meeting once a week for lunch and check in with each other on the phone every morning at 7:15.
But on policy issues, in contrast to what was expected, the new group re-creates the ideological divisions within the Reagan foreign policy team rather than the more cohesive approach of those who served President Bush's father.
Tests of how the competing spheres are reconciled will come in several areas: Iraq, where a new sanctions policy is being formed; Taiwan, where the battle will be over selling advanced weapons; Russia, where the fight will be over how to deal with Moscow on missile defense; the Balkans, over how far to assist the Europeans in peacekeeping; and North Korea, where the question is whether to pursue missile talks begun under President Clinton.
Mr. Rumsfeld has said that the European deployment force makes him nervous because he sees it as possibly weakening NATO. General Powell said last month that the United States went into the Balkans with its NATO allies and would leave with them. So far Mr. Rumsfeld has not addressed this issue.
Administration officials say they have now started the policy review on Iraq even though many of the senior posts at the Pentagon and the State Department are yet to be filled.
Mr. Cheney's shop is also playing a role. His national security adviser, I. Lewis Libby, has shown sympathy toward arming the opposition against Saddam Hussein, while at the National Security Council itself, one assistant on the Middle East, Kenneth Pollack, who openly opposed arming the opposition, has left.
At the State Department, much of the sanctions policy is based on assessments drawn up by Mr. Haass, who has said economic sanctions should be eased to stop punishing the Iraqi people, while financial and military sanctions should be tightened.
To this end, the State Department has proposed to states neighboring Iraq that United Nations monitors be posted on their borders as well as at key foreign airports to prevent Mr. Hussein from importing materials that would help him manufacture weapons of mass destruction.
At the Pentagon, however, Mr. Wolfowitz has made it fairly clear that he believes sharpening sanctions is probably not possible, and that trying to topple Mr. Hussein is more desirable.