WASHINGTON - The imminent choice by US President
George W Bush of a new director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the organization blasted on
Friday for "groupthink" and incompetence by a key
congressional committee, is fast becoming the major new
battleground between the administration's hawks and
realists.
Senior Bush officials have said the
president is virtually certain to nominate a successor -
possibly as early as this week - to the hapless George
Tenet, whose announced resignation last month took
effect on Sunday, exactly seven years after he took the
job under former president Bill Clinton.
With
the departments of Justice and Homeland Security warning
of dire new threats from al-Qaeda terrorists - possibly
designed to disrupt the November elections - and
Friday's release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's
damning report on the CIA's performance leading up to
the war in Iraq, Bush's advisers concluded that leaving
in place the CIA's acting director, career officer John
McLaughlin, could be interpreted by voters as
complacency, particularly if a successful terrorist
attack were carried out.
"Now that the CIA has
been torn apart [by the Senate committee], they want to
show they're really serious about getting its act
together fast," said one official. "Keeping McLaughlin
in place sends the opposite signal."
Both the
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
Republican Senator Pat Roberts, and its vice chairman,
Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, said much the same
on Sunday. "You cannot leave in an acting director for
six or seven months while you wait for the next
[presidential] inauguration, regardless of who is
elected," said Rockefeller. "We cannot take that
chance."
The problem faced by the
administration, however, is that it does not yet have a
candidate for the position who can be confirmed by the
Senate relatively easily and still be acceptable to
neo-conservative hawks centered on Vice President Dick
Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
Three
names have gained the most attention to date. Florida
Representative Porter Goss, the chairman of the
Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives
and a former CIA officer himself, made no secret of his
desire for the job after Tenet made his surprise
announcement last month.
Goss has, until
recently, enjoyed relatively good relations with
Democrats on the committee, but these have worsened in
recent weeks as his public statements have become
increasingly partisan, perhaps in hopes of making
himself more attractive to Bush.
But the bigger
problem for Goss is that he was widely considered one of
Tenet's staunchest defenders on Capitol Hill. Both
Democrats and some Republicans are now saying the two
intelligence committees were far too lax in dealing with
Tenet and should have exercised much stronger oversight.
Unfortunately for Goss, that was his job.
The
two other most prominently mentioned candidates -
neither of whom have publicly confirmed interest - are
identified with the two major factions that have battled
for control of foreign policy within the Bush
administration since it took office three and a half
years ago.
John Lehman, who served as secretary
of the navy under the late Ronald Reagan (1981-89) is a
dyed-in-the-wool neo-conservative who most recently
gained public attention in June when, as a member of the
commission that investigated the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, he spoke
out in defense of Cheney's continued insistence that
former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein may have played
some role in the September 11 catastrophe.
A
staunch supporter of Likud governments in Israel, Lehman
has long been closely associated - both professionally
and ideologically - with a number of other prominent
neo-conservatives, including former Defense Policy Board
chairman Richard Perle and Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz. After the September 11 attacks, he
signed an open letter published by the
neo-conservative-dominated Project for the New American
Century (PNAC) that urged that Washington overthrow
Saddam.
Like other neo-conservatives, he has
also been a chronic critic of the CIA for allegedly
producing overly optimistic assessments of the
capabilities and intentions of US foes, from the Soviet
Union to Iraq.
Lehman's nomination would signal a
major resurgence of neo-conservative influence in the
Bush administration after months of steady decline
resulting from their own overly optimistic predictions
about postwar Iraq.
For the same reason,
however, his nomination is likely to prove problematic,
not only to Democratic senators but to a growing number
of their Republican counterparts as well, beginning with
Intelligence Committee chairman Roberts himself, who, on
releasing the report last week, suggested he would not
have supported the war in Iraq if he had known that
Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.
"We
need to restrain what are growing US messianic instincts
- a sort of global social engineering where the United
States feels it is both entitled and obligated to
promote democracy - by force if necessary," Roberts said
at the end of May in what was taken by most analysts as
a parting of the ways between traditionally conservative
Republicans in Congress and the neo-conservatives in the
administration.
The third major candidate for
the job, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage,
would be the most easily confirmed, according to most
observers, but his close friendship with his boss,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as his
reputation as a realist, makes him unacceptable to the
neo-cons and other hawks around Cheney and Rumsfeld, who
vetoed his appointment as deputy defense secretary early
in the administration precisely because they thought he
was too close to Powell.
Armitage, one of the
original "Vulcans" who advised Bush during his 2000
presidential campaign and served in a senior Pentagon
position under Reagan, has generally been to the right
of Powell - he has signed a number of PNAC statements,
for example - but has also shown, quite openly, contempt
for armchair hawks, particularly many of the
neo-conservatives who have not served in the military. A
graduate of the US Naval Academy, Armitage is a combat
veteran who participated in covert operations in
Vietnam.
In a first shot at Armitage's
candidacy, the lead editorial in the neo-conservative
Wall Street Journal charged that he "has been
consistently wrong about Iran, which will be a principle
threat going forward, and [his] and Colin Powell's
philosophy at the State Department has been to let the
bureaucrats run the place. We can think of better
choices."
The Journal did not disclose whom it
had in mind for the CIA's top job, but Lehman has
written frequently on its op-ed page.
