Bush's new team trapped in old times

By RUPERT CORNWELL

LONDON - We should, I suppose, feel comforted.

United States President-elect George W. Bush may not be the brightest streetlight on the block, but in choosing his cabinet he has at least assembled old and wise heads around him.

That foolish smirk is unlikely to consign us to Armageddon.

After all, Dick Cheney (Vice-President), Colin Powell (Secretary of State), Donald Rumsfeld (Defence) and the rest saw off the Soviet Union without mishap for the world.

And if the worst does come to the worst, there's always President Bush the Elder, under whom the future Vice-President and Secretary of State served in the most harmonious national security team in recent US history.

They may not be of spellbinding novelty, but no safer pairs of hands could be imagined.

Anyway, since when was the youthful brilliance of rulers any guarantee of success?

President John F. Kennedy changed the generational guard, sweeping away the fusty old Eisenhower era.

But, with his reputation sealed for eternity by an assassin's bullets, we all too easily forget how Kennedy's impetuosity produced the Bay of Pigs and, indirectly, the Cuban missile crisis.

Worst of all was the Vietnam War, America's greatest foreign-policy calamity, testament to the errors of judgment of young men known as "the best and the brightest."

So why this lingering unease? Simply because age, experience, achievement, wisdom and long memory have drawbacks as well as virtues.

We all know how generals are prone to fight a new war using the methods that brought victory in the last. So, too, and equally understandably, are the managers of peaceful crisis.

Theorising is fine, but who among us, when confronted by a problem, does not reach for what worked in the past? And in the case of the incoming Administration in Washington, we are not even talking about the recent past.

This is not so much a Bush restoration as a Ford restoration - harking back to a quarter of a century ago when Rumsfeld was the White House chief of staff, succeeded by Cheney as he moved to the Pentagon.

But the world has changed hugely since 1975; indeed it has changed hugely since 1991, when Bush sen, Cheney and Powell gained their triumph, at once so overwhelming yet so inconclusive, over Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Last month, the CIA published its latest assessment of how the world might look in 2015 and of the forces that are already shaping that world. Of the seven so-called drivers, or most important factors, only one is conflict as we understand it.

The others are all non-military, among them climate change, demographics, the internet, economic globalisation and financial collapse.



Wars, the subject with which the Bush team is most familiar, will tend ever more to be within countries, rather than between them, and mostly in countries so poor as to be of little international significance. Alongside those, however, will be "transnational" problems, of drugs, crime and weapons proliferation.

The new masters of Washington know all that, on paper. They trundle forth platitudes about the need to revamp security policy "to meet the challenges of the new century."

But they are elderly men, their attitudes moulded in earlier times. Faced with an untidy new millennium, when great events will defy pigeonholing, their instincts will be to build walls around America.

I wish Powell, Rumsfeld and Cheney well. But you do not have to be a crude ageist to have your doubts.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT

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