-Caveat Lector-
Bush's Judgment of Putin
By Michael Kelly
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ipmk/20010626/cm/bush_s_judgment_of_putin_1.html
``I looked the man in the eye; I found him to be very straightforward and
trustworthy. ... I was able to get a sense of his soul. ... He's an
honest, straightforward man who loves his country. He loves his family. We
share a lot of values.''
--George W. Bush, June 16, 2001, on Russian President Vladimir Putin
``Mr. Putin was far from deserving the powerful political prestige and
influence that comes from an excessively personal endorsement by the
president of the United States.''
--Sen. Jesse M. Helms, June 20, 2001
To understand what put Sen. Helms in such a tizzy that he felt compelled
to publicly spank a president of his own party, you have to first consider
the matter of Sammy Sosa.
In 1989, Sammy Sosa played for the Texas Rangers, a baseball team
partially owned by one George W. Bush. Bush, who had only recently been
made the Rangers' chief executive and who had much to learn, took a sense
of Sosa's soul, and traded him to the Chicago White Sox. Considering that
nine years later with the Chicago Cubs, Sosa was in a chase for the home
run record, this was a mistake.
To further grasp the implications of Bush's judgment of Putin, and of
Helms' unhappiness over that judgment, you have to consider that baseball
was something with which Bush had some experience. He came from a baseball
family--his father played for Yale; his great-uncle George Herbert Walker
once owned 6 percent of the New York Mets--and he had played the game
himself in Little League and on a varsity level at prep school. He was a
lifelong avid fan, and he would turn out to be a natural at running a ball
team.
As the Putin example shows, Bush puts great stock in his gut instinct--his
ability to look into other people's eyes (he is forever talking about
this) and getting a sense of their souls. As the Sosa example shows, he is
quite capable of getting the sense completely wrong--even where he is
knowledgeable.
Now, you come to the presidency, Russia and Putin. Here, inarguably, Bush
knows very little. He cannot know a lot (at least firsthand) about being
president, because he has not been president for very long. He cannot know
a lot about Russia, because he had never been there. He cannot know a lot
about Putin, because he had never met him before this month's trip.
So what you have here is a situation where a prudent man would begin by
knowing his limitations--by admitting ignorance, proceeding with study and
basing eventual judgments on facts, not first impressions.
Vladimir Putin may be, as Bush feels, an honest, straightforward guy with
a perfectly swell soul who loves his family. On the other hand, he
indisputably is a guy who was willing to crush a rebellion in Chechnya
with vast and murderous force, to shut down the only independent
television network when that network criticized his government, to violate
arms-control treaties and to continue Russia's practice of selling arms to
states hostile to the United States. Also, he spent most of his career in
the service of the Soviet Union's KGB, which calls the quality-of-soul
issue into some doubt.
The worrisome thing about Bush is not, as his reactionary critics have it,
that he is an idiot who can't get anything right. He has, especially in
foreign policy, gotten it mostly right. He effectively warned China not to
try to eat Taiwan, which may avert a war. He moved the international
conversation on global warming out of a dead end by burying the dead Kyoto
protocol. He insisted on moving ahead with a necessary missile defense
against rogue nations. He has made these decisions largely, it seems, on
gut, and his gut serves him well.
No, what is worrisome is that Bush--and in this he seems dangerously to
resemble the foreign-policy-disaster-prone John F. Kennedy--does not seem
to understand, or care about, the limits of gut. He does not seem to want
to bother with the tedious business of study and fact-assessment that is
the process by which right decisions are most often arrived at--which is
even then not so often. He does not seem to want to work at the thing.
The idea that he does not know what he does not know does not seem to ever
occur to Bush. This is a problem and one that is a great deal more
consequential in the case of Putin than in the case of Sosa.
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