The imminent choice by US President George
W. Bush of a new director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), 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 Sen Pat Roberts, and its vice chairman,
Democratic Sen 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
centred around 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 him 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 exercized much
stronger oversight. Unfortunately for Goss, that was his
job.
The two other most prominently mentioned
candidates - neither of whom publicly confirmed their
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 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 terrorist attacks on New York and the
Pentagon, he spoke out in defence of Cheney's continued
insistence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
may have played some role in the 9/11 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 Defence
Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Deputy Secretary
of Defence Paul Wolfowitz.
After the 9/11 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 Hussein.
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 post-war
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 Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction
(WMD).
"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 defence secretary early in the administration
precisely because they thought he was too close to Powell.
In a first shot at Armitage's
candidacy, the lead editorial in the neo-conservative
'Wall Street Journal' charged "(he) has been consistently
wrong about Iran, and he and Colin Powell's philosophy
at the State Department has been to let the bureaucrats
run the place. We can think of better choices".
