October Surprises All Year Long

23.04.2003 By Jim Hoagland In this election year, incumbents and challengers alike do not have to worry about only an October surprise in foreign policy. They have to worry about surprises that lie in wait well before then. The vulnerability of the presidential campaign calendar to unexpected crises abroad was illustrated in recent days by an uprising in Haiti and a diplomatic tussle with Libya over the plea bargain President Bush has struck with Moammar Gaddafi. These events demanded reactions and, in the case of Bush, some form of action. Haiti and Libya crowded onto a foreign affairs agenda already jammed with Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and the region formerly known as the Middle East (now expanded by the adjective "Greater" in Bush's biggest diplomatic initiative of the year). To a breathtaking extent, the administration has made its return to office a hostage to its management of distant upheaval. With a deeply polarized electorate and an uneven economy offering evidence to each side for the case it wants to make, the Bush-Cheney campaign can easily pass or fail on its contention that it has made America safer from menace abroad. "From a set of circumstances two and one-half years ago in which it could be said that the United States had no effective strategy for dealing with terrorists" and "in which you could launch attacks against the United States with relative impunity and pay no significant price . . . we have moved to a safer world," asserts a senior White House official. Adds another official who knows Bush's thinking on how foreign policy will affect the campaign: "We will show that we have changed the strategic landscape." Bush-Cheney will project an unfinished narrative that needs to be completed in a second term: We have overcome the negligence of our predecessors (negligence that necessarily stretches to the Reagan administration's failures in the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing) and mobilized the forces of good to defeat global terrorism. The horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, and the interdependence brought by globalization and 24/7 communications help account for this campaign's deep connection of foreign policy and politics. But it is striking how much it the Bush administration has confidently invited, from the president's "axis of evil" State of the Union speech two years ago through his assertive enunciation of a doctrine of preemption and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a deeply personal foreign policy that is built more around Bush's values and beliefs than the skill of his diplomats and generals or any theory of international relations. That is another way of saying that it is a high-risk strategy in an election year for dealing with the many moving parts of a world that not even the president of the United States controls entirely. The term "October surprise" originated in 1980 when Reagan campaign manager William Casey sought to discredit the Carter administration for allegedly negotiating with Iran for an election-eve release of American hostages. But real surprises do not occur on schedule, nor do they originate only at the White House. Libya provided a small example last week when Prime Minister Shokri Ghanem suddenly departed from the negotiated script and denied that Libya had ever accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. After two days of U.S. pressure, Tripoli disowned the remarks and repeated the incomplete but clear admission of Libyan guilt that Gaddafi had accepted. The administration has agreed to lift sanctions, remove Libya from the terrorism list and re-establish diplomatic relations if Gaddafi follows through on renouncing his secret nuclear weapons program and his chemical and biological arms. Libya is also turning state's evidence on the extensive nuclear arms trade masterminded out of Pakistan. On balance, it is a painful but appropriate plea bargain with a dictator who directly controlled the intelligence agency that bombed not only Pan Am 103 but a French airliner in 1989 and has continued to murder Libyan dissidents. But it is disturbing to hear administration officials exult in the deal or present it as a model to pursue with other bloodstained dictators. It is also, as the slippery Libyan prime minister reminds us, premature to label any deal with Tripoli as final. From the standpoint of its own interests, the White House is well advised to postpone substantial rewards to Gaddafi to a date that is after, say, Election Day. By making his foreign policy one that is of, by and for George W. Bush, the president also makes any unpleasant surprises to come a campaign problem of, by and for George W. Bush.