Condi: The Problem with Big Thinkers

• Share

The most dramatic moment of Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission last week--her confrontation with former Senator Bob Kerrey--was also the most revealing. Kerrey was hammering Rice about the President's now famous "fly swatting" remark. Bush had asked Rice for a comprehensive strategy for dealing with al-Qaeda; he didn't want any more futile pinprick attacks. "What fly had he swatted?" Kerrey demanded. And a minute later: "Why didn't we respond to the [bombing of the U.S.S.] Cole? Why didn't we swat that fly?"

Rice replied that she had been "blown away" by a "brilliant" speech Kerrey had given in which he suggested the best way to avenge the Cole was to "do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein. That's a strategic view. And we took the strategic view. We didn't take a tactical view." Earlier, Rice had described her problems with Richard Clarke's first al-Qaeda action memo: it was too tactical; it didn't consider the larger picture, the strategic impact on the volatile situation in Pakistan of any U.S. actions against the terrorist bases in Afghanistan. Indeed, the distinction between strategic and tactical thinking, which Rice mentioned repeatedly, is crucial to understanding the Bush Administration's foreign policy and why it has gone so wrong. It's also a good way to understand why the Clinton Administration's foreign policy wasn't such great shakes, either.

Strategic and tactical are wonky words, tossed about with impunity by policy sorts. Strategic thinking is comprehensive, long-term, theoretical; tactical thinking is more limited. Tactics are, at best, the means to the strategy's end--the practical, concrete actions to be taken. The Clinton Administration was, arguably, the least strategic in recent memory. In fact, Bill Clinton offended old-line strategic types by raising economic policy, which was considered a lesser art, to the same status as strategic policy in his meetings with foreign leaders. Clinton did make the strategic decisions to expand NATO and push the Middle East peace process. But almost all his other initiatives were tactical, reactions to crises--in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans and Iraq. The most notable example, the "fly swatting" that Bush reacted against, was Clinton's decision to launch cruise missiles against a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a chemical factory in Sudan after al-Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.