President Bush has not always had the best of relations with the United Nations. He is, after all, the president who dispatched John R. Bolton as his ambassador there. The envoy did little to disguise his distaste from time to time with the "multilateral" approach.
Six months before the United States invaded Iraq, the president went to New York to tell the U.N. how much he respected the organization — but he'd put Saddam Hussein in his place with or without U.N. approval.
So here comes the president making his farewell address to the world body on Tuesday.
He will focus on how the United Nations and other multinational organizations can be improved to meet current challenges, said Stephen J. Hadley, the president's national security advisor, in a preview of the speech that sounds something like an eight-year report card, with some check marks for "needs improvement."
"He believes," Hadley said in an interview with a small group of reporters, that the United Nations "has an important role to play in meeting the challenges of this new century," along with NATO, the European Union and other multinational organizations.
But Bush will also say that the U.N. needs to do better at confronting the challenges facing the world today, according to the senior aide. Among the president's complaints: The world body has been "glacially slow" in placing peacekeepers in Sudan.
Look, also, for reminders from the president directed at Russia to adhere to the commitments it made in the wake of the crisis in Georgia. Bush will be directing that message at Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. Neither President Dmitri Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin are expected to attend, Hadley said.
As for the U.N. and other such organizations, Hadley said the president would recommend "that we need to have an attitude of partnership, not patronizing; that you want to partner with governments that are making the right decisions for their people — that are governing justly, investing in their people, understand the power of markets to lift people out of poverty."
For eight years, Stephen J. Hadley has observed President Bush up close.
As the president's national security advisor throughout the second term, and on many occasions before that as the deputy national security advisor, Hadley has traveled the world with the president, has cleared brush with him in Crawford, and briefed him daily on developments around the world.
He was there for discussions leading up to the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan? 9/11? North Korea? Iran? Hugo Chavez? Human rights and the Beijing Olympics? Russia? Georgia? All were in his portfolio.
If the word "crisis" was attached to it -- save, perhaps, for the stock market and Katrina -- it is only a slight exaggeration to say there's a good chance the debate went through Hadley's office at the northwest corner of the White House West Wing.
The vantage point for tracking the president could hardly be better.
Bush, Hadley said today, is "remarkably unaffected by eight years as president in terms of who he is, what he stands for, what he thinks of himself."
He spoke with a small group of reporters in the Roosevelt Room, across a small corridor from the Oval Office.
He was responding to a question about whether in its second term the administration had adopted a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to both foreign policy and economic matters, compared with the first term.
"Situations change," Hadley said, referring specifically to the Middle East, which he said was "a very different place" these days compared with 2001. Therefore, he said, the way the administration approaches it has naturally undergone change.
Of course no presidential aide wants to say the boss has eased back on his core principles. Nor would one want to say that the boss had not grown and adapted over eight years.
Hadley put it this way: "We've tried to be flexible. We've tried to learn."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Stephen J. Hadley, left rear next to Vice President Dick Cheney, in the White House Roosevelt Room, 2006. Credit: Eric Draper / The White House
When the United States and Russia signed an agreement in the spring setting the two countries on a course toward civilian nuclear cooperation, the pact, subject to hard negotiations, was cheered as "a symbolically laden illustration of post-Cold War tolerance between Washington and Moscow," the Los Angeles Times' Megan Stack reports from Moscow.
That was in May. Then, in August, the brief Russian-Georgian war broke out over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia.
The civilian nuclear agreement has become one of the casualties.
President Bush announced today that the United States is pulling out of the agreement, under which the U.S. and Russia would have shared knowledge about civilian nuclear technology, and Russia would have become a repository for spent nuclear fuel.
In a message to Congress, Bush said he was taking the action "in view of recent actions by the Government of the Russian Federation incompatible with peaceful relations with its sovereign and democratic neighbor Georgia."
Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to spend a half-hour today with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in Tbilisi. The meeting went more than twice that--and when he emerged, Cheney was spitting fire toward Moscow.
No surprise there, the Telegraph of London notes. No one had expected the vice president to mute his sharp line toward Moscow over its brief war with Georgia last month.
The newspaper wrote:
In comments that seemed intended to goad the already tetchy Russian government, the vice-president unequivocally took Georgia's side in its conflict with Moscow while warning the Kremlin that its relationship with the West was now in 'grave doubt.'
If that didn't catch the Kremlin's attention, there was the vice president's line that the United States was "fully committed" to Georgia's eventual membership in NATO.
Writing for the Los Angeles Times from Tbilisi, Alexandra Jinjikhashvili notes that "Cheney's remarks were likely to further inflame Moscow, where officials have railed against U.S. alliances with the former Soviet states."
It didn't help that Cheney was standing with Saakashvili, known in Moscow as a "war criminal" for launching the military operation in early August meant to control the breakaway province of South Ossetia.
Bush administration officials have said they are considering rearming Georgia after its military got battered in the uneven showdown with Russia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia last month.
But in the $1-billion aid package that the administration announced Wednesday, there was nothing set aside for weapons. Rather, the money is generally for economic and humanitarian assistance.
"It is not yet time to look at the questions of assistance on the military side," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained to reporters at the State Department.
That suggests, in a diplomatic manner, that the administration is reluctant to provoke Moscow at a time when the situation in the Caucasus region remains unstable.
"Thus far," Georgetown University's Charles Kupchan told the Los Angeles Times' Paul Richter, "it looks like the administration is going out of its way to avoid military assistance that would indeed be interpreted by Moscow as a serious provocation."
Besides, he said, while the United States may ultimately help rebuild Georgia's military, “with Russian troops still on Georgian territory I don’t think the U .S. wants to be in the business of sending lethal weaponry to the Georgians.”
He may have something there.
Countdown to Crawford can't help but recall the five U.S. Marine Corps Humvees that went AWOL in Georgia -- and presumably are now in Russian hands. They were about to be used to train Georgian military forces, but have been missing since Russians took control of the port where they had been parked.
In any case, Kupchan said, the United States and its European allies are pressuring Russia to get its troops out, Humvees or not. So, he added, "they are studiously avoiding steps that could fuel a major reaction."
Which brings us to the visit to Georgia Thursday by Vice President Dick Cheney....
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Vice President Dick Cheney with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan. Credit: Associated Press
It may be hard to believe in Pol-World, what with Barack Obama basking in the Denver glow and heads spinning over John McCain's vice presidential pick (Sarah Palin Who? Governor of Where? Alaska?).
But there remains a White House. The president is there. And as always, trouble is a-brewing.
It's just that few are paying attention.
Never mind. At the White House, there are distractions aplenty from Pol-World.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin (remember him?) saw the hand of President Bush in the conflict in Georgia. He told CNN on Thursday that the White House may have ginned up the Georgian military push into South Ossetia (which brought a Russian response) to benefit McCain's campaign.
If his aides are telling him that, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said of Putin, then he's...
Maybe the Russians can help President Bush cut into the federal deficit?
When they moved into Georgia earlier this month, Russian soldiers confiscated five U.S. Humvees that were being shipped to the Georgian military as part of an American training program. They were apparently taken at a port awaiting shipment inland.
Most of the U.S. military trainers in Georgia were Marines, and Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, was asked at a Pentagon news conference Wednesday what he intended to do about the Russian capture.
"I think we're going to send the Russians a bill and tell them, you know, 'Either pay up or give us back our vehicles, guys,'" Conway said.
Total value? About $540,000.
-- Peter Spiegel
Photo of Humvee in Baghdad: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times
It must have been something like going back to school after the final vacation, with senior year drawing to a close.
President Bush and Laura Bush flew back to Washington today after a late-summer break at their home in Crawford, Texas.
Tony Fratto, a deputy White House press secretary, put it this way for reporters aboard Air Force One this afternoon:
We're on our way back to Washington, D.C., I guess the last visit to Crawford for August, for last August, last hot August in Crawford for the president and all of you. So we're on our way back to Washington.
It was back to business -- at least for a short while.
The president was planning to have dinner with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, just back from three weeks of intensive travel (Georgia two weeks ago, Europe and Iraq last week, and the Middle East this week).
"You can expect them to have extensive discussions about where things are going with respect to Russia and Georgia," Fratto said.
And, oh yes, he said, the president had been doing some work at the ranch: Bush took a phone call Tuesday night from President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia.
As for Crawford, that one-light crossroads town seven miles from Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch, the president's departure will likely make no difference -- nor will his departure from the presidency.
What was a top national security aide to Vice President Dick Cheney doing in Georgia shortly before Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's troops engaged in what became a disastrous fight with South Ossetian rebels -- and then Russian troops?
Not, according to the vice president's office, what you might think -- if your thinking takes you into the realm of Cheney giving his blessing to the Georgian's military operation.
To be sure, Cheney has been a leader of the hardliners in the administration when it comes to standing up to Russia -- to the point that the man who ran the Pentagon as the Cold War came to an end during the administration of the first President Bush has been seen as ready to renew that face-off with Moscow.
It was Cheney who visited the Georgian embassy in Washington last week to sign a remembrance book as a demonstration of the administration's support.
And yes, Joseph R. Wood, Cheney's deputy assistant for national security affairs, was in Georgia shortly before the war began.
But, the vice president's office says, he was there as part of a team setting up the vice president's just-announced visit to Georgia. (It is common for the White House to send security, policy, communications and press aides to each site the president and vice president will visit ahead of the trip, to begin making arrangements and planning the agenda.)
The White House disclosed on Monday that Cheney would hurry over to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Italy next week, almost immediately after addressing the Republican National Convention on Labor Day.
And so it was that a team from the vice president's office, U.S. security officials and others were in Georgia several days before the war began.
It had nothing to do, the vice president's office said, with a military operation that some have said suggests a renewal of the Cold War.
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo of Saakashvili and Cheney in 2006. Credit: David Bohrer / The White House
Never mind that Vice President Dick Cheney will actually keep his speaking date at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul on Monday night. Or that he never intended to stick around after that anyway. Or that President Bush is speaking that night and also making a hasty exit.
It was just too delicious to ignore: We're talking about the possibility that Bush had found a way to keep the man with an even lower job approval rating than his far from the Twin Cities while the GOP meets there.
It didn't take much to suspect that Bush had something other than national security on this mind when he decided to send Cheney to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Italy next week in the midst of the Republican convention. Can you say "political security?"
Conspiratorialists immediately began fanning the fires, spreading the word that perhaps Bush's real motive in sending Cheney to the Caucasus region was to get him as far from the upper Midwest as possible. The Far East and Middle East are relatively quiet now; a trip there would have been too obvious a detour.
Enter the latest hot spot.
Besides, Georgia is probably somewhat more distant from St. Paul than the vice president's infamous "undisclosed location." With fears of a new Cold War, what better place to send the nation's premier cold warrior?
But Megan M. Mitchell of the vice president's press office had a six-word no nonsense message for any who suspected that Cheney was splitting the country rather than letting himself be seen anywhere in the vicinity of Republicans about to nominate Sen. John McCain as their presidential candidate:
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
