David Frum, former Bush administration speechwriter and found of Frumforum, a daily blog folded into the Daily Beast, took some time to speak with the Brown Political Review.
Brown Political Review: First, we have a few questions on foreign policy. We’re approaching the ten year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. What’s the legacy of Iraq now, and what will it look like in twenty years?
David Frum: What Iraq will look like in a few decades probably staggers even my powers of imagination. But here’s where we are now. We have a mixed record of bad and good. The bad, we had a war that was much more difficult than expected and led to results that were much less conclusive than expected. We have the difficulty of embarrassment, that the reason the war was fought, the elimination of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, proved unfound. The weapons weren’t there. Iraq has emerged, or is in the process of emerging as a very different kind of country than what it was under Saddam Hussein. It does have representative institutions. We have seen the end of the human rights atrocities that occurred under Saddam Hussein, it’s no longer a threat to its neighbors and it’s returning to world oil markets.
BPR: The New York Times reports that Iraqis are acquiescing to Iranian pressure to use their airspace, shipping weapons and supplies to the Syrian regime. What are the odds that the Iraqi regime we established is no longer our ally?
Frum: The Iraqi regime we established doesn’t claim it’s an ally. It’s a partner but not an ally. It’s a government that represents a lot of different forces in Iraqi life, some of which are subject to Iranian influence, some of which are not. I don’t know about the validity of those reports about Iranian arms shipments to the Syrian regime. I would also caution everyone that the story of what is going on in Syria is much more complicated. It’s very hard to know who exactly are the good guys and who are the bad guys in the actual political context in Syria. Obviously the Assad regime is a terribly oppressive government but there are things about the insurgency that ought to give us pause as well.
BPR: What do you think the US should do in response to Syria, if anything?
Frum: I would advise a very circumspect policy in Syria. It is always possible in the Middle East to go from bad to worse. I think we should avoid assuming that all enemies of dictators are always democrats. And I think when we don’t have reliable knowledge and a good sense of who the local actors are, there’s a strong case for being very cautious about our initiatives.
BPR: Do think we should use the multinational coalition we used in Libya as a model for action in Syria?
Frum: I would be very hesitant to do that. First, if we look at Libya, I think the jury is still out on what we achieved. Muammar Gaddafi, although a horrific dictator and an abuser of his people, had ceased to be an important security threat to Western countries.
BPR: In the same vein, what do you think the President should do about Iran and what do you make of Netanyahu’s public pressure on the subject?
Frum: I have total sympathy for Netanyahu’s public pressure on the subject. If you are the country that is the declared target of an Iranian nuclear program, you’re going to want to rouse the world to act against that program. I think Benjamin Netanyahu has shown himself a responsible leader of his country and an eloquent spokesman for an embattled and endangered democracy threatened with extinction by Iran. I am cautious. And I’ve written a lot about this, about the efficacy of overt military force against Iran, you’re dealing with a nuclear program that’s very distributed, deeply embedded, and a regime that does have much deeper popular roots than the Saddam Hussein regime. So in stride, you have to assume you might get lucky and this might not turn out to be true, but in your planning, you have to plan that a strike on Iran is the prelude to a big war. I think it’s better to stick with the program that we’ve seen under both presidents Bush and Obama of tightening sanctions and an effective program of sabotage.
BPR: If you think the sanctions on Iran have been working, do you think the president has done enough to support Netanyahu and Israel as a whole?
Frum: President Obama, while he delivers some positive support to Israel, he does so late and grudgingly and in a way where he does not achieve the psychological results that you would expect from the decisions that he makes. On sanctions against Iran, for example, the financial sanctions were perceived as so important, but the president resisted and resisted and resisted the Kirk-Menendez bill. Then, when those measures were finally put in place, he was very hesitant about applying them. He has allowed himself to have a very personally bad relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu, culminating at the UN in September. Netanyahu was put in a position where he publicly asked for a meeting and was publicly refused. That should never happen.
BPR: You coined the term ‘axis of evil’ in a 2002 State of the Union speech for President Bush, which referred to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Ari Fleischer recently went on record saying he still has zero qualms about the use of that phrase. Do you?
Frum: First, people who write for a president need to very modest about what their role is in these speeches. Even if you draft a speech, you are not its author because you are anticipating what the president wants to say. You are serving him in much the same way that the people who work on other aspects of his program are serving him. When you look back on that, you need to be really careful about making claims about your role in things. It’s like writing movies, there are a dozen hands on everything important. I think that phrase was a very powerful description of a reality, that in 2002, was widely disbelieved, and in 2012, is a simple matter of fact. Back in 2002, the existence of the AQ Khan network from Pakistan that shared nuclear technology was a highly guarded government secret. It’s now widely known. Back in 2002 we were often told that it was simply inconceivable that Iran and North Korea would share technology. That’s an established fact. In fact, in December when there was an explosion at an Iranian missile proving ground, a few North Korean military officers who were there to review Iranian rocket technology were among the people killed. Back in 2002, we heard all the time that Sunni and Shiite groups never cooperated. Well the whole world now knows, and President Bush knew then, that Iran is the major bankroller of Hamas. So, the idea that there is significant cooperation among terrorist groups and state sponsors of terror and that they seek the world’s most terrible weapons is now completely conventional wisdom. The question to ask is not why would anybody have qualms about it, but do those people who rejected the phrase now feel a little bit silly, knowing that everything that President Bush said in 2002 has been corroborated and corroborated again.
BPR: We’re going to move on to domestic politics now. You founded New Majority, which is now in its third iteration at Daily Beast. What attracted you to new media?
Frum: I don’t know if it even makes sense at this point to talk about new media. I engage in radio, I engage in television, I write text journalism, which appears sometimes on printed paper and sometimes on the screen. If you write text, people read it on their computers, iPads, and phones. That’s where text goes and there just isn’t really a whole lot of choice about that. When you participate in the public discussion, you use every technological means that is available to you at the time. I’m a big enthusiast for Twitter, both as a consumer and as a producer. That’s the latest thing because that’s how you reach people.
BPR: Convention states that the GOP has two wings, one of which is economic, and the other of which is cultural and religious. You’ve argued in Frumforum and for the Daily Beast that this is a shotgun marriage that needs a new direction. Do you think Romney losing this election is the kind of wake-up call the Republican party needs?
Frum: I think if Romney loses the election there is going to be a lot of self questioning inside of the Republican world. We’re going to have a big debate about whether Romney was too extreme in his endorsement of the Ryan plan, or not extreme enough. But I think that the old model that said the social conservatives were the extremists and the economic conservatives were the moderates has really been called into question over the past four years. We have seen, under the impact of this terrible recent recession, the ability of economic issues to become the basis for extremism, too. The job of the Republican party is to champion policies that are pro-enterprise, that allow for business growth, that respect private markets. But building on the basis of the United States as it’s governed now in a way that is culturally modern is the challenge after 2012, whether Romney wins or loses.
BPR: What do you think Romney needs to do to win this election?
Frum: I think at this point, fifty days out, he has no choice but to execute the strategy he already has. This is not the strategy that I urged a year ago. But given the difficulties of communications in a vast presidential election, it’s very dangerous to change messages. So he is now going to continue to run as the candidate he’s chosen to be.
BPR: Is there a conservative figure to take the party in the new direction you’ve mentioned in your writing?
Frum: I think one of the great problems in the Republican world is that there’s a tendency to think the most important question to ask is, “Who?” My belief is that the most important question to ask is, “What?” We’ve seen that when the party is in thrall to false or impractical or extremist beliefs, then even a middle of the road candidate like Mitt Romney ends up being remade in the image of this extremist agenda. So we need to fix the agenda, then we find a candidate.
BPR: Bob Woodward’s new book paints a hazy picture of who is to blame for the debt ceiling crisis. Who shoulders that blame in your view?
Frum: I don’t have the kind of tik tok that Bob Woodward does. I was not invited to those rooms. He has considerable access. My question is why do we have these crises at all? Why is there a debt ceiling? It seems like an absurd instrument of government in the first place. In every other democracy, when the legislature approves spending levels that are higher than the tax levels the legislature has approved, it’s just presumed that the executive has authority to borrow the difference. It’s one of those things about the US government that seems wacky to me. The legislature gets to vote first to tax, then to spend, and then when there’s a difference, they have another vote about whether or not the executive is allowed to borrow. I don’t know why there’s a debt ceiling at all, and we wouldn’t have these intermittent crises if we didn’t have the ceiling. It is a sign of the way in which the practices of the US government have been fossilized to the detriment of the economy and common sense.