Change requires a strategy

Change.

Courtesy of the New Hampshire primary and the candidacy of Barack Obama, change has become the new buzzword for presidential candidates.

I understand why many voters want a new style of governance in Washington after seven divisive years of the Bush team. But until a candidate defines change, it is nothing but a six-letter word.

The slipperiness of big words not backed by clear policy is on my mind this week, as President Bush sets out on a tour of the Middle East.

This trip is a coda to a Mideast policy based on grandiose terms such as freedom and democracy for the region. Even now, the president’s language reveals the flaw that has haunted his foreign policy: a failure to match words with a detailed strategy to bring them to life.

On Bush’s first presidential trip to Israel, he aims to activate Israeli-Palestinian talks begun at Annapolis, Md., in November. As early as 2002, the president called for a “two-state solution,” but he never put any political muscle behind the concept, focusing instead on Iraq.

Late in the day, he backed Condoleezza Rice’s push to restart a nearly dead peace process. This effort seemed largely aimed at placating Arab allies whose help Bush needed to isolate Iran.

Six weeks after Annapolis, talks have gone nowhere. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians have lived up to commitments made in a Bush-supported “road map”: The Jewish state has failed to freeze all settlement construction in Palestinian areas and dismantle illegal settlement outposts; the Palestinian Authority has failed to halt violence.

The United States committed itself at Annapolis to judge each side’s performance; there is little indication U.S. officials are taking up this burden. Without progress on these first steps, any move toward closing gaps on bigger, final-status issues is unlikely. And Washington has shown little interest in providing proposals to bridge these gaps.

Nevertheless, the president keeps up the grandiose talk. This week, he told the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot that he expected a comprehensive peace agreement to be signed “before I leave (office).” He added: “I’m an optimistic guy.” Such hypertalk will increase anti-American passions in the region when that impossible prediction fails to come true.

The president will also travel to Egypt. He and Rice used to make grand statements on promoting democracy there, but that kind of talk has ceased because of fear that free elections might boost Islamists. Meantime, presidential candidate Ayman Nour, a secular liberal whom Bush once championed, remains jailed on trumped-up government charges.

And Bush will visit Saudi Arabia, along with other Gulf countries, to bolster international pressure against Iran’s nuclear program. Here, too, big words not backed by clear strategy have tripped up the president .

Bush lumped Iran into the “axis of evil” in January 2002, at a time when Tehran was cooperating with the United States on Afghanistan. Iranian feelers on negotiations in 2003, just after the Iraq invasion – and before the insurgency had weakened the U.S. position – were ignored. The ouster of Saddam Hussein, who was replaced by an Iran-friendly Shiite government, wound up strengthening Tehran.

The White House never seemed able to figure out how – or whether – to match its verbal sticks against Iran with carrots sufficient to entice Iranian leaders. When a recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate found Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the White House was floored.

Now Bush is trying to persuade Gulf states that the United States still wants to curtail Iran’s nuclear energy program, which might yet produce materiel for a bomb. Yet U.S. goals have been so murky – rhetoric without a clear regional strategy – that our allies don’t trust us. Passionate phrases can’t replace clear policy.

So, when I hear stirring calls for change in U.S. policy, I’m not moved. I want details.

The next president will have to clean up the mess Bush has made overseas. Big words alone won’t do the job.