WASHINGTON: The image was not an edifying one: the president of the United States a horse, his vice president, the rider.

But that is the image Sen Joseph Biden, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used to describe the power relationship between US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in a recent interview with the ‘National Journal’.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Biden’s account, sometimes talks Bush into pursuing a more conciliatory foreign-policy line, as he has done with North Korea or the United Nations from time to time.

“Like with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water. But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, ‘Un-uh,’ and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water. That’s my image of how it goes,” Biden said.

That is also the image which is gaining currency in power circles in Washington. When it comes to foreign policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as holding the reins.

While the mainstream media continue to refer to Bush as the captain of his own foreign-policy ship, hints that Cheney — a Republican right-winger surrounded by neo-conservatives, many with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party — is the dominant figure in Washington’s diplomacy have become too plentiful to ignore.

The most stunning example was disclosed in a recent ‘Washington Post’ article that assessed Rice’s performance as national security adviser. The authors reported that Bush had ordered Cabinet officials not to give any preferential treatment to Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) as US forces moved into Iraq last spring.

Imagine the shock felt by the State Department when, shortly after Bush gave the order, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 600 of his armed followers into southern Iraq in early April “with the approval of the vice president”.

Enforcing policy discipline, especially in a divided administration, is ordinarily the task of the national security adviser. But Rice, an academic whose substantive knowledge of foreign policy is largely confined to her expertise, the Soviet Union and Russia, has not been equal to the task.

Her failure in that regard, as well as Bush’s own passivity and inexperience, is precisely what has enabled Cheney to dominate the policy process, particularly with respect to the Middle East where Cheney’s views are almost entirely consistent with those of the neo-cons close to Likud and Sharon.

Even before Sept 11, Cheney had endorsed Israel’s selective assassination policy even as the State Department was denouncing it. One year later, Cheney told Israel’s defence minister, albeit privately, that he thought Palestinian President Yasser Arafat “should be hanged”.

That Cheney should assume such a dominant role is not surprising given the degree to which Bush depended on him during his presidential campaign and in the administration’s early days. And the fact that Cheney, who was asked by Bush to recommend his running mate in 2000, chose himself suggested that he felt confident that Bush would give him extraordinary powers if he won.

Similarly, Cheney played a much more important role than Rice, despite Rice’s much closer personal relationship with Bush, in the appointment of both cabinet and sub-cabinet national-security officials, beginning with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

Not only did Cheney personally intervene to ensure that Powell’s best friend, Richard Armitage, was denied the deputy defence secretary position, but he also played a key role in securing the post for Paul Wolfowitz.

Moreover, it was Cheney who insisted that ultra-unilateralist John Bolton be placed in a top State Department arms position, from which he has pursued policies that run counter to Powell’s own preferences.

Cheney’s own chief of staff and national security adviser, I Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a Washington lawyer and Wolfowitz protege, is considered a far more skilled and experienced bureaucratic and political operator than Rice.

Moreover, his own national-security staff, the largest ever employed by a vice president, has largely been chosen for both their ideological affinity with their boss and proven Washington experience. “They play to win”, said one State Department official.

With several of his political allies, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Middle East director Elliott Abrams, on Rice’s larger but more diverse staff, Libby “is able to run circles around Condi”, a former NSC official told IPS earlier this year.

Thus, Cheney played a key role in assigning responsibility for post-war reconstruction to the Pentagon, a major departure from past experience when the State Department was given the lead.

Similarly, Cheney backed the Pentagon’s exclusion of State Department officials, including Tom Warrick, a highly regarded Iraq specialist who oversaw the mammoth ‘Future of Iraq Project’ that involved hundreds of Iraqi expatriates and other experts, in the post-war administration.

It was also Cheney and Libby whose frequent trips to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the run-up to the Iraq war played the decisive role in distorting the intelligence process, in part by pressing on CIA analysts questionable evidence supplied by the INC and Pentagon hawks under Rumsfeld, according to retired intelligence officers.

More recently, it was Cheney who led the effort to deny Powell the authority to negotiate a new UN Security Council resolution that could have reduced the Pentagon’s control over the political transition in Iraq, even after the president had initially approved such a deal.

Even now, according to some sources, Cheney is actively trying to blunt Congressional pressure to reduce the Pentagon’s control over Iraq policy and fire several senior Pentagon hawks, beginning with Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, who are believed to have misled Congress about both the evidence used to justify the war and the post-war situation.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar and Biden, the committee’s ranking Democrat, explicitly mentioned Cheney in what amounted to a bipartisan appeal on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ television programme Oct 12 for Bush to assert his control over foreign policy.

“I would say”, Biden said, “Mr President, take charge. Take charge, let your secretary of defence, state, and your vice president know this is my policy, any one of you that divert from the policy is off the team”.

Lugar, a staunch, albeit moderate Republican, said he agreed with Biden, adding, “The president has to be president. That means the president over the vice president and over these secretaries.”

The past month’s announcements that Rice had hired Robert Blackwill, Bush’s former ambassador to India and reputedly a skilled bureaucratic and Republican infighter himself, as a top deputy and that she is heading up a new, inter-agency Iraq Stabilization Group appeared designed to create the appearance that she was at last taking the reins.

So far, however, there is little evidence that Cheney is prepared to dismount.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.

A FIVE-member delegation of MPs of the European Union headed by John Cushnahan would be arriving in Islamabad on Sunday as a follow-up of the EU’s resolution passed last year by its parliament pledging to ‘closely monitor the democratic process’ and to ‘stay engaged with Pakistan throughout its transition to democracy’.

Earlier on in 2002, the EU had sent a 100-member strong electoral mission to oversee the general elections. The mission went back home reporting that elections were ‘seriously flawed’, provoking an angry response from the Pakistan government.

As the mission arrives in Pakistan to draw up a balance sheet, the generals will pass a word to its members that the Constitution has been revived and a functioning parliament is in place and then ask, what is the fuss about?

But the ‘revived’ Constitution is actually a document called the ‘legal framework order’ (LFO) written by a handful of military officers in the GHQ. The document may have been written by a subedar major or a major-general in the GHQ, but it is not the will of the people expressed through the elected representatives which is what a Constitution is.

The opposition parties however have been demanding over the last one year inside and outside parliament that the document be placed before it they have boycotted parliamentary proceedings as the treasury is unable to maintain quorum. In return, the general has warned more than once that the whole system can be sent packing if the GHQ-prepared document is not accepted as the new constitution.

Two earlier military rulers namely Gen. Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq, brought their LFOs to parliament. One military ruler General Yahya refused to bring his legal dispensation before parliament. His refusal led to the break-up of the country and the surrender of tens of thousands of troops.

Fearful of the angry response of the legislators, the general has failed to fulfil a constitutional obligation, namely, to address the parliament’s joint session. No legislative work has been carried out by parliament. This is how a ‘functioning parliament’ is claimed to have come into being.

The military refuses to acknowledge that the Constitution is an embodiment of the national will. The generals insist on adopting as the constitution a document tailored only to advance the petty personal interests of some ambitious ones. As General Jehangir Karamat, the army chief who preceded General Pervez Musharraf, has said, the Legal Framework Order did not represent the will of the people but the ‘desire of the generals to re- write the civil-military equation on the terms of the military alone’.

Accepting the legal framework order means adopting the words of a few generals as the constitution of the country. The democratic opposition refuses to accept this and have decided to call the bluff of threats of dissolution.

The general needs indemnity for overthrowing the Constitution. A general ultimately going home without indemnity and without the levers of power in his hands is a dreadful prospect. That indemnity can be given only by parliament. It is in general’s own interests therefore to allow parliament to function.

It is also claimed that a free and independent judiciary as a fundamental requirement of democracy is in place. But the truth of the matter is that the judges have yet to take oath under the Constitution of 1973. When the general took over, he sent home half of the Supreme Court judges. Those allowed to work were asked to take a fresh oath of allegiance to Gen Musharraf rather than to the Constitution.

The bar has demanded that the judges be allowed to take oath under the 1973 Constitution but the demand is yet to be met. Disgusted, the Supreme Court Bar Association decided not to take any constitutional matter to the Supreme Court saying that the judges were not independent. Never before has there been such stinging criticism of the judiciary by the bar itself.

The civil society and its representatives have no say in the formulation of foreign policy. All elements of nuclear command and control ranging from nuclear weapons manufacture, custody, intelligence, operational control and the decision to press the trigger are in the hands of the military.

The disastrous policy of the so-called jihad in Afghanistan chasing the elusive ‘strategic depth’, the Kashmir issue, relationship with India and Iran are determined by the armed forces. Not only the civilians have no say, their voice of concern, even over miscalculated adventures such as Kargil, are denounced as treason.

The parliament is resisting efforts to subjugate its voice. It worries about the new edicts like that of the National Security Council totally excluding the civilian leadership from issues for defence and foreign policy. It is a dangerous concentration of powers in the hands of the generals who have been so close to the forces of extremism and jehadis pre-9/11.

Democrats are worried about continued governance by a sitting army chief, the power of the president to dismiss assemblies, the need to reform the election commission and the modalities for elections and a large number of laws, edicts and orders passed by the military rulers during the past three years which the parliament is asked to accept. To check this, the parliamentarians asked for a list of the edicts passed which they are expected to ratify, but the list has been denied to them.

General Musharraf came in with the promise of clean politics. At the end of four years politics is more muddied than ever before. Convicts were freed to form government. Those who were declared corrupt by the National Accountability Bureau were declared clean as soon as they joined the government.

The EU whose delegation is shortly arriving here must in accordance with its resolution ‘stay engaged’ with Pakistan throughout its transition to empowerment of the people.

The Indian announcement of 12 confidence-building measures (CBMs) seems to have generated immense excitement. Suddenly, it has rekindled hopes that may be a breakthrough between India and Pakistan is in the offing.

May be not, say Pakistani diplomats privately. They point out that most of these overtures may be a case of “old wine in new bottles.” The proposal of a bus service between Srinagar and Muzafarabad, for instance, was floated before the Agra summit in July 2001. The suggestion on releasing each other’s fishermen is also not new.

But the basic point is the contradiction between Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha’s announcement and the content conveyed to Pakistan’s High Commission in New Delhi. On a closer look, the raft of these measures is linked to each other, hence is “conditional.”

Pakistan’s High Commission has been told in New Delhi that the second round of talks will depend on progress in talks on the civil aviation issue. Even Yashwant Sinha was been categorical in saying that India would not enter into substantive talks without evidence on the ground that “cross border terrorism” was being brought to an end. But optimists insist that with the flurry of Indian writers and peace activists visiting Pakistan, “something must be cooking.”