Will we see a new Bush?

Jonathan Freedland, Guardian News Service, London

The American weekly satire show Saturday Night Live used to have a neat spin on the last Republican president to serve two full terms.

First it showed Ronald Reagan as most people thought they knew him -- a genial old buffer who was hardly the sharpest pencil in the box. But then, behind closed doors, there was a surprise. Saturday Night Live's Reagan was suddenly revealed as an energetic, high-IQ superman -- conversing with Leonid Brezhnev in Russian, scolding the Iranians in Farsi, analyzing military data at computer-speed.

This Reagan, the TV show suggested, was the real president -- hidden behind the bozo exterior.

With Reagan's heir was sworn in for his second term on Jan.20, the men around George Bush seem keen to give him the Saturday Night Live treatment.

Chief strategist Karl Rove insists his boss sees the same papers as the rest of the team but.

Perhaps this is indeed the real George Bush who has, after all, built a career by exploiting his enemies' tendency to underestimate him. Or maybe it's wishful thinking, a clue to what kind of president his aides hope the second-term Bush will be.

For a second inauguration offers the chance for a new start. Previous occupants of the White House have sometimes used their second bite of power differently from their first -- looking to their historical legacy, rather than mere re-election, replacing a narrow, partisan agenda with one that seeks to serve the larger, longer-term national interest.

In his first term, for example, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire". In his second, he sought an accommodation with Moscow, even coming close to agreeing total nuclear disarmament with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Might Bush repeat the pattern, leading in the next four years in a strikingly different direction to the past four?

The skeptical answer is that he'll be lucky to lead anywhere at all. Recent second terms have been notoriously unproductive, with an uncanny knack for miring the incumbent in scandal.

Nevertheless, Bush is ambitious, setting out grand goals, foreign and domestic, for this second spell in office. As he said immediately after his victory last November, "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it."

The likeliest scenario, at least in the sphere of foreign policy, is that he will use that momentum to serve up more of the same. On this reading, the U.S. will not rush for the exits from Iraq but will, in the president's words, "stay on the offense".

Iraqis will vote at the end of the month, Bush will hail the ballot as a great day for freedom -- but he will not pull the troops out. Instead he will continue the current policy of Iraqification, training the country's own security forces until, as he puts it, democracy can endure even without the presence of U.S. guns. If that takes years, so be it.

It's even conceivable that Bush will use his new lease on the White House to extend the project. He speaks with fervor of his mission to democratize the Middle East -- believing it to be a goal equal to Reagan's vision of a free eastern Europe -- and there are some logical next steps.

Iran would be the obvious new front, which could explain the weekend revelations that U.S. special forces have been on the ground in that country, scoping out nuclear sites for future military attack. Far from feeling chastened by the Iraq experience, Bush 2 might feel as if its work has only just begun.

There are some pointers in this direction. Note how, despite the cull of Bush's first-term cabinet, the key hawks are still in place, starting with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These two leopards are not changing their spots any time soon. Note too the elevation of Alberto Gonzales to attorney general: As White House counsel, he commissioned a memo justifying torture and described the Geneva convention as "quaint". Meet the new team -- same as the old team, with teeth just as sharp.

One last factor would suggest an unremittingly Bushite second term. Republicans, pumped by their November success in the House and Senate, are in confident, aggressive mood. The latest conservative obsession is contempt for the United Nations, with Kofi Annan firmly in their sights. With this as his flank, Bush will be under pressure to keep the rudder tilted right.

For all that, it is not delusional to hope that a new Bush could yet surface -- one more like the probing, thoughtful homme serieux described to Newsweek. The crucial witness here is the woman who appeared before the senate last week, Condoleezza Rice. She is no Colin Powell, but by placing such a close confidante at the state department, Bush has upgraded the status of diplomacy itself. Perhaps just as important, Rice's deputy is to be Bob Zoellick, a veteran of Bush's father's administration -- and an old-style Republican internationalist a la James Baker. That could augur well for a more engaged, alliance-conscious approach to U.S. foreign policy.

Advocates of this view cite two items of evidence.

First, they say that the neo-cons have been discredited: They promised that "old Europe" could be ignored without consequences and yet the consequences have been severe, leaving the U.S. alone in its task of Iraqi training, for example, when French or German help was badly needed.

Second, runs this argument, circumstances have changed: Witness the recent Ukrainian episode, which brought Europe and America together against Russia. If the Bush administration does transform itself, the clearest proof will come in the Middle East.

In the first term, Bush kept his distance. Now, with Mahmoud Abbas rather than Yasser Arafat leading the Palestinians, hopes are high that Washington will get stuck in. If that happens, with Rice taking a hands-on role, applying pressure to Ariel Sharon as well as Abbas, then we will be looking at a genuinely new second act. If, however, the demands are all one way -- insisting only that the Palestinians reform, crack down on terror and democratize -- then we will know the script has stayed the same.

None of this is entirely in Bush's hands. If U.S. public opinion turns yet harder against the war in Iraq, he may have to cut and run, whatever his intentions now. The rhetoric will certainly be grand tomorrow, as it always is -- but it will be reality that decides.