Who Sent Hadley?

Add the Stephen Hadley snafu to the long annals of failed Bush diplomatic initiatives. Last Saturday national security advisor Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin left the presidential bubble in Crawford to hold a surprise 45-minute roadside meeting with Cindy Sheehan. Did the two senior White House officials believe that their radiant presence alone could disarm Sheehan? Did Hadley and Hagin really think they could make Sheehan go away simply by expressing their condolences and smiling politely during her tirade against the war that killed her son? If so, the president's men once again badly misjudged the determination of their adversary.

There was no larger negotiating strategy behind this mission to Sheehan beyond naive we'll-be-greeted-as-liberators optimism. The moment that Hadley -- the top geopolitical advisor to the Most Powerful Man on This Planet -- spent 45 minutes with Sheehan, it became impossible to credibly dismiss her as a publicity-seeking nutcase rendered irrational by grief. The president's national security advisor is far too important to waste nearly an hour on missions of mercy to looney-tunes protesters. Do you think the foreign minister of Latvia would get 45 minutes with Hadley, even if he flew unannounced to Crawford? I can just picture the exasperated expression on Hadley's face if an aide announced that Helen Clark, the anti-war prime minister of New Zealand, was on the phone and wanted to talk about Iraq for the next three quarters of an hour.

Hadley still might have salvaged the situation by quickly blaming faulty intelligence for the abject failure of his meeting with Sheehan. But the Bush high command may have decided to finally retire that familiar excuse from overuse. In the end, the only thing that Hadley and Hagin accomplished was building up the stature and the credibility of Sheehan. With masterful negotiators like these, no wonder we have been so successful in thwarting the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.