BUSH FOREIGN POLICY: BANKRUPT IN THE 1920's, BANKRUPT TODAY
Re: This is not a political party issue.
You got to be kidding... <gg> Who provided the planes that flew the attorneys to Florida to fight for the Imposter in the Bush vs. Gore litigation? Can you say Enron and Halliburton?
Of course this is a political party issue. Don't be naive.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Here's a useful view as to the deliberately small-minded and bad foreign policy that Bush seems to be operating under:
washingtonpost.com
At Odds With the Real World
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, July 30, 2002
The geographical center of George Bush's foreign policy is not, as you might think, deep in the heart of Texas but in the Massachusetts of Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican senator who sank Woodrow Wilson's dream of putting the United States into the League of Nations. "His 26 years in the Senate had been 26 years of uncompromising advocacy of assertive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by strong armed forces," Robert Caro writes of Lodge in his biography of Lyndon Johnson. Strike those years in the Senate and the same could be said of George Bush.
But just as Lodge's views were at odds with the real world, so are Bush's. Alliances work to America's benefit -- not the other way around. The post-World War II international institutions that the United States fostered -- everything from the United Nations to the World Bank -- proved to be useful to this country. They are examples not of dreamy idealism but of hard pragmatism. We need the world as much as the world needs us -- and needed us in the 1920s and 1930s, when the world was heading toward war.
Bush is finding that out the hard way. He is now trying to assemble a coalition to topple Saddam Hussein, by war if need be. It is not in itself a bad idea, but it needs to be sold to our allies in Europe and friendly states in the Middle East as not in our interests alone. Yet the same president who is trying to make that case started off by renouncing or rejecting international agreements, such as the Kyoto treaty on the environment, that he and other Republican ideologues simply did not like.
Early on, the administration expressed unhappiness with various peacekeeping endeavors -- Bosnia, the Sinai -- that were in fact costing us little and, better yet, seemed to be working. Some of these activities had the whiff of nation-building to them and this, as Bush said in his debate with Al Gore, was something the United States should not attempt. Bush cited Somalia, where a military mission "changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong." He then, more or less, issued a doctrine:
"And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building."
The result has been a weird compromise in Afghanistan. That country and nearby regions of Pakistan remain unsecured. Nonetheless, the administration has limited nation-building to the capital, Kabul. It's only a matter of time until the rest of the country reverts to poppy growing and terrorism. We may have to return.
This application of doctrine regardless of the facts has become a Bush characteristic and has produced some contorted diplomacy. Back in June, for instance, Bush pronounced that Yasser Arafat should be a man without a country. Once again, this is not a bad idea. But it is not a policy. Bush did not say how this could be done and what would happen if, as expected, the Palestinians elected Arafat in a truly democratic fashion. Bush apparently left it to Secretary of State Colin Powell to figure things out.
So Powell quickly suggested that maybe Arafat could stay as a figurehead, and Arafat, inveterate liar that he is, pronounced it a capital idea. Just exactly why a one-time guerrilla leader and full-time terrorist would suddenly be content with greeting schoolchildren and attending international conferences not even Powell could explain. We have heard nothing about the idea since.
Throughout Europe, politicians and media types are scratching their heads. They never understood Bush's Palestinian policy and, more important, his apparent determination to go to war with Iraq. They were put off early on by an administration that bristled with contempt for international treaties but now wants everyone to enlist in a crusade they don't quite endorse. They are looking, in vain, for consistency.
As it happens, the Europeans caught on to Bush before the American public . In various polls, the voters here give Bush high marks for foreign policy, particularly his handling of international terrorism. But even the war on terrorism has not been handled well. As Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) points out, the United States botched the operation at Tora Bora by using Afghans to flush out al Qaeda and Taliban forces. The Afghans apparently did business with them instead.
Bush's problem, and our own, is that he keeps trying to apply a dated ideology -- the wisdom of Henry Cabot Lodge -- to a world where it still does not fit. The Massachusetts senator was a unilateralist. We tried that route once, and it didn't work. There's no reason to believe it will work now. |
