There are three different arguments being raised against what I said. The first is that the Bush administration has not in fact been rude, tactless, etc., but rather nice--they went to the UN, tried to get others' support, etc. The second is that the Bushies may indeed have been rude, but legitimately so--they're just speaking the tough truths appropriate to the tough new world. And the third is that however one might characterize what they've been doing, there really isn't much of an alternative path, so my criticisms are beside the point.
Objections one and two obviously contradict each other, and can't both be correct. I think the second is a more legitimate a point than the first, because what gestures the Bush administration has made toward others have been so clearly grudging and partial that it's hard to paint them as genuine or substantial. Any seasoned foreign policy practitioner with a modicum of common sense would have known from the start that the administration couldn't go to war simply by executive fiat, and would have taken the cultivation of a domestic and international mandate as a serious first order of business. (For an example of what such an approach would look like, see the efforts of Bush 41 before the Gulf War.) Instead, Bush 43 had to be dragged kicking and screaming to Congress and to the UN, and basically told both bodies "I demand you give me large, vague authority to do something quite radical." With the UN, moreover, the administration made very clear publicly that this was something they felt was moderately desirable rather than necessary, thus gratuitously dissing the organization even as they were requesting something from it.
The administration has tried hard to link the case for war with Iraq to 9/11 and al Qaeda, moreover, even when extremely few knowledgeable people outside its ranks find such a connection strong or compelling. This repeated reliance on weak but politically charged arguments makes it seem like they are trying to pull a fast one on people, as does the fact that they have never clearly repudiated the numerous statements by many people inside and near the administration that sought (entirely unsuccessfully so far) to tie Iraq to 9/11 or the anthrax mailings.
This behavior regarding Iraq has been entirely of a piece with the administration's general handling of foreign policy toward the rest of the intertional community in the prior year and a half. From the rough handling of Kyoto, the ICC, and various other major treaties, to the agricultural subsidies and steel protections, to the cool dissing of Nato in the wake of 9/11, to the repeated rude and dismissive comments from a number of administration and related officials (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, etc.), the Bushies have made it clear that they think little of the general international institutional order and architecture that they inherited--and that they believe they have the power and the will to bypass it freely as and when they see fit.
And they have couched their treatment of Iraq, finally, in a general context of preventive actions against a number of enemies, thus giving credence to the notion that what they are doing re Saddam is not a one-off operation to handle a special, extraordinary case but rather the first in a series of operations.
All this is the backdrop against which the current demonstrations and resentment should be seen. None of this means I don't support an agressive approach to Iraq or radical Islamist terror (I do), nor that I excuse the shenanigans of the French and Germans or the outrageousness or frivolousness of many lefty antiwar types (I don't). A full portrait of the situation, though, has to take all considerations into account.
As to what might have been done differently, finally, I can sum it up in two words--Blair and Pollack. Those two have been the spokesmen for bold policies against terrorists and against Iraq that nevertheless take the general feelings of the international community and the practical realities of diplomacy into account. If the Bushies could have followed their lead, making it seem like they were reluctant warriors who recognized the seriousness of what they were proposing and felt a need to justify it through honest and intelligent argumentation and bold, generous-spirited policies, I think much (although not all) of the current hullaballoo could have been avoided.
tb@sothere.com |
