Two excellent articles have popped up over the past couple days examining Bush’s mind-numbingly painful inability to actually work with the global community to accomplish his goals, putting America in a position of being the agressor ‘rouge state’ that the rest of the world fears.
First, from Newsweek, The Arrogant Empire. This was first given to me at work by one of my co-workers, I also saw it posted by Tom Negrino. It’s a long and very in-depth article, and shows well how pitiful Bush is in comparison to his predecessors:
In diplomacy, style is often substance. Consider this fact: the Clinton administration used force on three important occasions — Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo. In none of them did it take the matter to the United Nations Security Council, and there was little discussion that it needed to do so. Indeed, Kofi Annan later made statements that seemed to justify the action in Kosovo, explaining that state sovereignty should not be used as a cover for humanitarian abuses. Today Annan has (wrongly) announced that American action in Iraq outside the United Nations will be “illegal.” While the Clinton administration — or the first Bush administration — was assertive in many ways, people did not seek assurances about its intentions. The Bush administration does not bear all the blame for this dramatic change in attitudes. Because of 9-11, it has had to act forcefully on the world stage and assert American power. But that should have been all the more reason to adopt a posture of consultation and cooperation while doing what needed to be done. The point is to scare our enemies, not terrify the rest of the world.
Secondly, from Slate, Turkey Shoot: How Bush made enemies of our allies, also posted by Tom Negrino. While the Newseek article compared Bush to the administrations of the past fifty years, the Slate article focuses more on comparing Bush’s administration to Clinton’s. Bush doesn’t come out looking any better.
Rather than make the most of the extraordinary support the world offered the United States after 9/11, the Bush administration seems almost willfully to have squandered it. In the months after Sept. 11, the administration withdrew from one international agreement after another, from the ABM treaty to the International Criminal Court. It refused NATO’s offer of help in Afghanistan, eventually accepting some troops from NATO-member countries but no shared NATO decision-making. Though German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder braved a no-confidence vote to win parliamentary approval to put German combat troops in Afghanistan, he received little thanks from Bush. Nor was he seriously consulted as Bush formulated his Iraq policy, despite (or perhaps because of) growing signs of German discomfort with that policy. Cut out of the loop, Schröder then began to exploit the anti-Iraq war backlash among German voters and become a fierce opponent of Bush on Iraq.