"How Very Foreign"
By Brian Morton, Political Animal column
Baltimore City Paper
First noticed at Radio Free Albemuth
Bit by bit, the Bush administration's combination of xenophobia and high-handedness is coming back to bite it. A year ago, it spent untold amounts of time and effort browbeating the United States' regular political allies into supporting a pre-emptive strike into Iraq on the basis of intelligence information that many of the allies felt was shoddy at best, and treating the United Nations like it was a bunch of preschoolers who didn't know enough to make "adult" decisions.
The administration pushed for a U.N. resolution, only to withdraw the effort when it saw it wouldn't get the needed votes. There was spying on various allies using the British as a cover, and one of the Bush administration's strongest foreign policy relationships to date, with Mexico, was jeopardized when the Mexicans were threatened with retaliation via jobs and trade if they didn't straighten up and fly right. For the better part of six months, you could make a pretty decent case that the probable author of U.S. foreign policy was Vito Corleone: "Nice little country you have there--it would be a shame if something happened to your aid budget."
Irony, something this administration has seen no shortage of in its three and a half years, could be scooped out in shovelfuls. While now the Bushies talk about establishing a working democracy in Iraq, they didn't have much respect for the working democracies that were our allies in NATO. Turkey's leaders were put between a United States that wanted not only acquiescence to an Iraq invasion but also use of Turkish bases and airspace to do it, and the Turkish population, which was overwhelmingly against an invasion, fearing another flashpoint on its southern border with the troubles arising from the Kurdish population. When Turkey's leaders wisely came down in favor of the wishes of their own citizenry, U.S. officials all but demanded that they contradict the wishes of their own people in order to do our bidding.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost. More than 90 percent of the Spanish people were against going to war in Iraq, and in the wake of last week's terrorist bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid and the deaths of 200 people, Spaniards concluded that were it not for the center-right leadership of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, their troops wouldn't be in harm's way in Iraq and their nation never would have drawn the attention of what now seems to have been an al-Qaida attack. And this came about because Aznar was one of the few European leaders who stood next to George W. Bush in the Azores a year ago and declared that his country would support an invasion.
What a difference a year makes. Despite the fact that there have been no weapons of mass destruction found and no visible ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida demonstrated, Bush is campaigning as if he is a "war president" skilled at foreign policy in a dangerous world. He is correct in that the world out there is a dangerous one--but it is becoming more and more apparent that much of that danger has been brought about because of the foreign policy ineptness of his administration, not in spite of it. What's worse is that since the president has declared war on yet another abstract noun (we still haven't defeated poverty, cancer, or drugs), there is no way to determine when we can declare victory. Like the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the whims of this war are to be decided solely at the discretion of this president, who argues that nobody has oversight over his actions in its regard--not the Supreme Court, not the Geneva Convention, not the United Nations, and not the U.S. Congress. It's a war because he says so, and it ends when he says it does. This is the example of democracy we wish to set for Iraq?
For too long the Bush administration has peddled its Manichean viewpoint of the world--black and white, good and evil, with us or against us. Whereas the president's father, George H.W. Bush, spent years in public service, serving as ambassador to China during some of our country's touchiest years in dealing with the world's most populous nation, this president wields foreign policy like a blunt instrument with as much subtlety as Pope Alexander VI cutting Latin America in two in 1493.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are already attacking Sen. John Kerry's foreign policy views from their typical simplistic vantage point, that "there are evil people in the world, capable of any atrocity," as the vice president told an audience in Kentucky recently. While there have always been evil people in the world, in the past we didn't inflame them into taking their aggressions out on our allies due to childish demands that those allies do what we want or else. Nearly every other president we've had has known better.
The policy of the last three years hasn't been foreign. It's been downright alien.
Policy wank: politicalanimal@citypaper.com.
© 2003 Baltimore City Paper. All Rights Reserved.
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