Bush Foreign Policy Failures Will Continue

It's not a hard prediction to make. Bush will continue to bungle America's foreign policy either through incompetence or through ideologically flawed assumptions. There are times when Bush seems to set himself up for failure. Four and a half years ago, Afghanistan was a winnable war but Bush was anxious to move on to Iraq for his own reasons.

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note believes the Bush Administration is once again setting it self up in a different way: by making failure a more likely possibility in Lebanon for ideological reasons:

John Bolton spent four months and made approximately 70 journalist and editorialist calls setting low expectations for the embryonic UN Human Rights Council.

Had he spent nearly this amount of effort working to actually secure a Human Rights Council that met American expectations, we would probably have succeeded far beyond expectations.

John Bolton is now undermining the UN international force to be deployed in Lebanon.

Read the rest. Unlike his father, George W. Bush doesn't think much of the UN; even multilateralism seems largely to be a public relations tool for domestic politics. Who knows, maybe Bush is still rebelling against his old man, but his river of errors just keep rolling on.