Controlling Bush's Image Trumps Foreign Policy
No presidency has ever been so obsessed with image-making; not even Reagan's staffers went to such lengths. Yesterday, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times noted this about Bush's trip to the UN this week:
Keep in mind that George W. Bush has not tried diplomacy with Iran. Yes, late last May Bush offered some carrots to Iran if Iran would stop their nuclear processing but it was a diplomatic move that could hardly be called serious; Condi Rice put the package together by herself in a single weekend. A public relations campaign can be mounted in a single weekend; serious diplomacy, though, requires work, an effort, that when it comes to foreign policy, the Bush Administration refuses to take on. Various foreign policy experts have pointed out that you can't delegate diplomacy and you can't just use diplomacy as something you check off on a box for a to-do list before going to war.
We are in a dangerous period. An Iran with nuclear weapons is not a good thing but a United States that no longer bothers to try real diplomacy is also a dangerous thing. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have already seen developments they did not anticipate in their rush to war in Iraq, though the experts warned them; a number of things that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were warned about have indeed taken place.
In her second to last paragraph, Maureen Down added:
Bush clearly seems interested in regime change in Iran. He has tried regime change in Iraq and has clearly shown that he has no idea what he is doing and is even oblivious to the enormous chaos he has unleashed. So far, the chaos in Iraq is somewhat confined to that country. If Bush drags us into a third war, this one against Iran, with the real purpose of another regime change, the war has a high chance of spilling beyond Iran's borders and may involve players who had no interest in war just five years ago. In addition, this is not 2002; the world sees Bush and the United States very different than it did four years ago. If we have another war, we are likely to see things we cannot control.
All day the White House team went through gyrations not to run into the Iranian leader, fearful to be caught in the same frame, perhaps haunted by memories of that picture of a smiling Rummy shaking Saddam's hand in 1983. It seemed a little silly, given what a tough guy W. acts like. If he ran into the punk, he could have just told him to quit processing uranium and moved on....
Keep in mind that George W. Bush has not tried diplomacy with Iran. Yes, late last May Bush offered some carrots to Iran if Iran would stop their nuclear processing but it was a diplomatic move that could hardly be called serious; Condi Rice put the package together by herself in a single weekend. A public relations campaign can be mounted in a single weekend; serious diplomacy, though, requires work, an effort, that when it comes to foreign policy, the Bush Administration refuses to take on. Various foreign policy experts have pointed out that you can't delegate diplomacy and you can't just use diplomacy as something you check off on a box for a to-do list before going to war.
We are in a dangerous period. An Iran with nuclear weapons is not a good thing but a United States that no longer bothers to try real diplomacy is also a dangerous thing. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have already seen developments they did not anticipate in their rush to war in Iraq, though the experts warned them; a number of things that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were warned about have indeed taken place.
In her second to last paragraph, Maureen Down added:
W. has now put so many bad actors in the terror stew—some of whom hate each other—and has justified so many sketchy programs under the war-on-terror rubric, that the word "terror" is losing all meaning and just becoming a marketing slogan. Even the Republican columnist Peggy Noonan says that W. can sound like "a historical drama queen."
Bush clearly seems interested in regime change in Iran. He has tried regime change in Iraq and has clearly shown that he has no idea what he is doing and is even oblivious to the enormous chaos he has unleashed. So far, the chaos in Iraq is somewhat confined to that country. If Bush drags us into a third war, this one against Iran, with the real purpose of another regime change, the war has a high chance of spilling beyond Iran's borders and may involve players who had no interest in war just five years ago. In addition, this is not 2002; the world sees Bush and the United States very different than it did four years ago. If we have another war, we are likely to see things we cannot control.
posted by Craig at 5:25 PM
1 Comments:
The word 'could' is the most dangerous flaw in the preemptive strike principle. Bush's analysis of the world over the last six years has been, to say the least, somewhat short of reality.
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