Blair May Be the Last Brit to Support Bush

It doesn't take much to find the rumbling noise of discontent among our allies. Overseas, lacking the 24/7 spin that Bush and his friends managed for so long, no one is fooled by Republican attempts to blame others for Bush's failures. In January, Bush will begin his seventh year in office and excuses for failure are still being laid at the feet of others. I can think of no similar situation in my lifetime though the closest to come to mind was Nixon and Kissinger. Both Rumsfeld and Cheney worked for Nixon but appear not to have learned anything. At least Nixon and Kissinger, for all their faults, had significant foreign policy successes in Russia, China and the Middle East. Of course, it followed from engaging in dialogue with our enemies and taking on difficult diplomacy with others.

Tony Blair, for whatever reason, threw in with George W. Bush's foreign policy from the beginning despite serious concerns that there were a number of issues that Bush left unaddressed. Blair's judgment has taken a beating for some time now (he lost two foreign secretaries whose wiser counsel he ignored) and it increasingly appears the British have serious doubts about his leadership despite Blair's more moderate position than Bush on a number of foreign policy issues (one could argue that Blair at least tried to repair some of Bush's more glaring blunders).

Here's an article by a well-known British commentator, Alice Miles, of The Times:

I REMEMBER a time when, following an event of international significance, the world would wait to hear what the president of the United States had to say about it. In Britain we would have an impatient few hours before America had woken up. Because until the President had spoken, you couldn’t be sure of even the shape of what might happen next.

On Monday we woke to the news of North Korea’s nuclear test, and to a banal commentary of people who didn’t really know what to say about it. Just when you wanted some real insight and even facts, the Today programme again indulged its tiresome obsession with Iraq, focusing upon whether Tony Blair’s actions there had made this move by Kim Jong Il more likely blah blah. That didn’t surprise me. What did was my instinctive reaction when George W. Bush did speak much later in the day. There he was gravely intoning on one or other news channel that this “constitutes a threat to international peace and security”, and “Oh sod off” I heard myself muttering, with no desire to hear any more. It was as much ennui as irritation: I didn’t believe he would have anything useful to say and found it faintly annoying that he spoke as though the world would care.

(snip)

I hate what the US has done to itself and, were I an American, I would hate it even more. I hate the fact that we now look to China for international leadership. Yes, I know, it’s their side of the world, but time was . . .

Mills makes it clear that she would prefer a functioning United States that was still capable of offering leadership in world affairs. For some time now, despite the photo ops and spin, the leadership we are supposed to provide has been dissipating under Bush. Our moral credibility and political credibility have been damaged, and by overextending our military in two wars that have been handled poorly by the Bush inner circle, our physical ability to get things done is increasingly limited militarily, economically and diplomatically.

Let me offer a metaphor, imperfect though it be. In bars around the country, it's not difficult to find a drunk who can talk tougher than even President Bush about foreign policy but no one takes such a drunk seriously (though if the drunk says, 'nuke 'em,' there are talk show hosts who lap up such nonsense). Our foreign policy isn't quite that bad, yet, but talking tough while failing to use or even understand the wide range of foreign policy tools that have been built up over sixty years is one of the main failures of the Bush Administration. The other great failure is simply not being clear about what we're trying to accomplish beyond the vague generalities that Bush trots out for his public relations moments. Another metaphor that might apply is that Bush is the CEO of a company who aggressively and repeatedly says he's going to make more profits for the company than the last guy but he never gets around to saying how he's going to do that and almost never listens to people who have a general idea of what you have to do. Such a CEO borrows a lot of money, sets things into motion and builds a lot of enterprises that sound good but that never do much, and in the end the CEO never seems to notice that company is in worse shape than when he started. When it comes to foreign policy, we're not Enron, but Bush is working on it.

For sixty years, Republicans and Democrats embraced a bipartisan foreign policy. It was not a perfect situation, and there were breakdowns from time to time, but generally it was superior to what existed before and it was superior to what Bush has given us for the last six years. Bush has repeatedly thumbed his nose at experts who tell him things he doesn't want to hear. If Bush's gut instincts when it comes to foreign policy and a wide range of other issues were justified even half the time, one might have to respect his judgment, strange though his process would seem to be. But his gut instincts, when we have a sense of how they play out, are suspiciously consistent with the worst kind of right wing ideological nonsense that has been around since at least the 1950s, and one could argue that there's a strain of dated jingoism in his foreign policy that goes back to the 19th century. That so many other Republicans put up with such nonsense for so long will go down in the history books as one of the great mysteries of this era. The nonsense will continue unless voters send a clear message to Washington.