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BIGFOOT of GLOBAL DIPLOMACY |
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Bush strides the globe
like bull in china shop
By CHUCK McFADDEN
of TheColumnists.com
When he came to office two years ago, George W. Bush expected to be engrossed in domestic issues. Foreign affairs would not be the focus of his administration because he had a full plate of at-home things to push: tax cuts, school vouchers, privatization of social security, “sensible” environmental policies, removal of the capital gains tax, stem cell research.
China was a worry. Cuba was a pesky little thorn. Russia seemed to be coming around. There was that tedious mess in the Balkans and the murderous impasse in the Middle East. But those things were going to be taken care of by Colin Powell, the cabinet star.
Foreign affairs were not where the Bush Administration was going to make its mark. Making the U.S. safe for business--that’s where the Washington action would be.
Times have changed. The president’s nationally televised talk from his Texas ranch on how stem cell research was to be conducted seems a long, long time ago.
Now the president’s focus is largely overseas. He is seeking to eliminate Saddam Hussein, the thug who rules Iraq. The current conventional wisdom is that the more attention the Administration is able to focus on Iraq, the better will be its political fortunes. That’s because here at home, the domestic issues landscape could be certified as a Disaster Area for the Bush Administration.
The economy is in the doldrums; for a while there, we seemed to have a scandal-of-the-month involving the Bushies’ beloved big business and that may not be over yet--there are rumblings about Vice President Dick Cheney’s conduct of the affairs of Halliburton when he was CEO of that company; there are more rumblings about the president’s sale of stock in a company that later hit the skids; the stock market tanked.
On September 12, 2001, President Bush provided real leadership. He justifiably won high praise for bringing the nation together and pointing it in the right direction. We were going to unite the world and defeat terrorism.
Then along came the president’s campaign to eliminate Saddam Hussein, where the Bush Administration has given us all an object lesson in how not to conduct an international effort.
If you decide you have to move militarily against an enemy in today’s world, you do a number of elementary things. What follows breaks no new ground. It is International Relations 101.
First, you make sure that everyone in your administration is aboard on the president’s policy. If you don’t agree, you resign. You don’t have cabinet members wandering all over the landscape voicing differing positions.
You quietly build up as much evidence as you can against your enemy as fast as you can - documenting atrocities, aggression, development of weapons of mass destruction, whatever you’re worried about. Much of it you already have in hand.
You quietly talk to key members of Congress, showing them the evidence. You swear them to secrecy, crossing you fingers and knowing it’s only a question of time before someone blabs.
Knowing that, you concurrently, quietly and as quickly as possible round up your allies and your potential allies and try to get them aboard, using that dramatic, documented evidence you have been energetically gathering.
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Saddam Hussein to picture him ...as the Green Goblin of Freedom? |
You gather together the most powerful journalists in the United States. You give them a closed-door briefing on the situation and what appears to be the best avenue for resolving it.
Very soon after, because for sure someone will blab, you do a nationwide television address, laying out the evidence.
Immediately after that, maybe the next day, you go to the United Nations for official support. You by now have as many of your allies aboard as possible. Perhaps the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. goes before the Security Council with the evidence. Remember Adlai Stevenson at the Security Council with his blown-up photographs of missile installations under construction during the Cuban missile crisis? Remember how effective that was? Adlai was “prepared to wait until hell freezes over” for a coherent Russian reply to the damming evidence. None came. The Kennedy Administration won the day, domestically and internationally.
That’s what you do. The Bush Administration has done it exactly backwards.
First, the president announced the United States would, one way or the other, take out Saddam Hussein. Then he started consulting with our allies. Then the Administration started talking about evidence of Saddam’s evil intentions. All along, the president and his advisors made plain that they had little use for an interfering, wearisome Congressional role in all this.
The media, essential toward rallying the country behind any international undertaking, received no message, then vague messages, then contradictory and confusing messages. There seemed not to be any effort to formulate a coherent argument for doing what the administration wanted to do.
The administration announced first that it did not have to go to Congress for approval of what amounted to a war. Then it said that, well, it would.
The administration contradicted itself not for a day or two, but for weeks on end. The secretary of state said one thing, the secretary of defense said another. The old hands around Bush The First weighed in publicly with their doubts and their advice. Let a thousand blossoms bloom. No one knocked heads together behind closed doors.
Talk about the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
The Bush Administration may yet pull off a coherent strategy to deal with Saddam, starting with the president’s speech before the General Assembly on September 12. But time is passing and the record is not encouraging.
The frustrating part of this is that the Administration, struggling through its sea of ineptitude, is undoubtedly right in its attitude toward Saddam Hussein.
Saddam is a vile man who has firmly established a track record of committing aggression whenever and wherever he thinks he can get away with it, and sometimes doing it anyway when any sane person would know he couldn’t get away with it.
He doesn’t want international arms inspectors poking around in Iraq, asking questions about development of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. He has used poison gas against his own people. He thought he could invade Kuwait in 1990 and no one would pay attention. He plainly has a screw loose and is capable of gigantic miscalculation. We cannot ignore that.
We have had plain lessons from history. In the late 1930s, Winston Churchill was a lonely voice warning Europe of Adolph Hitler’s evil intentions. He was tut-tutted by those who knew better, who thought him a warmongering, old-fashioned, simple-minded hack whose time had come and long gone. Hitler could be handled by the more sophisticated among us, said those in charge in Britain and France. Hitler had signed an agreement. There would be peace in our time.
Sixty million lives later, everyone agreed that Hitler could have been stopped with a minimal united effort in 1936 or 1937 and Churchill had been right all along.
Too few people today act as if they’ve learned anything from that.
Most world leaders agree that, yes, Saddam is an evil man. Well, yes, he does want to move aggressively against his neighbors. Wars against Iran and Kuwait prove that. Well, yes, we do have to admit he seems to be hiding something about whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction. Well, yes, he has repeatedly defied United Nations resolutions. But let’s not do anything about it. We might destabilize the Middle East.
The current “stability,” of course, consists of a continuing bloody war of terrorism in Palestine and Israel, murderous mullahs screaming for war against the West on a daily basis to half-educated men, continuation in power of half a dozen of the world’s most despotic rulers, Al-Qaeda plotters being given a free hand and financial support, and a burning resentment of free societies.
Mustn’t destabilize that.
The Bush Administration may yet pull it off. But if they do, their success will have more to do with this nation’s overwhelming military and economic power than it will with deftness of strategy.
© 2002 by Charles
M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
The other illustration is adapted from a cartoon in IMSI's Master
Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA. The "burning" Bush is an official Bush portrait
with special effects added.
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