The Bush Administration's Radical Foreign Policy Now Lies in Ruins

Published on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 by the Anniston Star (Alabama)

Editorial

The two pillars that support the Bush administration’s foreign policy- the doctrine of pre-emption and democratization by gun- are crumbling. The invasion of Iraq was supposed to show the strength of these pillars; instead, it has revealed their weakness. In principle, the doctrine of pre-emption, which President Bush unveiled in a June 2002 speech at West Point, subverted our country’s foreigh-policy traditions and flew in the face of hundreds of years of international law. In practice, it has given us an unprovoked and unnecessary war that has made us significantly less safe. Pre-emption, as embodied in the Iraq campaign, always had a certain cowboy aspect to it. The idea was that by making an example of Saddam, we would show terrorists and rogue states the dire consequences of so much as casting a dirty look at the United States. But what’s happened is that the Iraq war has created many more jihadists than we have killed, and it has provided them with the perfect training ground for honing their deadly skills. Meanwhile, those other members of the Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea, don’t exactly seem to be quaking in their boots as a result of our show of force in Iraq. As a report from Tehran in Sunday’s New York Times explained, the Iraq quagmire has only emboldened Iran’s leaders. As for the president’s professed zeal for spreading democracy across the globe, who can take issue with it so long as the discussion remains at the level of grandiose rhetoric? But it bears mentioning that the United States has always touted itself as the champion of democracy, even during the Cold War when it was overthrowing democratically elected governments or blocking free and fair elections from Iran to Guatemala to Vietnam to Chile. What Bush and his neoconservatives advisers brought to the table was a willingness to back up their idealistic talk with cruise missiles and fighter jets. Of course, Bush and the neocon architects of the Iraq invasion were not all that idealistic in practice. Their initial idea of democracy in Iraq was to install slimy exile Ahmed Chalabi as leader of the country. The administration also dragged its feet on holding direct elections, but Iraqi Shiite powerbroker Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani forced Bush’s hand. Still, some creative interpretation of the events of the past couple of years has enabled the president’s supporters to credit his policies for the spate of elections in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. Now that we’ve learned that honest elections do not guarantee desirable outcomes, it will be interesting to see how the pro-Bush historical revisionists explain recent developments in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere. President Bush took office as a man who knew little about the world, and seemed to care about it even less. He was a nearly empty vessel into which radical neoconservatives could pour their half-baked ideas. We now have had nearly three years to see the catastrophic results of their ideas put into action. The country still has three more years of this presidency, but it cannot waste another day in charting a new course for the nation’s foreign policy. That project must begin by renouncing unprovoked wars and by acknowledging that democratization must be an organic, homegrown affair, not something outsiders impose with guns and bombs and exiled con men. © 2006 The Anniston Star