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| 2006-07-11 |
| Bush Basher's 'vindication' By John Podhoretz It's "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," Time magazine declares on its cover this week. Interesting. President Bush's antagonists and enemies have spent nearly five years perfecting a caricature of his foreign-policy and warmaking views, and now self-satisfiedly declare that their caricature of Bush has been overtaken by events. The profound difficulties of the war in Iraq have, in the eyes of the caricaturists, exposed the failure of Bush's supposedly swaggering foreign policy. The United States isn't standing so tall, walking so proud or throwing its weight around so baldly after three-plus years in Iraq, say the caricaturists. Why, even the president himself has said he shouldn't have used the wanted-poster "dead or alive" formulation when talking about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The Taliban are back making mischief in Afghanistan, and bin Laden is still on the loose. And where is all the talk of the "Axis of Evil" now that North Korea is test-firing missiles and Iran is declaring its intention to go nuclear? "Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing," write Time's Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar. "Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation." Cleverly put - but absurd. Bush's stance toward North Korea has been basically unchanged since the summer of 2002, when Pyongyang announced it had created fissile material. The administration did not react with belligerence at the time, choosing instead to place the issue in the hands of a six-nation task force. The North Korea policy has always been the real-world refutation of the ludicrous suggestion that Bush always seeks to go it alone in the world. Indeed, a more sensible critique of the Bush administration's North Korea policy would be to call into question the use of this multilateral negotiating system with a regime as recalcitrant as Kim Jong Il's. Maybe what was needed was more belligerence, not less. Or maybe, just maybe, the North Korea problem indicates that presidents are somtimes faced with lousy options all around. Belligerence seemed out of the question with North Korea, since the regime seems capable of starting a war at a moment's notice. Every president since Ronald Reagan has decided that the only prudent course with Pyongyang is some form of bribery, since the prospect of war on the Korean peninsula could lead to the deaths of millions and the potential for a breakout of regional hostilities with no good foreseeable outcome. Whatever is the case, George W. Bush never swaggered toward North Korea, never used "cowboy diplomacy," whatever that cutesy phrase might mean. Still, we can all see how world events and the war in Iraq have made Bush's foreign policy seem problematic. But have the problems discredited the Bush foreign-policy doctrine? That's a different question. Think, for example, about the scoffing references to Bush's "Axis of Evil" conceit - the notion that Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed special and particular threats to America and the world. It was denounced as simplistic and belligerent when it was first presented in the 2002 State of the Union address. Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking for the Democratic mainstream, called the phrase "a big mistake." But now, four years later, some Democrats are trying to outflank Bush and the Republicans on the right by offering Bushite solutions to the North Korean crisis. For example, former Defense Secretary William Perry has called for a preemptive strike against Pyongyang. This is especially startling, for Perry's signal achievement during the Clinton years was negotiating the so-called Agreed Framework, under which the United States basically paid the North Koreans billions not to go nuclear - an agreement that North Korea clearly violated with impunity, since it announced it had created fissile material only 16 months into the Bush presidency. Remember, the hallmark of the Bush doctrine is preemption - the explicit statement by Bush and his administration that the United States will consider preemptive attack as a tool against the spread of weapons of mass destruction that might menace America. So, even as Time magazine is declaring an end to the Bush doctrine, Bill Clinton's defense secretary has offered what one must assume is a serious proposal to act preemptively against North Korea before it develops a workable long-range missile. What this suggests is that the Bush doctrine has succeeded in doing what doctrines do - it has made preemption a thinkable strategic and tactical option for the United States. And that won't change no matter who the next president is. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #6 titel sondz like teh ghey |
| Posted by: muck4doo 2006-07-11 15:05 |
| #5 "No blood for bark soup!" [ fixed it for you, Mr. Bat ;) ] |
| Posted by: eLarson 2006-07-11 10:22 |
| #4 Liberals are a weird bunch. They claim to fight for the downtrodden minority, but then call them racial slurs when the president appoints them to a post never before occupied by a minority. He has done that 3 times now, and the libs squeal like pigs. They claim they are peace lovers, but they sound like they want to go to war in Sudan,NKor,and Iran to me. They want to double taxes and "redistribute the wealth" , but most are fantastically rich and have become so using the current economic model. They are publically defeatist and anti American, anti global economy, anti economy in general, but goddamn you if the stock market slips a few points. They are split right down the middle on Iraq, some care about nothing but the environment, some want to annihilate 1/3 the worlds population so the frogs can screw more freely, some want us to let the U.N. run our domestic and foreign policy for us. They are a walking, talking , anti-american enigma to me. As a party they can't even state what they stand for. I don't understand them. I doubt I will ever understand them. They are too spitefull and divided in their loyalties to be trusted. They hate what America (the icon) stands for, and I cannot abide that. As for me, I say- PAX AMERICANA |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2006-07-11 09:20 |
| #3 Time is right. It's long past time for gunboat diplomacy |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2006-07-11 07:50 |
| #2 Leave it to Time magazine to draw the wrong conclusions. Congress and the president should send a clear message to Korea punctuated with an air strike against North Korean missile launch facilities. Will the Koreans strike back? Probably, but Korea is no longer our problem with the South wanting to unify. If North Korea launches a missile that even comes close to any territory if the US or its allies, the republican congress will pay with seats. We are past time to deal with this problem. |
| Posted by: badanov 2006-07-11 06:57 |
| #1 Oh sure! But now all those preempting neo-con Jooos are taking control of Japanese . . . um . . . Well, I'm sure it will benefit Israel somehow! No blood for . . . um . . . kim-chi! |
| Posted by: Hysterical Moonbat 2006-07-11 06:55 |