For a President spectacularly unprepared for the nuances of foreign policy, Bush’s tenure has been marked largely by his actions on the international stage. The list of blunders, big and small, is long and telling.
June 2003: The Bush administration withdraws $34 million in promised funding from the United Nations Population Fund.
The Bush administration withdrew the aid because it claimed the Fund provides aid to Chinese government agencies that force women to have abortions – even though a U.S. State Department fact-finding mission disproved these allegations. Meanwhile, millions of women in the 142 countries that the UNFPA provides family planning and reproductive health services in continue to suffer and die.
This represents an extreme dereliction of duty by the world’s only superpower, the ultimate in international arrogance. The Bush administration would rather have the perpetuators of war crimes go free than face the possibility that American soldiers who commit abuses could be indicted by the international community.
June 2003: Bush’s America acts just like him: childish, arrogant and overreaching.
The President reigns over a Washington that embarrasses itself by renaming French fries in the House cafeteria, lies about a war in which nearly 200 Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians have died, and, with a post-war Iraq in shambles, moves on with swords drawn towards Syria and Iran.Once again Americans are fearful as they travel throughout the world. Even worse, we are embarrassed to admit where we've come from - disheartened by our government's actions in the world and despairing of the woe we have wrought.
June 2003: Bush turns prisoners of war into “unlawful combatants” and sidesteps Geneva Convention rules on the humane treatment of prisoners. The prisoners are denied rights under U.S. federal law and do not have access to federal courts.
Bush’s actions in Cuba make a mockery of the goodness that he claims America stands for. A country that violates international law and treats prisoners who have not been tried or found guilty with such injustice is no better than the terrorists who violently take the lives of the innocent. This is not how a modern, democratic society is supposed to function. We are no longer victims, but perpetrators as well.
Bush can’t have it both ways. He claims that America is the protector of freedom and democracy, but he refuses to act when human rights are grossly violated, when nations are begging for American help, when Liberians are placing the dead bodies of their loved ones at the gates of the American embassy.The U.S. may be acting according to its strategic interests, but Bush’s rhetoric suggests that the mighty, benevolent America does otherwise.
September 2003: A Congressional report announces that the United States maintained its dominance in the international arms market in 2002, especially in sales to developing nations. No mention of hypocrisy, but the report is dripping with it.
October 2003: We are shocked, shocked to discover that the U.S. has a bad image in the Muslim world. A Bush panel recommends better presentation of Washington’s side of the issues.
We agree with the panel that the root of the problem might very well indeed be the American policies themselves. What are we going to advertise to the Muslim world – that they should like us because we are the protectors of democracy? Bush’s arrogant behavior towards the rest of the world during the build-up to the Iraq campaign and continuing to the present has proven to the world that our commitment to democracy is casual at best. It’s a convenient way to couch our true intentions, which involve oil, American business interests and a conservative plan to oust Saddam Hussein that evolved long before Bush announced he would run for president.Bush’s continuing swagger and outright hypocrisy cannot be explained away by catchy public relations slogans. What will change minds in the Muslim world and beyond is for the U.S. act as a partner instead of a bully, a builder instead of a protector of its own interests and anything other than an out of control occupation force.
December 2003: Bush, terribly misinformed, believes “that the growth of democracy is inevitable. It is not.”
December 2003: Bush restarts the arms race. Because those negotiations are going so well in North Korea and Iran.
December 2003: Three ways to criticize Bush’s foreign policy: Bush as the evil creature of corporate interests; Bush’s preemption doctrine as weakening international legitimacy and fraying global alliances; Bush’s implementation is not up to snuff – his grand strategy is hampered by his lack of follow-through on details.
March 2004: The three pillars of Bush’s foreign policy: First, America will defend the peace by opposing and preventing violence by terrorists and outlaw regimes (grade: C minus). Second, we will preserve the peace by fostering an era of good relations among the world's great powers (grade: F). And third, we will extend the peace by seeking to extend the benefits of freedom and prosperity across the globe (grade: D).
May 2004: Bush exhibits a total lack of humility in response to the abuses at Abu Gharib.
May 2004: The WMDs turn up in North Korea, not Iraq.
The discovery that North Korea may have supplied uranium to Libya poses an immediate challenge to the White House: while President Bush is preoccupied on the other side of the world, an economically desperate nation may be engaging in exactly the kind of nuclear proliferation that the president says he went to war in Iraq to halt.Yet to listen to many in the White House, concern about North Korea's nuclear program brings little of the urgency that surrounded the decision 14 months ago to oust Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush has been asked about North Korea in recent months, he has emphasized his patience. He does not refer to the intelligence estimates that North Korea has at least two nuclear weapons, or to the debate within the American intelligence community about whether North Korea has spent the past 18 months building more.
