Foreign policy debacle

Bush may have sounded good on foreign policy, but what he said made no sense

by Seth Gitell

Now comes the ultimate outrage. Everyone, pollsters and pundits alike, are saying that George W. Bush mastered last nights debate on the basis of his foreign policy discussion. But did anyone actually listen to the guy? The substance of what Bush had to say was quite disturbing.

People seem taken with the fact that the Texas governor could talk about foreign policy for almost 45 minutes. But they're neglecting his circular reasoning, blind faith in coalition building, and lack of knowledge in comparison to Vice President Al Gore. Before I get into the substance of what he had to say, though, I have to take issue with a style point. Near the beginning of last night's lengthy foreign policy portion of the debate, Bush padded one of his answers by devising the "humble nation/arrogant nation" dichotomy. An intelligent way to express this idea would have been to simply refer to Theodore Roosevelt's adage about foreign policy: "Speak softly but carry a big stick." While not original, giving credit to TR for the idea -- as Bush's primary opponent John McCain often did -- would have made his idea seem more solid. Instead he gave us this "humble nation" mumbo-jumbo.

But there's a lot more to take issue with than that. On the Middle East, for example, Bush talked about "coalition building" and "reaching out to moderate Arab nations like Jordan." What Bush and his foreign policy advisors don't seem to remember -- though it's hard to believe because most of them were there at the time -- is that this is the same coalition that opted to leave Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. The reason Bush's father allowed Hussein to keep his job as the butcher of Baghdad wasn't to maintain stability in the region -- as many now believe. It's because the strategy of dethroning Hussein was nixed by the Gulf War coalition, which included such paragons as Hafez al-Assad of Syria and the royal family of Saudi Arabia.

Removing Saddam Hussein would have been dangerous to these regimes. The leaders of these non-democracies knew that their people would never have tolerated their participation in the decapitation of another Arab leader. They also knew that television footage of the final battle, which surely would have been a bloody, awful American rout, would have inflamed their publics and possibly lead to revolts in all of their lands. People forget this now, but even the beloved King Hussein of Jordan was all but an ally of Iraq prior to the Gulf War - a captive of both the Palestinian majority in his nation and his proximity to Iraq's armies.

Like Senator Joseph Lieberman last week, Gore voiced support for the opposition in Iraq and linked them to the democratic forces that removed Slobodan Milosevic last week. "I want to give support to the groups trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein," said Gore. "I know there are allegations that they're to weak to do it. That's exactly what they said about the forces that were opposing Milosevic in Serbia."

In the days following this debate, you're going to hear that Bush didn't make any bloopers (see "Default Mode"). But consider this: when debate moderator Jim Lehrer asked Bush to say what his position would have been on different American military actions around the world, Bush said this of Haiti: "I wouldn't have supported it either." Later, in a discussion of policy regarding Colombia, Bush said it was it "was in our interest to have a peaceful Colombia" because it was in our "hemisphere."

Last time we checked, Haiti was in our hemisphere, too.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell@phx.com.