Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [113]
From a diplomatic point of view, the problem with the Axis of Evil is that it pretty much precludes negotiation, in addition to the risk of setting off paranoid reactions by the “evildoers” named, which is apparently what happened in the case of Kim Jong Il.
Putting Iran in the evil axis also undermined some promising signs of change and new pro-Western attitudes there; the allies thought it remarkably stupid. Powell began preparing the ground for “regime change” in Iraq, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that we “might have to do it alone.”
The general world response to the news that we were about to go after Saddam Hussein can be summarized as, “Huh? Why?”
It is always somewhat unfair to criticize anyone, including a president, for what he does not say rather than what he does. But as Frances FitzGerald observed in The New York Review of Books in September 2002, “In his state of the union speech, Bush did not mention any positive goals for American foreign policy, and he has mentioned none since. Indeed, apart from some vague talk about the expansion of freedom and democracy, he has never presented any clear idea of the world he would like to see emerging from the ‘tectonic plate shift’ of September 11. He has spoken only of threats, and in recent months, his emphasis on American autonomy and his reliance on military solutions has become even more pronounced.”
As we warned three years ago, “If you think his daddy had trouble with ‘the vision thing,’ wait’ll you meet this one.” There might be a better world a-waiting—through international law, peaceful cooperation, emphasizing diplomacy rather than military action—but for all one can tell from his public statements, none of this has ever even occurred to George W. Bush. That we might consider weapons of mass construction, rather than destruction, is apparently beyond his administration’s imagination. Constructive “weapons” would include vaccines, medicines, health interventions, emergency food aid, farming technology, and a system of microloans modeled on the Grameen Bank.* When Bush speaks on foreign policy, he speaks almost exclusively of peril, danger, threat, and risk. “It is a dangerous world,” he often warns. He never even mentions positive goals. Even his commitment in the 2003 State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over five years to fight AIDS in Africa turned out to be a classic example of the Bush bait-and-switch tactic. If you go through his foreign-policy speeches underlining the words about terror, evil, and danger, you will be struck by how often they appear contrasted to the very occasional, very vague nod to democracy. His foreign-policy rhetoric is also free of the language of sacrifice or even simple cost. Blood, sweat, toil, and tears are never mentioned, nor even using less gasoline. Perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities of this crisis was Bush’s advice about what to do after September 11. The whole country was dying to help—ready to donate blood, money, sign up for the Marines, ride bikes, anything we could think of. Instead our president told us to shop.
The debate about unilateralism versus multilateralism is not about realism versus idealism; it is about pragmatism; is international cooperation merely desirable, or is it necessary? Of the major problems that confront the world—AIDS, population control, water shortage, and global warming—it is difficult to see how any of them can be solved without international cooperation. Multilateralists see international cooperation not as some vaguely nice thing but as a necessity.
One interesting development in the ensuing months was that Osama bin Laden fell off the map. According to the polls, most Americans still thought tracking down bin Laden was essential