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Goodwill Squandered: George W. Bush Prepares to Quietly Mark 9/11 Anniversary with Little to Show for His War on Terror
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Goodwill Squandered
George W. Bush Prepares to Quietly Mark 9/11 Anniversary with Little to Show for His War on Terror
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by Tim Harper
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WASHINGTON—As he stood atop a wrecked fire engine, shouting encouragement through a bullhorn to exhausted World Trade Center rescue workers, the response came in a defiant cadence, louder and louder.
"U.S.A., U.S.A.," they shouted back at George W. Bush, and in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, who among us didn't feel a kinship with his grieving nation?
This enormous outpouring of sympathy was so rare because U.S. foreign policy doesn't usually engender sympathy. The idea that this could have been squandered is particularly horrific.
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Phyllis Bennis, author of Before And After: U.S. Foreign Policy And The September 11 Crisis
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A thirst for retribution had international support and understanding from a sympathetic world and Americans instinctively closed ranks behind their commander-in-chief.
Yet, handed as much political capital as any president in U.S. history, Bush has done the near-impossible in only 24 months, squandering the global goodwill and watching his domestic backing erode daily.
Next Thursday, when he will quietly mark the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 in his country, Bush will have little in the way of anti-terrorism victories to take to Americans two years after his declaration of the "first war of the 21st century."
Instead, he will address the nation tonight as he heads back to the United Nations, cap in hand, looking for money and manpower from the organization he had derided as slipping into irrelevancy when it refused to support his campaign in Iraq.
He looks, as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry suggested last week, like a man who needs some friends in this world.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush and his administration are quite rightly tarred as the gang that fights good war, but forges lousy peace — more interested in dropping smart bombs than building democracies.
"We fight the war very well, but we display a mix of indifference and incompetence at managing the post-war environment," says Flynt Leverett, a scholar at Washington's Saban Center and former CIA analyst.
"I think it is traceable to a serious intellectual deficit, or conceptual deficit, at the heart of the policy."
Bush is again courting a transatlantic rift and a reprise of the diplomatic fights with France and Germany that marked the pre-war period.
Kerry and other Democratic candidates looking to unseat him in next year's election are tripping over each other to decry the Iraqi mission and Republican unilateralism in a bid to catch up to Howard Dean, the front-running Democrat who fashioned an improbable lead by casting himself early as the anti-war candidate and waiting for the wave to come to him.
Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, now stand accused of substituting arrogance for foreign-policy vision and of replacing diplomacy and flexibility with stubbornness and rigid ideology.
The "evil-doers" Bush pledged to hunt down remain at large, regrouping and conspiring as American troops are stretched beyond their capacity in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"This enormous outpouring of sympathy was so rare because U.S. foreign policy doesn't usually engender sympathy," says Phyllis Bennis, author of Before And After: U.S. Foreign Policy And The September 11 Crisis.
"The idea that this could have been squandered is particularly horrific."
Bennis argues that Bush began to toss out the goodwill shortly after 9/11, when he told the nations of the world that they were either for him or against him and suggested that those who would not join his crusade were on the side of terrorism.
"America was acting as if they were the only ones who had ever been attacked in this way," Bennis says. "If ever there was a time that should have taught us we needed the rest of the world to bring the perpetrators to justice, this was it.
"Instead, the argument was: You have to be with us in our crusade."
James Rubin, an international relations professor at the London School of Economics and former State Department official in the Clinton administration, argues that America lost its diplomatic compass under Bush because it let military objectives and timelines guide its foreign policy.
"Exercising power without careful diplomacy has left the United States' reputation in tatters," Rubin writes in Foreign Affairs magazine.
European leaders saw through the charade at the U.N. Security Council before the U.S.-led March invasion, knowing Washington would never be satisfied with anything less than war in Iraq.
He cites Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney — representing the hawkish wing of an administration that could never deliver a coherent message — for disparaging the U.N. and its arms inspectors.
But, Rubin says, the well had been poisoned with Europe even before Sept. 11, when the bullying Bush government came to power — the president wearing his unilateralism on his sleeve as his administration pulled out of and disparaged international treaties ranging from the Kyoto protocol on the environment to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and, most important, the International Criminal Court.
"One reason Washington's goodwill reserve had all but vanished is that European countries pay a lot of attention to treaties," Rubin writes.
A poll published in Canada in the spring showed Bush to be the least popular American president since Canadians have been asked to rate their approval of U.S. leaders.
In western Europe, Bush and his foreign policy have never been more unpopular, according to a major American-European poll released this month.
The poll of 8,000 Americans and Europeans was conducted by the Italian Compagnia di San Paolo and the U.S. German Marshall Fund.
When they measured approval of Bush's foreign policy, they found 60 per cent of Americans backed their president. But of the seven European countries canvassed, only in Poland — with a sizeable troop contingent now in Iraq — did a majority of respondents back Bush.
Approval was at 16 per cent in Germany and 15 per cent in France. In Tony Blair's Britain, only 35 per cent approved Bush's performance on the world stage.
Perhaps most telling, 78 per cent of Europeans polled said they thought U.S. unilateralism posed a possible international threat over the next 10 years.
"There is a Bush style that really does drive Europeans up a wall," German Marshall Fund president Craig Kennedy told the Washington Post.
However, since Bush's views are still backed by a majority of Americans, a Democratic president would have trouble selling radical changes to foreign policy, Kennedy says.
Sensitive to these charges of an administration that is foundering, Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "strategy" more than 20 times during a lengthy overview of American foreign policy at George Washington University in the nation's capital Friday morning.
In Powell's view, the Bush administration has been able to build more global friendships than any other American government in history, building on the post-Cold War era.
"We have a National Security Strategy that is based on a vision, a vision that includes strong partnerships, not unilateralism, but strong partnerships with our traditional allies and our new friends on the world stage," Powell said.
"Today, America's motives are impugned in some lands, but as we preserve, defend and expand the peace that free peoples won in the 21st century, I believe we will see America vindicated in the eyes of the world, speedily in our time, in the 21st century."
The administration's push in Iraq now — beginning with tonight's speech by Bush and in the days leading to his U.N. address on Sept. 23 — will focus on the need to hand Iraq back to Iraqis as quickly as possible.
But some analysts feel Washington has waited too long to go back to the U.N., in effect squandering international capital yet again.
"The hand that the U.S. has to play right now is much weaker than it might have been had we done this either beforehand or, at the very least, immediately afterward," Ken Pollack, an Iraqi expert at the Brookings Institution, told a seminar last week.
"In those few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, most of our allies were coming back to us and saying, `Look, clean slate. We had our differences before the war, but the war is now over. We want to mend fences; we want to be part of the reconstruction. We want to help.'
"And the administration stiffed them and basically told them it's our way or the highway."
Pollack said Washington should always have been aware that it needed U.N. help
"In terms of building democracy in a country ... we don't know how to do it.
"Where has the United States actually ever built democracy? The U.N. has done it.
"It's the full panoply of U.N. capabilities to rebuild a country, which the U.S. simply doesn't have."
To build democracy in Iraq, Pollack said, the United States must relinquish a large part of its political control in that country to the United Nations.
And for that to happen, Bush the unilateralist would have to undergo a major foreign-policy metamorphosis, one that apparently would be driven by desperation, not idealistic conversion.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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