Bush: champion of international cooperation? NOT!

June 13, 2008
Bush: champion of international cooperation?
by Jonothan Landay - McClatchy Blog

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice isn't the only senior member of the Bush team who appears to be rewriting the administration's stewardship of U.S. foreign policy in the twilight of the second term.

Her boss seems to be doing it too.

His legacy apparently weighing on his mind during his Farewell Europe Tour, Bush is (re)casting himself as a champion of international cooperation, especially where Iran is concerned.

"We are increasingly united in our interests and our ideals," the president asserts today in a speech in Paris intended as the highlight of his trip. "We must go forward with unity. Dividing democracies is one of our enemies' goals, and they must not be allowed to succeed."

The president notes that there have been serious tensions between the United States and Western Europe and cites the 1950s Suez Crisis and the deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles. No mention of the disputes on his watch, like the invasion of Iraq and U.S. detainee policies.

And under his stewardship, Bush asserts, trans-Atlantic relations have become "the broadest and most vibrant" they have ever been.

While Bush and his European leader-hosts may be making nice these days, we here at Nukes and Spooks suspect there are a lot of other people on both sides of The Pond who don't see eye to eye with the president.

Bush's invasion of Iraq, his refusal to move early and decisively on global climate change as well as the extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay and abuse of detainees by the United States still stir deep anger across the Continent. And how about the anger of Bush's own secretary of defense and top military commanders at the Europeans' refusal to send more troops to fight the growing war in Afghanistan or to relax the "national caveats" that prohibit their soldiers from engaging in counter-insurgency operations against the Taliban?

According to an international poll released Thursday, views of the United States in Western Europe, which plummeted after the 2003 Iraq invasion, have not come close to recovering.

And lest the president and his top aides be tempted to forget, Nukes and Spooks (McClatchy blog) thought we would remind them that they did not exactly embrace harmonious international cooperation just a few short years and two wars ago. Quite the opposite.

The administration rejected European offers to send peacekeepers to Afghanistan after the 2001 ouster of the now-resurgent Taliban and then resisted the expansion of a limited NATO-led contingent beyond Kabul. It also made it clear that the United States was prepared to invade Iraq alone if necessary, even though the administration's case for doing so was based on erroneous, exaggerated and bogus intelligence.

Bush abruptly undermined South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" with North Korea (and humiliated Colin Powell in the process); pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over European, as well as Russian and Chinese, objections; approved a U.S. National Security Strategy embracing unilateral pre-emptive military strikes; rejected an enforcement and monitoring system for the Biological Weapons Convention supported by the European allies; refused to resubmit for ratification the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, also embraced by the Europeans; joined China, Russia and India in refusing to sign an international treaty banning landmines; withdrew the United States from negotiations on the Kyoto treaty on fighting global climate change; and renounced the U.S. signature of the treaty creating the International Criminal Court. Only days before Bush departed on his European tour, the United States broke with its European allies and joined Russia and China in refusing to join a new international ban on cluster munitions.

There are just the high points and not in any particular order.

The rest, as they say, is history.

As U.S. forces became stressed and bogged down in Iraq and the United States confronted gargantuan reconstruction jobs there and in Afghanistan, where violence has been steadily on the rise, the administration discovered that it had no choice but to seek the multilateral cooperation and engage in the "nation-building" that it had once spurned.

Bush signed the United States up to the six-party talks on denuclearizing North Korea (after they detonated a nuclear test blast, of course) and embraced - albeit reluctantly - international diplomatic efforts led by the Europeans to resolve the crisis over Iran's nuclear program.

So as members of the Bush team prepare to leave office, some of them perhaps contemplating multi-figure fees for memoirs they may write, we hope they find this post useful. Unless, of course, they decide to follow in Scott McClellan's footsteps.