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Fri 15 Oct, 2004 05:02 am
Interesting BBC op ed piece speculating about possible foreign policy under a Bush regime elected for a second term.
Full story here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3743446.stm
Your thoughts?????
"Analysis: All change for Washington outlook?
By Jonathan Marcus
BBC diplomatic correspondent
The next US administration's foreign policy will not be decided simply by the outcome of the race between George W Bush and Senator John Kerry.
Would a re-elected President Bush keep Rumsfeld and Rice?
Even if Mr Bush were to be re-elected, the direction of US foreign policy is by no means clear.
Would it be business as usual in Washington? Or, would a significant change in the foreign policy line-up lead to a shift in Washington's approach towards the world?
Even from within Republican ranks, strong criticism has been directed at Mr Bush's handling of foreign affairs, most recently by Brent Scowcroft.
When George W Bush's father was president, Mr Scowcroft was the White House national security adviser. And now he has had some unpleasant things to say about the younger Bush's stewardship over US foreign policy.
Mr Scowcroft told the Financial Times newspaper that George W is mesmerised by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon; that the Bush administration's current efforts to enlist UN and Nato help in Iraq and Afghanistan are a desperate move to "rescue a failing venture"; and that America's unilateralist stance had contributed to the decline of the Atlantic alliance.
Tarnished ideology
Mr Scowcroft's blunt remarks are a reminder that there is a very different strand of foreign policy-making in the Republican Party that is struggling to re-emerge.
It could be dubbed the realist or pragmatic wing - the foreign policy establishment of Henry Kissinger, James Baker and others - that has dominated Republican thinking on foreign affairs for much of the past 30 or so years.
This tradition was eclipsed once the younger Mr Bush came to power by a new ideologically tinged grouping of intellectuals - the so-called "neo-cons" or "neo-conservatives" who, especially after the events of 9/11, seized upon the opportunity to push US foreign policy in a new and more unilateralist direction.
However the neo-cons have been tarnished by America's mistakes in Iraq.
And their programme to bring democracy to the wider Middle East looks increasingly over-ambitious if not utopian.........."
My first thoughts were that while I support the state of Israel, I abhor Sharon.
The author's choice of the word "stewardship" is interesting, and relevent. I posted a statement regarging the biblical statement that man shall have "dominion" over the creatures of the earth, and how that is actually a mistranslation from the Greek. The original Greek word is closer to "stewardship", which is quite a different thing indeed.
Must run, I'll pop in later.
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