Center for International Policy

So much for `humility' in foreign policy
By Jim Mullins, CIP Senior Fellow
South Florida Sun-Sentinel - 10/23/2004

President Bush campaigned for president in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" in domestic policy, "humble" and rejecting "nation-building" in foreign policy. He promised to be a "uniter not a divider," both domestically and in relations with foreign governments and institutions.

His later actions, however, were a flip-flop of massive proportions.

His domestic policy has been anything but compassionate, favoring the interests of the wealthy and corporations, with the largest net loss of jobs since the Hoover era, more children in poverty and fewer people with health insurance.

His abandonment of worthy foreign-policy objectives was based on the premise that 9-11 justified a policy requiring Americans to follow his leadership in a "War on Terror" into the indefinite future. Those Americans who questioned his judgment were called unpatriotic. Other countries, many of which had been subjected to decades of terrorism and managed to combat and survive it, were deemed either "with us or against us."

So much for "humility" in foreign policy.

But what came before 9-11 is not a blank slate. One of my memory's indelible moments goes back to a press conference during the transition period between President Bush's election and inauguration, when he was asked about festering Middle Eastern problems. After a long pause and a look of puzzlement, he replied that there are "problems over there" -- parroting the question and offering no specifics.

Not long after, he was brought up to speed by a neoconservative group that had been championing an Iraqi invasion since the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton adminstrations as the cornerstone of a utopian scheme to bring democracy -- read: market forces -- to the Middle East under American hegemony and control.

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, after leaving the administration, revealed that Bush proposed a takeover of Iraq at his first Cabinet meeting.

Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, sidelined Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism official under Presidents Reagan, Bush I and Clinton, who had instituted a daily report on terrorist threats. Rice ignored Clarke's entreaties on the impending threat from Osama bin Laden and failed to read former NSC adviser Sandy Berger's report stressing the same immediate peril. Emblematic of this failure was Clarke's first meeting with Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's second in command and a leading neocon, who rejected Clarke with: "I just don't understand why we are talking about this one man, bin Laden," and insisting the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center had a state sponsor -- meaning Iraq -- and, "Just because the FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." All this was before 9-11.

The record will show that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida perpetrated 9-11 and had to be defeated and removed; that six months later, long before that could be accomplished, Bush moved our Special Forces out of Afghanistan and our elite forces stationed in the U.S. began war games patterned on an Iraqi invasion.

Bush himself, at a press conference on March 13, 2002, stated, "I'll repeat what I said, I truly am not that concerned about him," referring to bin Laden.

He waited another six months to go public on his reasons for attacking Iraq, in order to stampede a public in deathly fear of terrorism and a Congress faced with a midterm election into giving him the authority.

Whistleblowing officials and leaked documents from the CIA, FBI, State Department and Department of Energy, buttressed by three consecutive U.S. weapons inspection teams, have given the lie to this administration's deceptions.

Bush shamed both Colin Powell's and America's reputation for integrity by his presentation, riddled with forgery and lies, to the U.N. General Assembly just before the invasion. Proof of charges of Iraqi possession of mobile laboratories and missile silos demanded by U.N. inspectors proved false once pictures were provided. Marconi, the British company that made the trucks, came forward at once to reveal that they were for the purpose that Saddam had purchased them and in no way could they be used otherwise. The missile silos were found to be chicken coops. (In a bit of dark humor and disgust, the inspectors made up T-shirts with "U.N. Chicken Coop Inspector" as a logo.)

All of the above has created unheard-of division in our country and worldwide distrust of our once-admired leadership. It has also left us with a bloody Iraqi occupation with no end strategy and an unsustainable deficit running into billions. We are mortgaging our children's future and selling our patrimony to foreign buyers of our debt -- all for a boondoggle created by a "humble" and "compassionate conservative."

Jim Mullins is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and a resident of Delray Beach.