THE BUSH FOREIGN POLICY DISASTER

We're about to launch a preemptive war. Our allies are at odds with us. We have no coherent policy on North Korea. The administration is trying to deceitfully weave Saddam and Osama together. Only just in the last instant or so do the Bushies realize that the whole Israeli-Palestinian thing might be related to the Iraq war in some way or another. And by the way, everyone in the world is angry at us, and the only "coalition" we can form is that of countries we bribe or threaten.

How did it come to this? Well, Josh Marshall points to a Michael Lind piece on the Bush foreign policy debacle up to now, that points to three central fuck-ups: 1) aspirations of global hegemony, 2) preventive, or preemptive war, and 3) the "war on terror". Here's a taste from point #2:

It is not clear whether the Bush administration regards preventive war as a prerogative of the United States alone, or as a newly recognized right of all countries. If the former is the case, then the U.S. is claiming that it is exempt from the rules that govern other nations. If the latter is the case, then Pakistan could wage a preventive war against India today, on the grounds that India might be a greater threat in a decade or two. The distinction between wars of defense and aggression would collapse entirely, if the United States, alone or along with all other nations, had the right to wage war on the basis of speculative future threats. And it is deeply troubling that the Bush administration has now adopted, as its own strategy, a “Pearl Harbor” strategy for which Japanese war criminals were hanged by the U.S. after World War II.

An interesting parallel on the "global hegemony" point is that recently the last elected president to serve, Bill Clinton, made a similar suggestion as to what the nature of our foreign policy should be:

Right after winning UN Security Council support in November for weapons inspections, the White House "sent 150,000 troops to the gulf, which convinced everybody we weren't serious about UN inspections. That's how we got into this political mess."

The U.S. should be strengthening the UN and other "mechanisms of cooperation," Clinton said. "We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block." (emphases mine)

Like the men and women whose 401(k)'s have devolved into 201(k)'s, I echo a likewise sentiment: I wish he was still president.