Bush bungled the diplomacy...how did he do that, exactly?

This is a thread for folks here (and I know there are a lot of them) who supported at least in principle the idea of using force against Iraq, but who didn’t like this particular war because they thought Bush and his administration bungled the diplomatic aspects of it.

I have heard this charge so many times, that Bush is ham-handed, lacks finesse, is arrogant, etc, etc, yet it occurs to me that on trying I could only think of one concrete example, that on one occasion he used the very unfortunate term “crusade” to describe the war.

So…please tell me exactly what things Bush and his administration did, or failed to do, that amounted to this terrible bungling of the diplomatic efforts. And please be specific. I don’t want to hear that he “created the impression that war was inevitable”. Tell me how he did that, what he did or what words he or his representatives actually spoke to give that impression. Don’t say he should have gotten UN approval…tell me how you would have gotten it if you were in his place.

Also, it strikes me that a lot of people were more impressed by Tony Blair’s performance (I’m sure I read some good reviews of his speech to Parliament, though I forget where). If anyone wants to compare and contrast, and point out where Bush should have emulated Blair, I’d be happy to see that too?

Well he did create the impression that war was inevitable. A long long time ago, he said he was seeking a “regime change”. Then he started talking to the weapons inspector and saying he didn’t want war and all that- but we all aready knew what he wanted. He outright said it. Why all the pretense?

Tony Blaire did do a better job selling the war. I remember watching a press confrence and a reporter asked if they were concerned about not having a lot of International support. Bush instantly got indignant and started muttering about “I’m very happy with the size of our coalition. We have a big coalition”. Tony Blaire eventually stepped in and gave us the names of what countries supported us and how they represent a broad base of support. He gave people the kinds of details that assure them that he is acting thougfully and has control of the situation.

even sven has a good point: The time to build a coalition in support of a war is before you start deplying your troops. It’s a hard sell in many nations to go to the electorate and say “We got a US offer to join in this war they’re going to start” - a better statesman would have given his potential allies the chance to say “After long and involved debate on the highest level, we and our allies have regrettably decided to go to war.” So if you want specifics: He deployed troops, then started coalition-building. Wrong way to do it.

Same thing with the UNSC debacle: Bush and his administration basically said to the UNSC “We’ll go to war in your name, now support us or fuck off - we mean, become irrelevant” in full public. A better statesman (like, say, Bush v1.0) might’ve checked what support he had in the UNSC before even bringing up the subject.

And if he had a feeling that the vote would’ve been against him, he wouldn’t even have mentioned 1441. There’s a distinct impression that the US wasn’t negotiating in good faith - they were offering a ticket to join the war, not a say in whether there would be a war or not.

On that same note, it seemed obvious to me that the US was never going to give a hoot about the inspections. And I’m damn sure that every tinpot dictator noticed that Hussein destroyed 60-some illegal missiles under UN supervision, then got steamrollered by a superior army anyway. I hope someone videotaped that voluntary destruction of weapons, because it’ll never ever happen again.

More in the PR arena than diplomacy, but still: The casus belli wasn’t really well-defined. IIRC, it started out as a threat from Iraqi WMDs, then it was said WMDs in the hands of terrorists, then it was defying the UNSC resolution 1441 and now it appears that Iraqi liberation is the slogan that’ll win the day. A lot of people - yours truly included - feel that one really good reason would’ve been somewhat more convincing.

Then there was the embarrassing incident with the alleged Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium. And the US attempts at bribing Turkey. The aluminium tubes. The balsa and duct-tape drones.

Personally, I found the “War on terror” angle more than a little unpalatable - and I know that quite a few of my countrymen did, too. It looked and felt very much like an attempt to ride the wave of sympathy and solidarity offered pretty much worldwide after 9/11. Choosing to make the big Iraq-speech in New York on 9/12 2002 was probably the most obvious example of this. It might have been completely incidental, but I honestly doubt it.

Of course, if what you’re asking for is a set of step-by-step instructions as to “How to start a war in Iraq with international backing”, there’s no way of knowing if it’s even possible.

Feh. War sucks. Good thing this one’s at least looking as if it’s winding down.

It’s a mistake to try to understand the invasion of Iraq in terms of diplomacy, and also in terms of means to achieve ends. The war wasn’t a means to achieve some desirable goal, like the elimination of the WMDs.

The war was its own end. War was the only thing being sought.

Why? It was a test of these principles set out in September 2000.

REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES

So, while it might look like a mind-boggling fuck-up, it is actually the way it was intended to work.

“Old Europe”

“There are four countries who will never agree with us: Iran, Syria, and Germany.”
“Who’s the fourth?”
“I forget the Fourth” - Donald Rumsfeld

Ahem. “Freedom Fries”

And, the huge, gaping, most monumental of all diplomatic fuckups just about ever. In the event that Blair was having difficulty garnering support for the war, with members of his cabinet threatening resignation over the issue, after having staked his job on selling the UK’s “special relationship” with the US, Rumsfeld essentially said “well, if the UK are with us, that’s fine, but we don’t really need them.” It’s true, but it’s one of those unspoken truths, and it’s especially necessary to keep it unspoken if the British Prime Minister has put his neck on the block to support you.

In summary, they didn’t speak softly.

The short list? In more or less order:

Bush unilaterally declared the Kyoto Treaty dead. (It was probably doomed, anyway, but rather than forming a team to analyze it and then using their findings to propose a replacement, he simply announced that he was walking away from it for no better reason than that his buddies in the oil industry did not like it.) So, he begins his term with an isolationist declaration. He did the right thing in a horribly bad way.

Between his inauguration and the WTC/Pentagon attack, Bush specifically announced that it was up to Israel and Palestine to work out their own problems and that he was not interested in mediating. Since the U.S. continued its aid to Israel with no strings (and, to be fair, continued to send a limited amount of relief to the Palestinians), he sent a message to the Middle East that he was not interested in their problems and that he was completely supportive of the policies of Sharon.

Following the WTC/Pentagon attacks, he began giving lip service to an interest in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but all of his pronouncements were couched in language condeming the Palestinians or favoring Israel, rather than seeking to tell both sides to work out the difficulties.

Bush declared that the U.S. would never again allow any other nation to “challenge” U.S. superiority and declared the right of first strike if we saw the need–a principle that the U.S. has never claimed before. (We did not disavow it during the Cold War, but we always couched it in the language of actual self-defense. Even when we provoked the War on Mexico, we gave them the opportunity to fire the first shot.)

Bush unilaterally withdrew from the International Criminal Court, claiming that he did not want U.S. military personnel subject to “foreign” laws if they happened to be accused of anti-humanitarian crimes during a mission. With the U.S. claims for the right to bring other war criminals to justice (a principle established by the U.S. at Nuremburg), Bush presented to the world a claim that the U.S. was above the law.

After the WTC/Pentagon attacks, Bush made several claims that anyone who did not support the U.S. obviously supported terrorism–and further declared the right to seek them out and “bring them to justice.” So first he declares that the U.S. is not bound by international justice, then claims that the U.S. can impose its own justice on whomever it chooses.

When pushing for the war on Iraq, U.S. spokespersons verbally agreed to the demands of France that 1441 could not be an automatic trigger for invasion. Following which, Bush began sending troops to Iraq in such force that it was clear that there would be an invasion, regardless. Then, when pushing for the second (failed) resolution, Bush declared that he could use 1441 to justify an invasion, despite the earlier (spoken, not written) comments and despite the fact that Blix and company had not filed their own final reports.

(And while the argument has been made that 1441 allowed the U.S. to “continue” the first Gulf War on the grounds that Hussein did not follow his agreements of the truce, that rings pretty hollow in the international community–more especially since the U.N. Charter does not allow of pre-emptive strikes that Bush had claimed as U.S. (and only U.S.) prerogatives.)

In building his “Coalition of the Willing,” there has been substantial speculation that the “willing” were simply not “willing” to see their current aid or trade relations severed. The coalition appears to have been assembled by coercion.

Now, each of these acts can be argued on their own merits. Certainly, proponents of some or all of these actions cast them in different lights. However, the cumulative effect of these actions (and several similar ones) was to portray to the international community that the U.S. was going to act without regard to anyone else.

Bush has established the U.S. as, if not a rogue state, at least an utterly unconnected state that has no desire to work with the rest of the world on any issue.

In order to say that Bush bungled the diplomacy, you’d first have to assume that France, Germany, and Russia could have been persuaded to vote with him. There was nothing he could have said or done to convince them too.
This was made clear when, after all three countries voted for Resolution 1441, which clearly stated that, if Iraq didn’t fully comply within 30 days, that “it will face serious consequences”.
30 Days came and went, and the three countries were against the serious consequences that they had originally agreed too.
There’s also the oil and other business contracts that France and Germany have, or should I say had, with Iraq, and the fact that Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein have been friends for over two decades. And don’t forget that Iraq owed billions of dollars to Russia, who was afraid that they wouldn’t get that money if a war broke out.

“Bungling diplomacy” does not mean having failed to persuade France, Russia, and Germany. There are a number of reasons why those three specific countries may have refused to join the coalition or provide support in the U.N.

“Bungling diplomacy” notes that Bush could not get even a simple majority of members on the Security Council to actively support him (and had trouble twisting enough arms to get a majority to grudgingly vote with the U.S.). “Bungling diplomacy” notes that it took the administration over two months to get such mighty warriors nations as Eritrea, Iceland, and Palau (while lacking a lot of NATO countries) to come on board and got only four countries to send troops. “Bungling diplomacy” indicates that there was such resistance to his efforts, world-wide, that most of his Arab supporters (many of whom appear to have been coerced to begin with) could not publicly declare their support for fear of their own populations. “Bungling diplomacy” notes that they sent Powell into the U.N. with badly forged evidence. “Bungling diplomacy” reflects such idiotic comments as Rumsfeld cutting Blair off at the knees the week before the invasion saying that the U.S. would go in alone if Britain backed out. “Bungling diplomacy” notes that Bush was barely able to get a majority of his own citizens to agree to his “go it alone” stance while the appearance of actual international support would have raised that number to nearly three-quarters, prior to the invasion.

It’s really only bungling if you assume that the Bush Administration didn’t want to be in the situation they’re in now. Assertions that the U.S.'s current diplomatic status is bad depends upon the assumption that the U.S. should have good, co-operative diplomatic relationships with the rest of the world, something that the Bush Administration pretty clearly doesn’t want. The neocon gameplan of transforming the Middle East has, as a side effect, raising the U.S. above “petty” diplomatic concerns.

When it came to the “second resolution” Blare was pushing for after the failure of 1441, only France threatened a veto stating that nothing would change their mind. Bush cannot be blamed for that.

So, if results aren’t immediate, then that’s bad diplomacy? And so what if we got only four countries, we only needed one.

We didn’t coerce anyone. Bribe a few countries, yes, coerce, no.
And for countries where they have Islamic populations they fear, how is that Bush’s fault?

Badly forged evidence? Proof please?

So, since we planed to go it alone anway, what should Rumsfeld have said?

Uhm, I don’t know where you’ve been, but a majority of Americans have, and do support the war:
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6269433^25778,00.html
http://www.gallup.com/poll/specialReports/pollSummaries/sr030224.asp

**Joel[/v], the question was not whether Bush did what it needed to or what it should have. The question was “What are examples of bungling?”.

The fact that France announced an absolute veto is not Bush’s fault, but the fact that Bush could neot get a majority of the Security Council to tell france that they were being unreasonably stubborn is a failure of Bush’s diplomacy.

The length of time it took to get countries to come on board with coercion and bribes is an indication that the U.S. was failing to make its case in the international arena. Regardless whether we “needed” to, we failed to.

Bush senior was able to get several more Arab countries to publicly join his coalition. The failure of Bush’s diplomacy is in failing miserably to make this appear a defense of the region rather than an assault on Iraq. The Arab countries would have had less to fear from their own people if Bush had persuaded everyone (or anyone) that he was actually acting in the interests of anyone other than U.S. stomping power.

Bad forged evidence? Surely you recall the absurd claims that Powell presented regarding Iraqi nuclear capability. (Iraq may have actually been working on such a capacity, but Powell’s “evidence” was forged:
Some evidence on Iraq called fake
Fake Iraq documents ‘embarrassing’ for U.S. UN Inspectors Say U.S. Relied on Forged Reports of Iraq Nuclear Efforts (Google Cache) )

Rumsfield should not have made a public declaration that placed Blair in the position of defending an unpopular policy that his chief “ally” claimed did not require British participation. (That is sort of one of the key points of the nature of diplomacy–not embarrassing your friends out of stupidity.)

The majority of Amerricans currently support the war once we were engaged. Once we engaged, I supported our efforts to end it as swiftly as possible. You, however, are ignoring the fact that on the eve of war, the various polls showed the support for the war to be around 70% if we went in as part of a U.N. declared intervention but at only around 50% if we went in alone. The fact that American society will tend to rally behind troops in combat does not change the fact that Bush was unable to persuade more than half of us it was a good idea before he launched his unilateral assault.

**Joel[/v], the question was not whether Bush did what it needed to or what it should have. The question was “What are examples of bungling?”.

The fact that France announced an absolute veto is not Bush’s fault, but the fact that Bush could neot get a majority of the Security Council to tell france that they were being unreasonably stubborn is a failure of Bush’s diplomacy.

The length of time it took to get countries to come on board with coercion and bribes is an indication that the U.S. was failing to make its case in the international arena. Regardless whether we “needed” to, we failed to.

Bush senior was able to get several more Arab countries to publicly join his coalition. The failure of Bush’s diplomacy is in failing miserably to make this appear a defense of the region rather than an assault on Iraq. The Arab countries would have had less to fear from their own people if Bush had persuaded everyone (or anyone) that he was actually acting in the interests of anyone other than U.S. stomping power.

Bad forged evidence? Surely you recall the absurd claims that Powell presented regarding Iraqi nuclear capability. (Iraq may have actually been working on such a capacity, but Powell’s “evidence” was forged:
Some evidence on Iraq called fake
Fake Iraq documents ‘embarrassing’ for U.S. UN Inspectors Say U.S. Relied on Forged Reports of Iraq Nuclear Efforts (Google Cache) )

Rumsfield should not have made a public declaration that placed Blair in the position of defending an unpopular policy that his chief “ally” claimed did not require British participation. (That is sort of one of the key points of the nature of diplomacy–not embarrassing your friends out of stupidity.)

The majority of Amerricans currently support the war once we were engaged. Once we engaged, I supported our efforts to end it as swiftly as possible. You, however, are ignoring the fact that on the eve of war, the various polls showed the support for the war to be around 70% if we went in as part of a U.N. declared intervention but at only around 50% if we went in alone. The fact that American society will tend to rally behind troops in combat does not change the fact that Bush was unable to persuade more than half of us it was a good idea before he launched his unilateral assault.

Wow, ** tomndebb, ** thank you! Great summation. Crisp, clean, clear, and completely depressing.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the 50% that supported the war almost certainly include the roughly 45% who he managed to convince that Saddam had a hand in 9/11.

Lies, lies, and more lies.

Gotta go, gettin’ sick…

From my amateur armchair perspective, the entire Bush Foreign Policy has been essentially:

Now, while this approach may work for a drunken hick getting plastered in a backwoods bar somewhere, it’s not the approach to take in international diplomacy, where the entire game is to convince the other nations how digesting fecal matter and terminating their own autonomic functions is ultimately beneficial to them. Failing to convince them is bad enough, but failing to convince them in such a ham-handed manner is outright embarassing.

Heck, about the only way George W. Bush could have made a bigger mess of his diplomatic effort was if he had flipped the bird at every foreign dignatary he met. I can only imagine that Condoleeza Rice took a few hours to persuade him to resist the temptation…

Damn. I was planning to chip in, but tomndebb pretty much covered everything I would have, and likely in a more organized fashion.

Read tomndebb’s first post in this thread, and the most recent one. Then go back and read them again. If, at this point, you don’t agree that the Bush administration massively squandered diplomacy and international relations, then you just don’t know what “diplomacy” means.

Joel: “…France threatened a veto stating that nothing would change their mind.”

France said that nothing would change its mind within the time frame for a second resolution (days not weeks) then on the table from the US. France never said that it had categorically ruled out force; to the contrary, just days before the war began France had a compromise on the table–a timetable for Iraqi disarmament that, if its terms were not met, would be followed by force within in 30 or 60 days. The US refused even to consider it.

That is not to say that France’s diplomacy during this period was impeccable. Far from it. It is only to say that, Bush dropped the ball with France as well as the rest. Had Bush been willing to compromise with France, he’d have been able to have his cake and eat it too. Even had the compromise fallen through, he’d have gained from the attempt, while France would have lost. But Bush was not willing to delay for the sake of gaining world support for his war. He was determined to go to war, and he was determined to go to war on his weather-driven schedule.

As tom has pointed out, the fact that a full complement of troops was already massing signalled that Bush was going in no matter what, thus reducing diplomacy to yet another type of “your with us or against us” strategy. That is not a very effective way to treat proud “old” countries who just happen to be our oldest allies and, in terms of international institutions, among our most important. The truth is that you can’t conduct diplomacy very well if you don’t actually care what the world thinks of you: and Bush patently does not.

Sorry, but that’s false on all accounts. France stated they would never support a resolution that includes an automatism for war. They never announced an absolute veto against armed force. Second, Russia announced it would veto the second resolution as well. Third, Bush can very much be blamed for that, for two reasons: One: He spat into the face of the world by misrepresenting data to construct evidence he did not have and using forged evidence. Second, he was violating the principles of the UN by demanding war without an imminent threat to world peace.

So threatening to cut any and all foreign aid is not coercion?

If you haven’t read the inspection reports, why don’t you admit you lack sufficient background knowledge to make a sound statement on the case? The Bush administration used a very primitive forgery by someone else to ‘prove’ that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. They also lied about Iraq having a plane to spread chemical weapons. The picture they presented as proof had been taken before the first stint of inspections which destroyed the vast majority of Iraq’s chemical weapons program. They also presented ‘before and after’ sequences of satellite photos claiming Iraqis had hastily cleaned up a site, when in fact, the pictures had been taken weeks apart, and likely showed routine transportations. And they portrayed an old report, outdated in the meantime, which the British plagiarized off the internet as a fine dossier full of incriminating evidence.

After 9/11, the US gained a huge amount of goodwill from all over the world, and importantly, from the people of the world, not just their respective governments. That goodwill lasted right through the war in Afghanistan.

That Bush has managed to turn world opinion against the US so drastically in a short span of 12 months is just mind-boggling. Aside from the very valid points brought up by tomndebb, this is a pretty telling result of GWB’s diplomatic abilities…

Just a minor nitpick, I’d say it has a lot more to do about economic cycles and the upcoming election than it has to do with the weather. Waiting for cooler weather would have kept oil prices up high and really whacked the US economy for a few more months, then probably not enough time for the lower prices to filter through the economy in time for the masses to decide life was good right before voting.

Never gets old I guess. Yes, the US was determined to invade Iraq. The French were determined to prevent that. There is no in-between, no diplomatic solution, if France set out to oppose any military action against Iraq. (I have no problem obviously with US insistance on regime change, YMMV.)

See this for the French view, interview with Chirac:

Note where, in the case of either no support in the UNSC for invasion or majority support for invasion, the French answer is still “no.” Changing their minds would involve swinging shiny watches or chantings in parseltongue, or something, but I doubt diplomacy could budge it.

Why, so often, do the same people for whom “world opinion” means so much ridicule the support of small countries? It’s arrogant and dismissive and I have no idea what bearing it is supposed to have on your argument. Iceland is my country of birth and I’m sure it didn’t appreciate having to choose between the Coalition and France/Germany/Russia in the first place.