Is this insight into Bush's foreign policy?

I saw this on the news, last night, and figured maybe I heard it incorrectly. But sure enough:

From The Herald Tribune:

I can’t believe that the man actually said this.

The way I take this statement is: “Diplomacy, shmiplomacy… invading countries is how you get things done.”

What is the good that can come from an attitude like this?

LilShieste

Can you cite some meetings (at the UN, which is what he’s talking about here IMO) that deposed a tyrant or brought a terrorist to justice?

That said, I think Bush is making a hell of a mistake by compounding his failure at the debates by going on the attack against Kerry. He should be ignoring Kerry and focusing on his own future policies. I think he’s losing this campaign just when it looked like he might be closing it out.

-XT

Well, **do **you know of a summit that deposed a tyrant or brought a terrorist to justice?

That’s actually a strawman. I’m not going to defend the invasion of Iraq, but you are oversimplifiying if you say the only solution Bush offers is invasion. You are equating “summit” with “diplomacy”. The former is one tactic, but only one, that can be used as part of the latter.

No, unfortunately I don’t have any cites for meetings/summits in which dictators have been dethroned, or terrorists have been “brought to justice” (what like punished, during the meeting?).

And I don’t agree that this is a strawman argument. Bush is implying that Kerry is weak on terrorism: he isn’t going to take any action; he is just going to attend summits, and just talk about what to do.

I fully realize that summits/meetings, all by themselves, will sometimes fail in their purpose. In these particular cases, some kind of action would probably need to be taken. However, with a statement like Bush’s, I get the impression that he would rather skip over the worthless meetings, and go straight to “action”.

I agree with you here. I think that if Bush wants to try and re-secure the race, he will need to move focus from the debates, to his “usual talking points”.

LilShieste

Bush is right that no meeting has ever evicted a tyrant.

Of course, what he carefully avoids saying is that actually meeting with other nations’ leaders might wind up generating support for joint efforts while his unilateral declarations left his administration begging for support after they got into Iraq and found out how big an effort it was going to be to rebuild the country.

(Perhaps he meant that his own “summits” with Blair were superfluous to his own assault on Iraq? That his summits with Putin had led to Russian assistance for Hussein? Or, perhaps, based on the “miscalculations” that we have seen, Bush simply sees all planning as counterproductive if it involves anyone who might raise a question?)

Well, your restatement of Bush’s comment has all the elements of a strawman: no on is arguing that diplomacy be thrown out the window.

Are you telling us that you are shocked, SHOCKED! that one candidate has twisted the other’s position and made a simplisitic charicature of it? That one candidate has, like you, used a strawman argument against his opponent? Round up the usual suspects!! :slight_smile:

Then what exactly is the president trying to say here? If my argument is a strawman, then surely the president’s argument is one as well, seeing as how no one is arguing that “tyrants have been deposed, as a result of a meeting”.

Here, I see that you already recognize Bush’s statement as a strawman, as well (so, umm… that last sentence up there isn’t for you). But it gets my goat that Bush says things like this, and people blindly follow along (as demonstrated by the numerous cheers he received, immediately following that statement). As such, I felt I had to point it out.

Am I “SHOCKED that one candidate has twisted the other’s position and made a simplisitic charicature of it?” Of course not. :stuck_out_tongue:

LilShieste

Forgive me if I’m wrong on this, but isn’t sole remaining Kerry’s complaint about the decisions to go to war that there were other ways to remove Saddam? Didn’t he say that there are other things that could have been done and he will do them? Further, didn’t he say that he would propose a summit of various countries to discuss Iraq. Isn’t it fair (if somewhat out of context) to read into that that Kerry thinks summits could have taken care of the problem of Saddam?

Bush is more apt to take a go-it-alone approach in foreign policy matters. Not all the time, but more often than Kerry would. Does anyone doubt that? Is that a surprise to anyone? But saying that Kerry would never go-it-alone or that Bush would never try the diplomatic approach doesn’t help in understanding either candidate or his positions.

BTW, this has been and will continue to be a dirty campaign. I hope you have lots of goats, because they’re going to be “gotten” over and over again. :slight_smile:

No, I think you have it right (as far as I understand it).

Let me go ahead and re-post a couple of statements I made, though, to clear up any confusion:

This was in repsonse to requests for a cite asking for summits/meetings (in the past) that have successfully deposed tyrants. But just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it is not possible.

I believe that if we had held a summit, to discuss Iraq, we would be in a much better position right now, and we certainly could have truthfully said, “We tried everything,” before going to war (oh… and we would be more likely to have a much larger coalition, too).

This suggests to me that I should just let (stupid, IMO) comments like this one by Bush, roll off my back- that doesn’t sit so well with me. Seeing as how this is the case, though, I probably should have stocked up on more goats. :slight_smile:

LilShieste

xt: *Can you cite some meetings (at the UN, which is what he’s talking about here IMO) that deposed a tyrant or brought a terrorist to justice? *

How about the meetings after the 9/11 attacks that resulted in the agreement to take out the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Of course, the meetings by themselves weren’t solely responsible for it, but I don’t see how it would have happened without those meetings.

I’m probably wrong on this, but afaik (or remember anyway…no time to look it up today, I’m working :wink: ) there was no UN resolution (or official UN backing, save that we invoked the Charter and no one called us on it) allowing the US et al to go into Afghanistan and remove the Taliban…was there? If I’m wrong about this then Bush is definitely wrong about no (UN) committee ever removing a tyrant or taking out a terrorists, etc.

Well, you’d need to define ‘meetings’. Its pretty clear that Bush is talking about UN meetings, not just meetings in general between countries. After all, Iraq and taking out Saddam were the result of ‘meetings’ between the US and our ‘allies’, chiefly the UK…no? So, its pretty obvious (to me anyway) that Bush wasn’t refering to just any meetings, but to UN meetings…and actual concrete decisions resulting in the world community DOING something active to take out tyrants/terrorists. And as we see in the Sudan not much has changed with the UN actively addressing such problems with concrete decisions for the world community to act.

-XT

I’m pretty sure there was no UN resolution re Afghanistan. I did a quick search and didn’t come up with anything.

Well, the reason that there was no resolution is that the U.S. was acting under an understood right to self-defense. While some questioned the wisdom of attacking Afghanistan, only relatively few questioned whether the U.S. had the justification to do this under the right of self-defense. There seemed to be a general belief that the connection was strong enough…with the government of that country clearly providing sanctuary and support for the organization that had attacked us…for it to be considered an act of self-defense after being attacked.

This is just a nitpick, but I think it is closer to say that Bush is talking about Summits. Specifically he is referencing Kerry’s assertion that calling for a summit soon after Kerry becomes president would have any effect on the course of the war in Iraq.
Just a little googling later, I found this site. It is a collection of the Security council resolutions passed in 2001. There were several which addressed 9-11. 1368, 1373, 1377 relate to 9-11 and terrorism in general. 1378 from 14 November 2001, condemns the Taliban and calls for national referendum in Afghanistan to form a new government. It does not specifically support any specific action in Afghanistan, but it does call on member states to provide:
-support for such an administration and government, including through the implementation of quick-impact projects,
– urgent humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering of Afghan people both
inside Afghanistan and Afghan refugees, including in demining, and
– long-term assistance for the social and economic reconstruction and
rehabilitation of Afghanistan and welcomes initiatives towards this end;

Certainly not a call to arms. But I thought you guys might be interested.

I believe that there were both UN resolutions and virtual summits, conducted by Bush I and Colin Powell, before Gulf War I. While the tyrant was not overthrown then, (and we did not get into a quagmire then either) he could have been. The diplomacy before Gulf War I is a splendid example of how it should be done.

Perhaps the summits during WWII would count also?

Is he suggesting that the meetings themselves don’t depose tyrants? Is he saying the equivalent of an shopping center architect saying, “I’ve never seen a blueprint that could hold 100 stores”? If so, he’s both right and an idiot: it’s the results of the summit, not the summit itself, that can be effective.

If he’s saying he’s never seen a summit that had positive results, then I might ask him to look wayyyyyy back to 1999, when NATO had meetings resulting in action in the Balkans that removed Milosevic. Indeed one of the criticisms of the West’s actions was that, in fear of the hay Milosevic would make from such an action, NATO neglected to hold serious talks with his opposition, and didn’t coordinate with them.

Daniel

Yalta.

Although that seems to prove everybody’s point.

I just find it amusing that Bush tosses out a quote like this while his handlers are dinging Kerry for being “disrespectful” to our allies.

All this is just one more example of the tendency of the Administration to equate Goals with Means. It is one thing to insist that a Goal, an Objective, is not subject to change or revision. It is a much different thing to insist, with or without conviction, that the Means to that Goal are sacrosanct. It is still another thing to insist that when a chosen Means is not effective in reaching the Goal that there is no other method of achieving that Goal.

Just how much of this is genuine inflexibility and how much is posturing for the benefit of the electorate is hard to tell. There is, after all, more than one way to skin a cat. Our President seems to have taken the public position that the only way to do it is to stand on its head and pull on its tail and any suggestion that some other method might work better shows a lack of commitment to the objective. The President says that if you do not accept the head-tail approach to cat skinning you are not really interested in skinning the cat and thus sending the cat an inconsistent message. It is a little silly isn’t it?