Bush’s Foreign Policy

last updated 8 January 2015

George W. Bush's big gamble has failed, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. Shortly after 9/11, the president and his advisors created a 'œBig Bang theory' to deal with the problem of Islamic terrorism. The Mideast's authoritarian regimes, they concluded, were breeding grounds for the poverty, powerlessness, and resentment that turned young men into terrorists. 'œTo create a new dynamic,' the U.S. would invade Iraq, install a democratic government, and let a prosperous, middle-class society serve as a transforming example for the entire Islamic world. It was a vision both 'œsimple and seductive''”and, as it turns out, dead wrong. Iraq has become a slaughter pit, its streets filled with bomb craters and mutilated bodies. Israel and Hezbollah are on the verge of a regional war. A defiant Iran is scrambling to build nuclear weapons. In the Mideast, in North Korea, even in Afghanistan, 'œthings look bleak,' said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. 'œIn almost every part of the world, the U.S. faces graver and more intractable problems' than before Bush took office. 'œAnd things keep getting worse.'

By assuming that democracy could be easily transplanted, said Alon Ben-Meir in the New York Daily News, the president's neoconservative advisors made a critical error. They didn't bother to consider how their experiment would be affected by the Mideast's 'œhistory, culture, religion, and ethnicity.' Not surprisingly, voters chose tribal leaders and Islamic radicals to pursue past grievances, rather than the greater good. The terrorist group Hamas was elected to run the Palestinian territories, and Hezbollah was given a grip on Lebanon's parliament. Iraq's government, meanwhile, is hopelessly divided among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. I hate to admit it, but maybe the skeptics were right, said Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. The Mideast may simply not be ready for democracy.

It's far too early to write off Bush's war on terrorism, said Investor's Business Daily in an editorial. Let's not forget what's been accomplished. Al Qaida hasn't struck on our soil in nearly five years. The Taliban no longer runs Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein is neither slaughtering thousands of innocents nor funding terrorists. 'œA long slog does not mean failure.' Nor does it mean that Bush is responsible for the current bloodshed, said Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online. What we're witnessing isn't a failed foreign policy, but the explosion of an arrested culture with 'œperennial grievances' against the West. 'œJihadists for decades have been at war not with George W. Bush alone, but with modernity itself.' If Bush can be faulted for anything, it's his failure to explain the true nature of this 'œcomplex war' to the American people, instead of offering 'œplatitudes about the inevitable triumph of freedom and democracy.'