Lubbock
07-11-2006, 05:42 AM
Fantasy Cowboy: Bush Bashers "Vindication
By: John Podhoretz
July 11, 2006 -- IT'S "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," Time magazine declares on its cover this week. Interesting. President Bush's antagonists and enemies have spent nearly five years perfecting a caricature of his foreign-policy and warmaking views, and now self-satisfiedly declare that their caricature of Bush has been overtaken by events.
The profound difficulties of the war in Iraq have, in the eyes of the caricaturists, exposed the failure of Bush's supposedly swaggering foreign policy. The United States isn't standing so tall, walking so proud or throwing its weight around so baldly after three-plus years in Iraq, say the caricaturists.
Why, even the president himself has said he shouldn't have used the wanted-poster "dead or alive" formulation when talking about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The Taliban are back making mischief in Afghanistan, and bin Laden is still on the loose.
And where is all the talk of the "Axis of Evil" now that North Korea is test-firing missiles and Iran is declaring its intention to go nuclear?
"Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing," write Time's Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar. "Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation."
Cleverly put - but absurd. Bush's stance toward North Korea has been basically unchanged since the summer of 2002, when Pyongyang announced it had created fissile material. The administration did not react with belligerence at the time, choosing instead to place the issue in the hands of a six-nation task force. The North Korea policy has always been the real-world refutation of the ludicrous suggestion that Bush always seeks to go it alone in the world.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/fantasy_cowboy_opedcolumnists_john_podhoretz.htm
By: John Podhoretz
July 11, 2006 -- IT'S "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," Time magazine declares on its cover this week. Interesting. President Bush's antagonists and enemies have spent nearly five years perfecting a caricature of his foreign-policy and warmaking views, and now self-satisfiedly declare that their caricature of Bush has been overtaken by events.
The profound difficulties of the war in Iraq have, in the eyes of the caricaturists, exposed the failure of Bush's supposedly swaggering foreign policy. The United States isn't standing so tall, walking so proud or throwing its weight around so baldly after three-plus years in Iraq, say the caricaturists.
Why, even the president himself has said he shouldn't have used the wanted-poster "dead or alive" formulation when talking about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The Taliban are back making mischief in Afghanistan, and bin Laden is still on the loose.
And where is all the talk of the "Axis of Evil" now that North Korea is test-firing missiles and Iran is declaring its intention to go nuclear?
"Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing," write Time's Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar. "Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation."
Cleverly put - but absurd. Bush's stance toward North Korea has been basically unchanged since the summer of 2002, when Pyongyang announced it had created fissile material. The administration did not react with belligerence at the time, choosing instead to place the issue in the hands of a six-nation task force. The North Korea policy has always been the real-world refutation of the ludicrous suggestion that Bush always seeks to go it alone in the world.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/fantasy_cowboy_opedcolumnists_john_podhoretz.htm