Bush Isn't Ready to Make Nice

By now, it should be painfully obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that President Bush's foreign policy isn't just a failure, it's a catastrophe. No, it's a crime.

It started with the lie of 9/11. No, I am not advocating some whacked-out conspiracy theory. But the President was never honest with the American people about why it happened. "They hate our freedom," he explained, speaking of al Qaeda.

But that isn't true. What they hate is our foreign policy. They're not attacking us because they don't like how we live our lives at home, they're attacking us because they are angry about our domination of local politics in their own homes. Yes, our middle eastern misadventures stretch back decades, long before George W. Bush. But he is uniquely responsible for misundereducating the American public about the complex history that led to 9/11 and the present collapse of the middle east.

Yes, Hezbollah started the present crisis with Israel; yes, the Israeli government has the right and duty to protect its citizens. But it's been decades now, and yet no one seems to have learned that military action is not terrorist pesticide, it's fertilizer.

President Bush has no moral center. He would prefer that human embryos that are not going to be implanted be tossed out as garbage, rather than used for research that could prove critical to curing a variety of medical conditions. He thinks the trash bin shows more respect for the sanctity of life than a petri dish. This is the same President who thinks tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians is progress toward democracy.

And so it was that a few weeks ago he announced, via Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, that he would not seek a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon, because it wouldn't last and would only be a temporary solution. To this president, open war is preferable to a temporary cease-fire, during which diplomacy could resume.

The President and his advisors and supporters live in a simplistic la-la-land where centuries of ethnic, religious and sectarian hostilities can be instantly transformed into pro-American democracies at the drop of a bomb. But it hasn't proved so easy.

In Afghanistan, we chased the Taliban out of the capital Kabul and installed a new government, but the country itself is ruled by traditional warlords in the north and the Taliban in the south; it takes all the coalition's might just to maintain the present status quo. And not to defend Saddam Hussein, because he was unquestionably a monster, but no one can rationally say the people of Iraq are better off now. We removed their dictator and left them with a civil war.

And in Palestine and Lebanon, where we hailed elections as signs of the effectiveness of the Bush foreign policy, we were dismayed to see that pro-terrorist, anti-Israel and anti-American parties won.

So while the fundamentalists who harbored bin Laden regain control of Afghanistan, as Iraq implodes, as Iran builds nuclear weapons, and as Israel bombs U.N outposts and cars full of fleeing civilians, Bush smiles, congratulates himself and says these are just the "birth pangs" of democracy.

As the Dixie Chicks would say, it's too late to make it right. And Bush wouldn't if he could.