Bush’s Foreign Policy ‘Falling Apart’

The Financial Express

May 23, 2004


WASHINGTON, MAY 23: Attributing the growing hatred against America in the Arab world to Bush administration’s actions in Iraq and West Asia, a leading newspaper here on Sunday claimed that US President George W Bush’s foreign policy is “falling apart”. “The Bush foreign policy is falling apart,” the Washington Post said stating, the United States has not made “a crucial advance in the campaign against terror,” as the President claimed when he declared victory in Iraq on May 1, 2003. “Instead, we have stimulated new hatred of the US in precisely the regions from which future terrorist threats are most likely to arise, while alienating our traditional allies,” the newspaper said.

By embracing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, we abandoned the ‘honest broker’ role that the US governments tried to play for four decades in the Middle East, and we confirmed the conspiratorial suspicions of every anti-American Arab. Our credibility has been battered, the newspaper stated.

“We set out to put fear into the hearts of our enemies by demonstrating the efficacy of a new doctrine of pre-emptive war. Instead, we have shown the timeless nature of hubris. “Last week we announced the transfer of 3,600 troops of the overstrained US Army away from the border of what might be the world’s most dangerous country, North Korea. They will be sent to help with the war in Iraq, for which we now acknowledge we had inadequate resources.”

Contrary to Bush administration’s stated and implied promises, “we will be greeted as liberators was the Vice President’s famous version”, the daily said, “the US did not achieve a relatively low-cost triumph in Iraq. “Instead, it has a crisis of still-growing dimensions.

The war has damaged the good name of the US in every corner of the globe, has cost unanticipated scores of billions of dollars (all of it borrowed), and now threatens long-term damage to the US Army and national guard,” the Washington Post said.