Bush's Foreign Policy Batting Average

Presidents are going to be wrong from time to time but Bush and his advisers seem to have an awfully low batting average. S. W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion reminds us of another Bush truism that doesn't quite match reality:

Bush likes to point out that a big reason it’s important to democratize countries of the Mideast is to promote peace. That, Bush repeatedly assures, is because democracies don’t go to war with other democracies.

Well, Israel and Lebanon are both parliamentary democracies. The fact that Israel’s objective is Hezbollah and not the government or most people of Lebanon provides no cover for Bush’s warm-and-fuzzy notion. The facts are that Lebanon is being bombed, shelled and shot up, and Lebanese civilians are being killed.

File this example of neocon nonsense away with Saddam’s massive stockpiles of WMDs, Saddam’s close ties with al Qaeda, the looming mushroom cloud, the broken-down trucks that supposedly carried chemical weapons but didn’t, the Nigerian yellow cake purchase that never happened, the aluminum tubes for centrifuges that weren’t, the happy Iraqis who would greet our troops as heroes, the oil revenues that would defray invasion costs, the assurances we have plenty of troops in Iraq to deal with the insurgency and the notion the insurgency is in “the final throes.”

The sad reality is that Bush is losing democracies rather than creating them. Iraq and Afghanistan are in danger of going backwards. Russia is less democratic today than when Bush entered office. Bush defenders try to excuse Bush by saying he's had a string of bad luck. If so, Bush is the unluckiest president in our nation's history. I suspect the truth is that presidents who are competent tend to create their own luck which is generally more useful than trying to create 'reality' with a lot of public relations. Creating luck isn't all that difficult: it means building bridges, not burning them.