February 18, 2008
The actions NOT taken were the policy...
Jim Miller writes on the Africa policies of Clinton and Bush. Guess who I think history will consider a great president. For this and a lonnng list of other reasons...
...The actions taken not taken in Rwanda were the Clinton administration's important African policy. Besides that, he did little, other than to continue the policies of previous administration. Africa did not much interest either of his secretaries of state, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright.
In contrast to Clinton, George W. Bush had promised a less activist foreign policy during his initial campaign for office. There were some exceptions. From the beginning, he backed Colin Powell's successful efforts to end the civil war in the southern Sudan, a war that had gone on for decades (or perhaps centuries in some ways of looking at it). (Incidentally, I have thought for some time that Powell has gotten too little credit for that success, and for helping defuse the tension between India and Pakistan, somewhat later.)
But, after the 9/11 attack, that changed, and Bush decided on a more activist foreign policy, in part, I suppose, to get support for the war on terrorism. But the area he chose, and the policies he backed after 9/11 were not inevitable, and show something interesting about the man, and his administration. Bush decided to help the poorest continent, Africa, and decided to help in three principal ways; he provided help for fighting malaria and AIDS, and he set up a new system of foreign aid, which challenges African countries to reform, before they receive the aid.
All three have had successes, some of which you can read about in this article in the Washington Post. It is likely that, in the next decade or so, millions of Africans will live who might have died without these Bush initiatives.
Let's summarize. Bill Clinton could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans — but chose not to, in order to preserve his political viability. George W. Bush has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans, in spite of the political costs.
The political gains for Clinton were not great, and the political costs to Bush were probably small. But the contrast, in which one man does the right thing and the other doesn't tells us more than a little about the two men. And the fact that this contrast has gotten so little coverage tells us more than a little about our "mainstream" journalists.
(I was dubious about the Somalia intervention; I was, to the extent I followed the question, in favor of stopping the genocide in Rwanda. That's because I thought that the first required enormous resources — or exceptionally skillful diplomacy — and that the second required trivial resources. In fact, the UN commander in Rwanda at the time, Roméo Dallaire, thought he could stop the genocide with a mere 4,000 troops. In contrast, to disarm the Somalia clans might have required 400,000 troops, or a very long campaign.)....
Bush is a Christian leader. Clinton is a narcissistic lefty nihilist. The results are plain to see. History will judge.
Posted by John Weidner at February 18, 2008 07:52 PMBut he has not moved against Saudis.
Posted by: Bisaal at February 19, 2008 12:45 AMBush has already unconditionally surrendered to Saudi Arabia after they attacked us on 9/11. Worse still, Bush has in fact turned of our military forces over to the terrorist leaders in Riyadh. It is only the stranglehold of partisan emotionalism that denies your mind the oxygen to reason your way to this obvious fact yourself. In response to being attacked by Saudi Islamic extremists, Bush quickly pulled all troops out of Saudi Arabia. He launched the eminently justified invasion of Afghanistan but quickly castrated the operation there before it could do any real harm towards Saudi interests in either Pakistan or Afghanistan. The eunuch-ized campaign in Afghanistan continues only to provide a diversion for the US public from the truth of US capitulation. But the main force of surrendered US troops are now fighting FOR Islam in Iraq, for the imposition of Sharia law in Iraq; for the “Religion of Peace” against secularism in Iraq. In short, our forces are fighting for the interests of militant Islam which means Saudi Arabia (and Iran). And yes, a few jihadis are thrown into the mix in Iraq to provide the thinnest of fig leafs. And yes, radical Islamists like Ayatollah Sistani are made our by the media to seem reasonable, and terrorists from groups like Al Dawa are made to seem like statesmen. But in the end our 160,000 troops in Iraq acting to ensure the force necessary to coerce the formerly secular Iraqis to submit to Islam. If one accepts the premise that Islam is evil, and I believe most people do, then doesn’t it follow that a secular tyrant in Iraq is far preferable to an Islamic democracy?
The amazing fact is that the US political elite, through the magic of partisan emotionalism, have been able to conceal the obvious fact of the US submission to Saudi Arabia from most Americans. But how else would it have been read if after the US were attacked by Japan in 1941 if we launched an attack not on Japan but instead on Japan’s enemy -- and imposed the ideology of Japanese militarism on the defeated people?
Belmont Club
Posted by: Bisaal at February 19, 2008 12:56 AMSaudis also have longtime deep interest in Pakistani nukes and have financed the nuke program. Infact Saudis may even be co-owner of Pak nukes.
Add to the fact that Pakistan and the Saudis were the major backers of AQ-Taleban Govt and we have the situation that the major backers of your officially designated Enemy are also your biggest Allies.
Now has Bush done something to extricate America from such alliance or has he plunged America deeper into Saudi-Pak-Taleban-AQ Alliance?
Posted by: Bisaal at February 19, 2008 02:16 AMWow - way too much in here to figure out a coherent reply to it all. So let me just address this one fundamental point where I so resoundingly disagree with you:
If one accepts the premise that Islam is evil, and I believe most people do, then doesn’t it follow that a secular tyrant in Iraq is far preferable to an Islamic democracy?
I do NOT accept that premise. Islam is not "evil", and tyranny in any form cannot be preferable to democracy. I'm enough of a realist to appreciate why we haven't invaded Saudi Arabia, and to lament the Palestinian elections. There are particular situations and moments of transition when pragmatic strongmen may be a necessary evil. But as a basic premise, government controlling its people is wrong, and people controlling their government is good, and the religious views of those people have NOTHING to do with it.
Mohamendanism is a Satanic perversion of Christianity. Most of Koranic stories are corruptions of Biblical stories.
Posted by: Bisaal at February 20, 2008 07:40 PMEven on the realist grounds, the Iraq war is pointless. It made Iran stronger and took away focus from Taleban-AQ and forces sheltering them. The AMericans forget that Saudis and Pakistan were the only two countries that recoginzed Taleban Govt.
It is pointless to worry so much about Iran getting the bomb when Pakistan has already got the Islamic bomb (named so by Pakistani themselves).
It stands to reason that there is official (or rogue
ISI) Pakistani involvement in 9/11.
While we have shown our military proficiency, what has not yet been demonstrated is whether Islamic democracy and the Jihad are incompatible — which is what I take to be the main point at issue in Iraq. The war has been prosecuted on the proposition that the two are indeed incompatible: that building democracy will weaken the Jihad. The successes of the Surge, even the tentative steps toward political progress, do not demonstrate this. And there is still a huge mass of evidence pointing the other way; pointing, that is, toward a convergence of democracy and the Jihad.
We are aided now right by the fact that the Jihad is by and large manned by criminals and brigands, if not outright madmen. The cruelty and fanaticism of these men is hardly tempered by shrewdness, flexibility or foresight. They resemble not the disciplined energy of the Turkish Jihad but the anarchic terror of corsairs, which the Turks used with such skill to disrupt European powers on the Mediterranean.
If the Jihad ever begins to develop or attract real statesmen, political innovators with vision, we will have more serious problems — one of them being the ease with which an independent Iraq could fall under the sway of a new Saladin or Osman or Suleiman.
Paul Cella
Posted by: Bisaal at February 20, 2008 08:28 PMI wrote a quick reply Bisaal, and posted it here...
Posted by: John Weidner at February 21, 2008 07:34 AM
