Gavin's column in NEXT last Sunday on the Bush versus Kerry foreign policy is so backward, I hardly know where to begin.
Let's begin with North Korea, since that is by far the most important concern right now, our relationship with Australia not withstanding. Here's a CBS article that explains it clearly.
First Bush ceased negotiations with North Korea, blew them off and embarrassed Colin Powell, and called them part of an axis of evil. Then he invaded Iraq to prevent the use of WMDs that didn't exist, while virtually ignoring North Korea which was openly declaring a nuclear program.
Yeah, that's good diplomacy. And Bush did not "[put] together a coalition to put pressure on North Korea," the coalition exists in spite of Bush. Bush is just trying, again, to take credit for other people's work, since he doesn't have much of his own to be proud of.
Further, Kerry's promise to enter bilateral negotiations with North Korea isn't "inexplicable," nor will it drive China away. Bush was just again demonstrating his ignorance of foreign policy matters. China has ASKED us to also enter bi-lateral talks with North Korea. All the other nations in the coalition have already done so.
What has made us "more hated, not less, in China, Japan, Russia and South Korea" has been Bush's hamfisted, impatient, amateur approach to foreign policy.
Kerry was right. Bush was wrong.
Meanwhile, Gavin goes on to criticize a couple of campaign statements by Kerry, or as often just someone associated with Kerry. Yeah, these really stack up to the actual actions of our current president, or the fact that no president in the entire history of our country has generated larger world-wide protests, or done more damage to longstanding alliances, than Bush.
Further, our own nation is more divided and more cynical about our own government than it has been since Vietnam and Watergate.
Outsourcing? You're going to complain about reducing tax incentives for companies to ship jobs overseas? Seriously? Kerry acknowledges this won't stop outsourcing, only reduce the incentive to do so. And voting for Bush because he won't reduce the number of unemployed in America for fear of upsetting India seems like the wrong kind of, shall we say, global test.
Gavin's column almost reads as a one-sided transcript of the debates, repeating many of the claims Bush presented there. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the many fact-checking articles that newspapers ran after the debates, both candidates made a number of errors and exaggerations.
The Kerry campaign has certainly erred on the side of insensitive statements occassionally while trying to make larger, valid points about Bush's failure to form a coalition that would equally share the burdens in Iraq, or about Bush's ignoring of the realities of Iraq.
Meanwhile, Bush has definitely erred on the side of actual, disastrous foreign policy decisions (not to mention domestic and environmental policies), costing thousands of lives, years of effort, hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, all the while making the world less safe.
BOTTOM LINE: Kerry can apologize for his big transgression -- a poorly worded statement. But Bush cannot simply apologize to take back an invasion, grant life back to the dead, repair relations with nations he's screwed over or pushed away, give back two years of extended service to reservists, capture Osama bin Laden, erase record deficits, erase the images of prisoner abuse by American soldiers, or reverse any one of the many disastrous mistakes he's made. Not that he's capable of admitting he's made any.
You want another four years of this? Really?
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