By Daniel Nelson
When President Bush’s approval rating soared above 90% after the World Trade Center attacks, most of his opponents dismissed it as the usual post-crisis rallying any President receives. Yet September 11th is becoming more and more distant and President Bush is still riding high in public opinion. A recent ABC poll has even placed him as one of America’s greatest Presidents, only trailing Lincoln and JFK in the minds of Americans. While we can all agree that Afghanistan was a military success, I still have reservations towards the idea that we are currently in the midst of our nation’s third greatest administration. I have serious doubts that it would even crack the top ten.
For the first few months after the attacks, President Bush’s black-and-white rhetoric seemed appropriate and healthy for the ailing nation. It seemed reasonable to label the Taliban and Al-Queda as “evil” because they had few if any graces that argued otherwise. Now that the Taliban government has been destroyed and Al-Queda has been dispersed across the globe, the issues surrounding the War on Terrorism have become more complicated. Terrorism, a concept easily defined during the Afghanistan invasion, has become more vague as the government struggles to apply it to other nations. Does consciously housing known terrorists in your borders make you a terrorist state? In the case of Afghanistan, the answer was yes. But does a nation constructing its own weapons that the US government disapproves of carry the same label? Bush seems to think so. He singled out three of them in his State of the Union address last month, and US diplomacy has been limping ever since.
Excluding those who have been in a coma or on an extended nature retreat, everyone has heard of Bush’s Axis of Evil: Iraq and Iran, with North Korea thrown in to show that we don’t just beat up on Muslim nations. After getting a positive response from villainizing the Taliban, I assume Bush thought he could continue to use the same simplified characterization on these three very different countries, and if the polls are any evidence, he was right. Too bad the rest of the world disagrees.
While Americans still see Bush as a political idol, every other nation on the planet, including our allies, has either shrugged their shoulders or vehemently dismissed Bush’s speech. Last week Bush was busily repairing relations and rallying support in South Korea, a country that tends to hold axis member North Korea in less than high regards. He was greeted by violent protests in the streets of Seoul. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, relations between Iraq and Iran have begun to thaw for the first time since the 1980’s. I’m sure this sort of alliance was not the desired effect of Bush’s speech.
Iraq and North Korea were both painfully blunt when responding to Bush’s Axis of Evil label, Iraq calling the idea “stupid” and North Korea calling the President a “politically backward child.” Neither country can be held in high reguard, but with the President currently backpedaling across the globe, they may be right. Unfortunately, most Americans back home are still too blinded by his achievements in Afghanistan to provide the criticism Bush’s dangerous new policy of dummy diplomacy deserves. Until that happens, I hope that the President starts reading over the speeches handed to him, and takes notice if the words are written in crayon.
