Through Murky Waters: The Marlboro Man & the United Nations
The president’s unilateral foreign policy is not exactly the way to ride off into the sunset
By Alex Sirney, senior writer
Posted on September 25, 2006

The arrogance shown by the United States this week toward the world community added a punctuation mark that looks more like a middle finger to President Bush’s address to the United Nations General Assembly this week.

Bush’s address carried the typical War-on-Terror cadence, although it was much less unilateral than would have been expected. It wasn’t the address, however, that may have sent U.S. diplomats across the Middle East scrambling either for damage control or to hand in their resignations. Instead, it was the actions and meetings outside the General Assembly that showed how little value Bush places on true diplomacy and what danger the United States could face as a result.

The United States had the honor of being the second country to address the assembly (behind Brazil) at the annual meeting that started this past week, with President Bush, as head of state, speaking on its behalf. He spoke almost exclusively of the War on Terror and how important and successful he feels the spread of democracy is, but as is his habit, he also addressed the people of several countries directly, including the Iranian people.

The United States, he told them, respects their country and that he believes the only thing holding them back is their leaders. This respect runs in sharp contrast to the absolute lack of respect shown by Bush to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who he refused to meet with despite the ongoing nuclear crisis and the murmurings of military action against Iran if it doesn’t halt its nuclear power and rumored weapons program.

What should further alarm those interested in self-preservation is that the president didn’t even listen to his Iranian counterpart’s speech later the same day, according to CNN. This is more than a bit negligent for a man who may or may not be considering military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. It could be hoped that with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the ongoing Iraq debacle, not to mention every domestic policy instituted during his regime, that Bush had learned to find out what he’s up against before jumping in head first.

Knowing when not to jump has never been one of Bush’s strong points, however, and this week in an interview with CNN he threatened another leap, this time into the territory of an important ally. When asked if he would send troops into Pakistan if Osama bin Laden was hiding there, he said, “Absolutely,” which in no way excited President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan who said, much more diplomatically, that Pakistan would prefer to perform any military action in its territory itself and that it would not allow U.S. troops within its territory. This comes in the same week Musharraf revealed that he had been threatened, in the early days of the War on Terror, that the United States would bomb Pakistan “back into the stone age” if it did not cooperate. The State Department denies this claim, of course, but from a purely speculative stance, it’s hard to believe that threat was never made when all the rhetoric of the time — and even now — includes that terminology.

All this together has not only weakened the United States’ diplomatic position, but also placed it in a precarious state where action in hostile countries from an already overstressed and thinly spread military seems inevitable. Unfortunately, this time around the countries in question can’t be expected to roll over as nicely as Afghanistan and Iraq did, or resist occupation as gently as the population of those countries are now.

Alex Sirney is a senior anthropology/SMAD major who welcomes feedback at sirneyac.