It's the Little Things along with the Big Things

In all this talk about whether or not the Bush Administration decieved the American people about Iraq or questions about forcing the CIA to come up with the "right" answer, there are other aspects to President Bush's Foreign Policy that are getting overlooked. Such as the fact that the entire Bush foriegn policy can be summed up on a postage stamp.

Do what we say or else!

Yep. The Bush administration apparently sees diplomacy as a way of presenting our demands to the world. We will tell other nations what to do, and they will do it. That's why Neo-Conservative thought calls for us to treat France as an enemy; because we asked them to do something and they didn't do it.

It's all pretty sad really. I love this conversation. "So why does President Bush want to act unilaterally?" "What do you mean unilaterally, more than 20 nations supported us in Iraq." The proper response is "Yeah, but how many of those nations got even the slightest input on how and when? Great Britain we listened to as long as they told us what we wanted to hear.

I've covered this ground before, back when Newt Gingrich attacked the State Department and tried to measure himself for Colin Powells job.

Which brings us to the man in charge of our diplomatic apparatus, Mr. Colin Powell. Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate, covers his current woes.

From the start of this presidency, and to a degree that no one would have predicted when he stepped into Foggy Bottom with so much pride and energy, Powell has found himself almost consistently muzzled, outflanked, and humiliated by the true powers—Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Bureaucratic battles between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon have been a feature of many presidencies, but Powell has suffered the additional—and nearly unprecedented—indignity of swatting off continuous rear-guard assaults from his own undersecretary of state, John Bolton, an aggressive hard-liner who was installed at State by Cheney for the purpose of diverting and exhausting the multilateralists.)

Kaplan notes that it is unlikely that Powell will be part of a second Bush Administration (assuming he gets one, and following Rooks advice over at Rooks Rant, I'm assuming he won't). So in the unlikely event of a second Bush Administration, well, maybe Gingrich will get to try on that new job he wants after all.