Bush takes a broadside

A very interesting article on Lateline last night: A group of high-ranking former officials who served presidents on both sides of politics, among them people who once held the following posts: chairman of the joint chiefs, CIA director, head of US central command, air force chief of staff and an array of former ambassadors and assistance secretaries of state and defence has held a press conference at which they called for what we call regime change in Washington because they said the Bush administration had made such an appalling mess of foreign policy.

The group said they were not politically motivated and included Republicans among their number as well as non-politically-aligned individuals and Democrats, but they described the Bush administration's approach to foreign policy like so:

As one of our people said, this Administration is trying to do foreign policy without diplomacy, which is a new departure, in our opinion.

Diplomacy should come first and when that fails then you can consider using force.

We seem to have been doing the opposite.

We use force first and then we try to use some diplomacy to clean up the act afterwards.

The following quote was particularly to the point:

Some people in the Administration have said, well, many people, that 9/11 changed everything.

In our opinion it didn't change all that much.

It was a major terrorist attack by foreign terrorists on our soil and this was shocking to people, particularly because they could see it on television, but that didn't change everything.

There are certain fundamentals that we still need to use in our diplomacy that were not changed by 9/11.

And what does this mean for John Howard? What are they implying about the Coalition of the Willing (willing to do anything to get that Free Trade Agreement or a photo-op with someone who is actually important)? Well Lateline's guest was a diplomat and in arguing for the value of diplomacy in US foreign policy he was not about to get tangled up in Australian politics... which is of course more than we can say for Bush for whom the term ham-fisted is coming to describe his whole administration.

Will the American public listen when not just 'peacniks' and the UN are saying the Busgh administration is a disaster but members of the CIA and the Armed Forces of their own country? Will they see that he is in fact one of the most thuggish and brutal presidents since... well his corrupt father? Only time will tell.

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