{"id":8162,"date":"2006-08-09T15:27:47","date_gmt":"2006-08-09T19:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8162.html"},"modified":"2006-08-09T15:27:47","modified_gmt":"2006-08-09T19:27:47","slug":"does-president-bush-understand-his-own-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/does-president-bush-understand-his-own-foreign-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Does President Bush understand his own foreign policy?’"},"content":{"rendered":"

If we can take another quick break from Election Land, Slate’s Fred Kaplan had a terrific piece<\/a> questioning whether the president actually understands his own foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Monday, the president and Condoleezza Rice held a brief press conference<\/a> in Crawford about the crisis in the Middle East. Taking the president’s comments at face value, Kaplan said Bush’s remarks “once more the question of whether he believes the things he says — whether he’s really so clueless about the world that his actions so deeply affect.”<\/p>\n

Kaplan went point by point, highlighting just how little the president’s responses corresponded to the administration’s policies.<\/p>\n

* “Everybody wants the violence to stop<\/i>” — Wrong. Bush “and Rice explicitly wanted the violence to continue, wanted Israel to pummel Hezbollah, so that when the time was ripe for a settlement, Israel could come to the table with a huge advantage,” Kaplan said.<\/p>\n

* “People understand that there needs to be a cessation of hostilities in order for us to address the root causes of the problem<\/i>” — Not even close. “This contradicted Rice’s mantra of the last two weeks — that there should be no cessation until these root causes are addressed,” Kaplan said.
\n
\n* “We have been in touch with Syria…. Syria knows what we think…. The problem is that their response hasn’t been very positive<\/i>” — Misleading. “No, Bush has not sent Colin Powell as an envoy to Syria in recent days (though that’s what he seemed to be saying),” Kaplan explained. “He was referring to a trip that then-Secretary of State Powell took to the Middle East in 2003. And, by the way, Syria’s response wasn’t entirely negative back then.”<\/p>\n

* “What Condi and I are working on, is to remind people about the stakes in the Middle East. And those stakes include…helping the Lebanese government firm up its democracy<\/i>” — As Kaplan responded, “But where’s the work? Where’s the aid, the diplomacy, the whatever-it-takes to firm up Lebanese democracy? Where’s the proof that the president understands what he’s talking about?”<\/p>\n

As usual, there was no proof. Bush was speaking without a script — which is often a recipe for nonsense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If we can take another quick break from Election Land, Slate’s Fred Kaplan had a terrific piece questioning whether the president actually understands his own foreign policy. Monday, the president and Condoleezza Rice held a brief press conference in Crawford about the crisis in the Middle East. Taking the president’s comments at face value, Kaplan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}