The bright side of Bush

Joshua Frank discusses some reasons for the left to be happy in the wake of the Bush years, including these:

No other president in modern history has done more to expose the dark side of US imperialism than Bush. The international community is not behind the Iraq war and doesn't trust our half-baked intelligence toward Iran, making it even more difficult for us to get away with bombing the country in the future. ...

Old alliances are becoming obsolete. NATO has weakened and the US go-it-alone strategy has damaged [sic?] the trend of US isolation in foreign hostilities. The US is unequivocally deemed a global menace.

I've written about this same upside of Bush (and the corresponding danger of a Democrat like Kerry or Bill Clinton who's able to enact the same policies with enough diplomacy and tact to defuse opposition).  Here's another example, from recent news:

The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy [of the Bush administration] has generated lasting "bitterness" and "deep mistrust" in Washington's relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, writes in his book "A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," set for publication next month. ...

Muñoz's account suggests that the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration's standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.

This is all to the good.  There's been a continuity in US foreign policy for decades, going right through the Clinton years, and that's not going to change no matter which of the current crop of major candidates ascends to the throne.  But thanks to the Bush administration's arrogance and heavy-handedness, the resistance to those policies by countries all around the world is at an all-time high—and that's most definitely something to be happy about.

Comments

[SteveB]

Hey, speaking of "I want to believe!", have you seen this?

My favorite line:
Obama avoids detailing his political programs precisely because he knows that in so doing he would shift the discourse from how to break through the fear we have of each other and our “certainty” that we are condemned to be alone and alienated, back to the old discourse about point X or point Y in his health care or environmental program, leaving most people behind in despair.

See, Obama avoids detailing his political programs for our benefit, so he doesn't harsh our mellow, or something like that.

The whole article is just loaded with insights like that. Yours for the picking, my friend.

[Fade]

What the go-it-alone mentality of the Bush years has done is made it impossible for us to go-it-alone into the future. It may end up being a boon for America in general to be forced back into a good global neighbor policy, but it's a shame that we had to do it like this. A little foresight would have went a long way.

Cowboy days are done.

[John Caruso]

Steve: Nope, hadn't. It looks like boilerplate Michael Lerner to me, for the most part, and I'd actually agree with much of what he says about Obama and the energy and spirit he's harnessing (or, more accurately, co-opting). None of that is bad; it's only bad when it's placed into the empty vessel of a corporate politician.

The thing I found most telling in the article was where Lerner says, "The energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests in Obama’s campaign has shown up before in the last fifty years, only to quickly be crushed." He then lists his choices of examples, and he includes the campaigns of two Democrats (Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson), but pointedly excludes the single greatest upsurge of progressive energy we've seen in decades: the 2000 campaign of the Green Party and Nader. Which isn't surprising, given that Lerner participated in that outpouring of energy in 2000, only to be one of those who helped to crush it afterward.