Any possibilities that America could take on characteristics of a team player in the United Nations have been officially choked to death. In minutes, President Bush smothered all of President Clinton's efforts toward turning America into a world leader that could be trusted. America plunged into world dominance with the sudden turn toward isolationism, which is no way to command the unquestionable world authority.
Bush has buried foreign diplomacy in the backyard. He has made it clear there is no room to negotiate anything. Whatever America wants, America gets.
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Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek reported, "President Bush's favorite verb is 'expect.' He announces peremptorily that he 'expects' the Palestinians to dump Yasser Arafat, 'expects' countries to be with him or against him, 'expects' Turkey to cooperate. It is all part of the administration's basic approach toward foreign policy, which is best described by the phrase used for its war plan--'shock and awe.' "
The notion is that the United States needs to intimidate countries with its power and assertiveness, always threatening, always denouncing, never showing weakness.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often quotes a line from Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." Rightly so, many Americans decided they didn't agree with running the country as a mobster would.
For the first time, Americans protested a war before it even started. Nationally synchronized protesting occurred in the first two days of this war. Few powerful countries have even teetered with the idea of supporting this countries' campaign for war.
Bush's cowboy logic of 'you gotta keep on keepin' on' is fueling his unilateralist thought, but his actions on that philosophy should frighten us all. And just like a trigger-happy cowboy from your favorite spaghetti western, Bush is asking his enemies to gang up on him.
Bush didn't even listen to top military officials like veteran Norman Schwarzkopf and, specifically, Colin Powell, who tried to hush ideas of war just days after Sept. 11, 2001. Even though they stand by the president, which they should do anyway since the hammer already has fallen, they knew it was not the right way to conduct business.
Gen. Wesley Clark said, "In the twilight of World War II we recognized the need for allies. We understood the need to prevent conflict, not just fight it, and we affirmed the idea that we must banish from the world what President Harry Truman, addressing the founding of the United Nations, called 'the fundamental philosophy of our enemies, namely, that 'might makes right.'"
Truman went on to say that we must "prove by our acts that right makes might."
Since Sept. 11, America has been in a similar position: the most powerful nation in the world, but facing a deadly enemy. The United States has the opportunity to use the power of the international institutions it established to triumph over terrorists who threaten not just the United States, but the world.
What a tragedy it will be if we walk away from our own efforts and from 60 years of post-World War II experience, to tackle the problem of terror without using fully the instruments of international law and persuasion that we ourselves created.
It is true that Saddam Hussein is a thug who should not be anywhere near a position of authority, as well as his heirs who have been equally ruthless. He gassed 60,000 of his own people in 1986 in Halabja. He sacrificed nearly 1 million Iraqis and killed or wounded more than 1 million Iranians in two wars. Iraq would be much better off without him.
If the United States is going to follow up with liberating oppressed peoples, there is need for consistency. But something tells me Bush isn't going to hunt down any of the other modern-day Hitlers in the world for the simple economical reason they don't have a thousand centuries' oil supply within and beneath their borders.
Layton Ehmke is a senior in print journalism. His e-mail address is: lre3684@ksu.edu