(CHICAGO, IL) Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., founder and President of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, issued the following statement regarding the Bush Administration’s foreign policy: Posted on 03/27/2003 3:26:39 PM PST by Maedhros
Rev. Jackson Brands Bush's Foreign Policy Neither Humble Nor Consistent
(CHICAGO, IL) Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., founder and President of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, issued the following statement regarding the Bush Administration’s foreign policy:
“When he campaigned for President, George W. Bush promised us a humble foreign policy, and criticized the Clinton/Gore years for their lack of consistency. But there is nothing humble about claiming the right to go to war unilaterally, circumventing the United Nations, splitting NATO between “new” and “old” Europe, and ignoring the treaties and rules of international law that George W. Bush overrode with his pre-emptive strike on Iraq.
There is nothing humble about adopting a brand new policy of “preventive war,” giving us—and in the near future, everyone else—the right to make war on any nation we choose, on the basis of a threat that no other nation can see, indeed, on the explicit basis of a threat that may not exist for years to come. There is nothing humble about adopting this policy in the face of the explicit opposition of much of this nation and most of the world. And there is certainly no consistency in this foreign policy. We attack Iraq for a future threat it might develop, and talk with North Korea because it has weapons that can threaten us right now. We invade Iraq supposedly because it has defied U.N. resolutions, but President Bush calls Sharon “a man of peace.” The Reagan/Bush Administration sold Iraq weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s, and now bombs Baghdad because Iraq has WMD. (As comedian Mark Russell said: “We know Iraq has WMD; we still have the receipts!)
Donald Rumsfeld goes to Baghdad in 1983 to assure the Iraqis of our support and friendship, and then leads the invasion forces twenty years later. The United States leads the world in arms sales, yet criticizes other nations for selling technology to Iraq. A Halliburton subsidiary circumvents the boycott to sell equipment to Iraq during the 1990s, and now we discover that Halliburton has won a huge no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq after the war. There are some other obvious contradictions.
Our aggression against Iraq violates our treaties, the rule of international law, and United Nations agreements—yet when Iraq seizes U.S. prisoners, the first thing the Bush Administration does is invoke the Geneva Convention. The Iraqis should follow the rules of the Geneva Convention; but so should we.
We rightfully demand fair treatment for our POWs in Iraq, but even our military establishment was concerned about the poor precedents our nation was setting in its treatment of prisoners held at Guantanamo.
During the run-up to the war, the Bush Administration made it clear that it was “my way or the highway” when dealing with the U.N. and NATO. Now that planning for the aftermath of this war has finally begun, however, it seems that the U.N. might be needed to help reconstruct and govern post-war Iraq, while our NATO partners may be asked to chip in to help pay for a war they opposed.
We are a nation of SUV drivers, invading another nation with massive oil reserves, yet publicly maintaining this war has nothing to do with oil. (Good thing the official name of the invasion is not “Operation Iraqi Liberation”—acronym OIL…) As Steve Kretzmann of the Institute for Policy Studies put it, if McDonald’s, the largest user of potatoes in the world, were invading Idaho, wouldn’t we suspect control of potatoes had at least a little bit to do with it? In any case, the rest of the world believes it does, and that counts for a lot.
This is being advertised as a war for democracy. Coming from an Administration which refused to count every vote in Florida, refuses to release documents that belong to the public, and refused to ask Congress for a declaration of war, this claim is automatically suspect. It is even more inconsistent, however, when we go to war without even a notion of the costs. The Administration had estimates even before the suspect $74.7B figure just released, but the Republicans on Capitol Hill were already busy ramming through a budget without any information on those costs, without any appropriations for the war, and with a huge tax cut that will make it harder to maintain the public welfare here at home while war and occupation continue. There is nothing democratic about withholding facts and information from the public, and from the Congress.
The Administration has articulated the idea that George W. Bush has all the power he needs to go to war, whether or not the Congress acts, whether or not the U.N. acts, whether or not our allies agree. Many believe this is un-Constitutional in nature, since Congress is supposed to declare war, not the President alone. And it is at a minimum “anti-Constitutional” in spirit, since Madison and the Founding Fathers deliberately set up our structures in the first place so that there could never be another “King George,” so that one man alone could not push the nation to war. This new doctrine of preventive war overturns the warnings of Washington and Madison and Jefferson that our nation has prospered by, supercedes the doctrine of containment that helped us win the Cold War, and makes us a nation that launches first-strike wars rather than defensive ones. Worse, this new doctrine was never discussed in a serious way in public, never mentioned during Bush’s campaign for President, and never voted on by the public. There is no mandate for preventive war. The consent of the governed has never even been asked, much less given.
Most Americans believe, rightly, that assassination is terrorism. But the Administration has quietly re-established the right to assassinate designated enemies overseas, with no public discussion or serious press coverage of this policy change.
This week the President was quoted as being grateful that weapons of mass destruction have not yet been used by the Iraqis. We are all grateful for that; we want our soldiers to return in good health, and soon. But we wonder about the cruise missiles now striking Baghdad—are they not also weapons of mass destruction? The people of the world asked us not to use them, and we ignored their pleas for peace. Where is democracy in that?
There is one final piece of hubris. The President cites God in every speech, and reportedly believes that God has tapped him to lead the fight against evil-doers. But the decision which of us is good and which of us is evil is not the President’s, it is God’s. And the people we are bombing are God’s children, too.
They say that truth is the first casualty in war. And with an embedded press corps seemingly giddy over covering this war, it is hard to argue with that statement. We would add that humility and consistency also seem to be early casualties.”
I'm convinced that for the left-liberals "Europe" and "NATO" equals France, Germany and Belgium.
REVERAAAND JACKSOONNN is nothing but a comic strip to me.a One of the biggest hypocrits of them all.
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