Perhaps the most irksome characteristic of the Bush administration has been the Rio Grande-wide gap between rhetoric and action.
The president has consistently talked a good game when it comes to democracy promotion, stopping weapons proliferation and other important goals, but his actions have just as consistently fallen short. Inaction is defensible -- because there is always a good case to be made for caution in international affairs. But why then has his rhetoric been so incautious? The combination leads to the suspicion that there is no underlying strategy, merely a disconnect between what the White House speechwriters churn out and what the rest of the government actually does.
To judge by the president's speech last week at West Point, the gap isn't diminishing in his final days in office. He gave a belligerent address that echoed his statements from the immediate post-9/11 period. Once again we heard stirring words:
"We resolved that we would not wait to be attacked again, and so we went on the offense against the terrorists overseas so we never had to face them here at home. ... We understood, as I said here at West Point in 2002, 'if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long' -- so we have made clear that governments that sponsor terror are as guilty as the terrorists -- and will be held to account. ... We're pressing nations around the world -- including our friends -- to trust their people with greater freedom of speech, and worship, and assembly."
Such pledges had a real impact in the years immediately after 9/11 when they seemed to be backed up with action. Those were the halcyon days when the Taliban and the Baathists were being overthrown, Libya was giving up its weapons of mass destruction program, Syria was pulling out of Lebanon and (if you believe the National Intelligence Estimate) Iran was suspending its development of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, in more recent years, the U.S. and its allies have been losing ground to such adversaries as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, Venezuela, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. There are multiple explanations for these dispiriting developments, but surely a large part of the problem is the failure of the Bush administration to live up to President Bush's words.
"We went on the offense against the terrorists overseas"? True, except when they happened to be living in places like Iran and Syria. For all of his talk about holding governments that sponsor terrorism to account, Bush has done little to punish these malefactors.
