Buchanan: America needs a new vision
By Lee Russ
Wednesday, January 04, 2006 at 02:02 PM
In an article in the journal Chronicles dated last week, Pat Buchanan cogently reviews the evidence of how well America's current foreign policy is working for us, and concludes:
"America needs a new vision. America needs a new foreign policy."
Question: How much trouble are you in when Pat Buchanan makes 10 times as much sense as the president of the United States?
Answer: Soooooooo much trouble.
Excerpt:....
A new Zogby poll of 3,900 people in six once-friendly Arab nations finds that, when asked to name the leader they detest most, 45 percent named Ariel Sharon, but Bush has moved into second at 30 percent. Tony Blair was a distant third at 3 percent. No one else was close.
Only 6 percent agreed with al-Qaida's goal of a caliphate ruling the Islamic world, and only 7 percent approved of its terrorism-but fully 36 percent admired how al-Qaida "confronts the U.S."
How admired is President Bush? When he urged the Iranians to go to the polls and repudiate the mullahs, they responded by choosing as president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who makes Hashemi Rafsanjani look like Ramsey Clark. When Condi Rice stiffed the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood on a visit to Cairo, the Brotherhood soared in Egyptian eyes and swept to victory in 60 percent of the parliamentary races it contested.
.....
Because of charges that we used secret prisons in Europe to interrogate jihadists and EU airports to transfer them there, the United States has never been less admired in NATO Europe, nor its president more despised.
Is it not thus apparent the world does not really want an American empire, or American hegemony, or Bush's "democratic revolution"? Is it not equally apparent that we Americans, unwilling to conscript our young or further tax ourselves, cannot sustain a global policy that commits us to defending nations all over this world, most of which do not even like us?
However Iraq ends, the era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall has reached its close. That place in the sun the Greatest Generation won for us, and the Cold War generation kept for us, the baby boomer generation appears to have lost. And perhaps forever.
America needs a new vision. America needs a new foreign policy.