Slate on Bush’s Inept Diplomacy
Slate has an article today about how inept the Bush Administration’s diplomacy has been.
Basically, even though history does not repeat itself in perfect experimental cases, we can note that Clinton was able to get Greek support for his Kosovo intervention, despite popular Greek sentiment against it. In fact, getting Greek support was probably more difficult than Turkish support for Iraq, because the Greeks openly sympathized with the Serbs (the Turks look on the Arabs running Iraq with disdain), and have a longer history of anti-Americanism.
The primary difference was that Clinton worked within a multilateral framework (NATO), which gave the Greek government both incentive and cover for supporting the intervention. Incentive, because the Greeks had a say in NATO and felt like they had a hand in decision making, and cover, because, even with strong public sentiment against war, they could point to the alliance deciding on war, rather than the seemingly hegemonic superpower. Similarly, the French were on board for bombing the Serbs, despite France’s historic ties to Serbia.
Bush, contrary to Clinton, publicly disdained the various multilateral frameworks he had on hand from the beginning. This made smaller countries oppose the war for the sake of not looking like the superpower’s lackeys. And, even if their governments supported war, these governments would have no cover from NATO or the UN. Because of this, Bush squandered the massive sympathy the world had for the United States after 9/11.