U.N. Reaction to Bush Shows How Far This President Has Fallen

Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush spoke to the United Nations where he was welcomed with a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and thunderous applause. Nearly two years to the day later, Bush was met mostly with staunch criticism at the U.N. this week, from a world community that has increasingly lost faith in his administration and its foreign policy.

It was another painful reminder of how far the United States has fallen in the world's estimation under this President. Bush has squandered the world's tremendous goodwill in the wake of Sept. 11, splintered relations with longstanding allies, inflamed anti-American sentiments in the Middle East, and embroiled American troops in what looks to be a long and dangerous occupation in Iraq. It is a record and a policy that, by the day, has fewer and fewer defenders.

Even Bush admits his administration miscalculated how large the task of rebuilding Iraq's government would be once Saddam Hussein was ousted. That's why he was at the United Nations on Tuesday, seeking other nations' support in troops and funds for rebuilding Iraq. But his speech to the General Assembly did little to sway skeptics aware of a disturbing gap between this administration's actions and words.

While the tone of Bush's message was respectful, he still managed to convey the impression that it would be his way or the highway. And he persisted in trying to bend the facts to support his case, including a revised take on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Bush spoke about Saddam Hussien's use of such weapons in acts of mass murder, a reference to a 1988 poison gas attack against Kurds in Halabja that killed 5,000. Yet, he ignored the fact that a U.N. inspections program had destroyed most of Saddam's WMD programs after the Gulf War in 1991 and no evidence has been found since that supports Bush's assertion that Saddam had restarted those programs. Even so, the U.N. was moving toward more aggressive and intrusive inspections before an impatient Bush launched war against Iraq. Those inspections might not have happened or been ineffective, but had the inspections occurred, war might have been avoided.

Bush even had the audacity to claim that the United States acted to defend "the credibility of the United Nations". This from a man who once dismissed the U.N.'s "nation building" in the Balkans or Somalia as unworthy tasks for the American military. The same man who rejected the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, opposed the International Criminal Court, and withdrew from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, now expects the General Assembly to believe he has the world body's best interests at heart.

Meanwhile, Bush offered nothing in return for the assistance he sought at the U.N. There would be no shared authority for nations contributing cash and troops, and Bush didn't even provide a timetable for turning control of Iraq over to its citizens. The U.N. was simply being enlisted to help mop up the mess that followed America's invasion of Iraq.

During his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt warned: "We shall have to take responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict." It appears that Bush has made his choice and it's the wrong one.