He may have been dishonest on the domestic scene. But when one speaks of hegemony is always in relation to the multilateral scenerio and not the domestic one. Internationally he has made clear what his intentions were and gone after it. He said in 2000 he would go after Saddam and he did. He did not fiddle around, he made everything he said clear internationally from day one. He does not abide by International rules and norms. The same can be said for all US presidents.
First, you can't arbitrarily split domestic from international "honesty," and claim a particular person is honest if they make remarks aimed at the world that are forthright, but lie endlessly, repeatedly, to roughly 300,000,000 people at home. It doesn't work that way. Second, you've taken a single comment of Bush's out of context. Bush has uttered many lies on the international stage. And he has also maintained publically, internationally, that he abides by international legal standards--a lie, in itself.
Third, it will always be possible to find upon looking at any nation, that it has not abided by internationally understood standards in some instances, so let's not be naive and claim the US is alone in this, or that Shrub is typical of the US. We are really talking about a continuum, in which Bush is far to one side, further than any other US administration has ever been in terms of breaking international treaties. Many US presidents, such as Carter, never broke any international treaties, though quite a few, like Clinton and Bush Sr, fudged often on the technical details--much as rulers do in every single country, including yours, every day.
I find it interesting that you question my knowledge of the history and background of the US administrations because i disagree with you. Internationally the US has always been cajoling, bullying and bribing nations into doing what the US wants. Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan are perfect examples of this. The 2 billion dollar aid package since the time of Sadat is a real life example.
I don't question your knowledge of US history because you disagree with me. I question it because your remarks, just like the one above ("the US has always been cajoling, bullying and bribing nations into doing what the US wants...") is woefully inaccurate. If you did know US history, you'd know that the US is an international chameleon and has been many things at many times, and you wouldn't utter things like this. My feelings don't enter into the matter. Personally, Fas, I like you quite a bit, and would hope to meet you sometime.
But factually, you're offbase, both in your sweeping statements about US international policy, and in the way you regard the US at its most belligerent as somehow atypical and worse than other international bullies who have acted and are acting in a similar manner.
Fable lets compare apples and apples. Russia and China were and are not large democracies with a very large educated population. The US has been a democracy for "200 plus years". It has a system of checks and balances it is the world's defender of human rights, liberty and justice for all. That is the image the US govt likes to see itself in and that is the image most americans see the US as. That is nothing but a smoke screen. The US is the only democracy on the planet that has attacked more countries in the current century. Communist dictatorships do not compare to the extreme use of the US military.
Even if I were to agree that the US is a democracy--which I certainly do not--it has not, even by your standards, always been so ("for 200 plus years"). Most federal government officials were chosen, not elected, for quite some time in US history. The president, for example, was "elected" by a group of 40 or so men until the 1830s. Members of the senate, one of the two legislative chambers, were chosen by state legislatures, not elected by the public, until 1913. There were salary requirements that voters had to show before being allowed to cast ballots for many years; and of course, half the nation, women, were not allowed to vote until the 20th century.
And no one is arguing that the US remotely lives up to the image it likes to project, anymore than the UK does, or Pakistan does, or Saudi Arabia does, or France does. Or have you done a quantitative an analysis of, say, France and the US, to show that the US is more hypocritical? And why can't Communist nations be considered alongside so-called democracies in a consideration of bullying tactics employed against other nations? A bully is a bully. You can't simply write off the horrific offenses of Russia or China because they never claimed to be wonderful saviors of humanity. Hypocrisy is nasty, but so is harsh brutality, divorced of any hypocrisy whatsoever. A person beaten to death doesn't care whether the person who has done the deed claimed to be their savior or just grinned savagely.
This kind of US bashing is frankly getting tiresome, and serves no point, as I see it. If you're going to create arbitrary rules that China and Russia are automatically excluded from the discussion, why continue this?
It may be the only one of the latest culprits but it has been doing so for the past 50 years. I am surprised you compare the US govt to that of the Soviet Union. I mean the atrocities commited in Vietnam are just as bad as those in Chechnya.
Read up on Chechnya. There were atrocities committed in Vietnam, and they're documented, but they were the exception, on both sides of an acknowledged war. (And don't tell me "the war was unjust and an atrocity in itself." Hell, I protested it at the time, and got the beatings to prove it. We're not discussing the justice of a given war, but the actions of the armed forces within that war.) Chechnya is a record of endless atrocities committed on a largely supine populace,
not in a war at all, but being treated as a combination free whorehouse and treasure trove by the Russian army. I think you may have the resources to discover this, for yourself. The results should shock you, for I know you are a moral person.
I'm cutting out the rest of what you wrote, since it seems to serve no purpose except to bash the US, without regard to any other nation's conduct, at any time. It is woefully inaccurate--really, the US deliberately violated
every international law it wanted to?--and you're clearly losing all perspective, as well historical insight, when you do this.
Fas, don't your rage blind you to the differences between ideals and international RealPolitik. If you're looking for nations that go around ignoring international human rights, I think you'll find China and Russia just as easily fit that description currently; not to mention dozens of smaller countries, like Zimbabwe, or North Korea, where the annual production of hypocritical BS and vicious behavior equals the worst of the big guys in substance if not scale. I loathe the current US administration and I've tolerated very few of its predecessors, but stop focusing on it, alone, and making excuses for places like China and Russia.