It has been suggested through numerous polls and in the words of Senator Kerry and others that the United States has a credibility problem. We were discussing this a little bit in the global test thread, but I thought it deserved its own thread.

In general supporters of Bush have claimed that there isn't in fact a credibility problem and we are moving forward with our foreign policy just fine.

Questions for debate:
1. Do you believe we have a credibility problem? Why or why not?

2. If you feel the United States does have a credibility problem, what do you believe is the right way to fix it? What will the candidate you intend to vote for do about it?

3. If you don't feel we have a credibility problem, how do you think the next Iraq-like conflict will be received globally?

I would say that is an absolute.

The way president Bush has handled foreign policy since he has been in office I think has worked to a detriment as far as the US is concerned. He just has an arrogant I do not need you attitude. Just some instances of this or proof of this I think is...

He supposedly didnt own a passport until he became president.

He couldnt name the leaders of foreign nations (and thought he shouldnt have to if a journalist didnt know them)

He never publicly apologized to Canada for the US bombing that killed Canadian soldiers.

He notoriously never thanked the coalition in Afghanistan.

He pulled the US out of the ICC (which is an impartial court) something that no other ally did.

He wanted to re-constitute the Star Wars program which dishonored an existing anti-weopen proliferation treaty with Russia.

He pulled out of Kyoto completely. He didnt try to engage in the process or even negotiate.

He called N. Korea, Iran and others Evil. This escalated tensions in the Korean penninsula and gave the appearance of a crusade.

Prior to the war in Iraq he at first refused to go before the UN and present his case and then gave up after he findly went and not surprisingly they werent wowed.

International Polls amongst our greatest allies show exactly how despised he is and how he has devalued America and our credibility in the eyes of the world.

Just watching The House of Commons the other day the Labour party (Blair's party) and even the conservatives slammed Bush in the exact same manner and with the exact same dialogue (except harsher) that Kerry has used. This is from Britain our greatest ally.

He has essentially put America in a corner in which we are isolated and crippled. We no longer have the ability to scare nations into submission (Iran is doing whatever they want and we are so overstretched we can do nothing). This belief that we must invade Iraq but we can deal diplomatically with equally vile nations like Iran and N. Korea is absurd and only undertaken because of the reality that we are not able to act militarily anymore as Australia, Britain and those few who followed us in are no longer able as Bush has pushed the opposition of the people within those nations towards the US to the breaking point. This happens as the muslim youth population is exploding and hatred towards the US grows at unheard of rates.

Our word and more specifically Bush's word is cancer on the international scene. Britain, Australia, Poland etc are stuck with us now but will never follow us into a "slam dunk" again. Yes we obviously have a world credibility gap.

Not sure if this is true or not, but in any case I was unaware that having a passport is a Constitutional requirement for the office of President.



Oh please. I bet you couldn't name the head of state of some of the countries around the world without looking it up. I know I couldn't.




I'll have to look this up, but I believe the US did issue a statement of regret for that accident. We did after all court martial the pilots that were involved in that accident.




Actually, the US did. I'll look it up, but I know Rumsfeld did express appreciation for the efforts of the coalition nations in Afghanistan in one of his press conferences.




The US was never IN the ICC (which in my opinion is hardly "impartial"). The ICC agreement was never submitted to the Senate for ratification.



SDI did not "dishonor" the treaty. There was a provision in that treaty for opting out of it with sufficient notice. Bush provided the notice required.




We were never IN the Kyoto agreement, it was never submitted to the Senate for ratification.



They are evil, but we'll get back to this one later on......



When did he refuse to go to the UN? He first went to Congress, got the resolution passed then went to the UN.

Apparently I can't directly quote anything more without messing up the script so I'll just close with the thought that other nations are going to do whatever they believe is in their best interest to do. Without regard to who the President of the US is. What we need to make sure of is that we have a President who is going to act likewise in America's best interest without regard to the polls in other countries.

Edited to add......

I think I ran out of my "quote quota" in this post, but I wanted to add this response in to this post...... I'll use quote marks for Kalabus' contention......

"He has essentially put America in a corner in which we are isolated and crippled. We no longer have the ability to scare nations into submission (Iran is doing whatever they want and we are so overstretched we can do nothing). This belief that we must invade Iraq but we can deal diplomatically with equally vile nations like Iran and N. Korea is absurd and only undertaken because of the reality that we are not able to act militarily anymore as Australia, Britain and those few who followed us in are no longer able as Bush has pushed the opposition of the people within those nations towards the US to the breaking point. This happens as the muslim youth population is exploding and hatred towards the US grows at unheard of rates."

Earlier on, Kalabus was unhappy that Bush referred to Iran and NK as "evil". Now, he himself refers to them as "vile". Evil and vile are anagrams. I just found that interesting.......

I am not saying it is a requirement. I am saying that someone who is running for the highest office in earth should have a rudimentary first hand experience with the outside world. It isnt as if he didnt have the money to travel. To me it is common sense that somone who understood the office of president and wanted to pursue it and all its duties would also have a slight interest in the rest of the world.

Oh Please? I am not running for president of the United States. (anyway I still am aware of more world leaders then Bush was when he ran) Call me an elitist but I feel that someone who runs to be president of the US should have a rudimentary knowledge of the nations, cultures and leaders he is guarnteed to be meeting with.

See I do not think you get it. Bush needed to apologize. Bush needed to speak to the Canadian people. He is the president. The US did issue regret but Bush said nothing publicly. The reason I remember this is because I read Canadian journalists making note of this. Making note how the US seems to walk all over Canada and seems unappreciated for the Canadian contributions. As a leader it is his duty to do this. Like when Reagan took blame for the Beirut bombings. That is the mark of a leader. What Bush did is the mark of a the xenophobic and culturally unaware person that he is.

Bush never directly addressed coalition members on thanking them on Afghanistan. Numerous journalists (of course leftists but certainly not making it up) like Paul Krugman and others have made public light of this.

I think you are playing a diversionary game of semantics. Dismissing the ICC and Kyoto protocols because we were never in them...Bush never showed a willingness to approach them. This raised the ire of allies especially the British. We are 1 of only like 6 nations who are not in the ICC the others are filled with the likes of Oman and Pakistan etc etc. Not a message of international soldiarity when you put Americans above international law and mandates.

He didnt want to present his case before the UN ( a very public and news reported reality). He finally relented and went of course but he did not like the idea at first because he knew it would fall under intensive scrutiny.

You do not get it. He is the president of the United States. Publicly calling a nation evil and realizing they are international threats are two completely seperate things.

Let me put it in an analogy. A person thinks abortion is wrong would it be okay to go on national televison and call woman who have had abortions Heartless Murderers? The leader of the free world has to have enough common sense to approach international politics as a diplomat not as a pretend gun slinging cowboy who is actually an ex cheerleader.


He lacks international sensitivity and perspective. He does not understand foreign cultures. From a sociologists stand point Bush would lack what they call the Sociological Imagination.

I do not care if you support him or not but you have to admit he is the most divisive president of all-time especially on an international level. Even the politicians of nations who are allies despise him.

(Note: I added the [red] numbers inside the quotes to better address them.)

[1] Having a passport might not be a prerequisite for becoming President, but it is an indication that George W. Bush was not well-traveled. That would certainly be a good excuse for having tunnel vision when it comes to foreign affairs.

[2] Kalabus rightly contends that since neither of you guys who can't name these names are running for Head of the United States, it is beside the point. But Bush's not knowing the names of heads of state in other countries was also an indication that he is not well-read. A President should be.

[3] Once again Bush does not feel it is somehow statesman-like to be big about this and say "I'm sorry" to the Canadians. Oh yeah, that's right: He doesn't make mistakes. Whenever there is a mistake somebody in his administration has fallen on his sword rather than sully his President's image of infallibility. Too bad Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill didn't follow the script (I suppose these were the appointment "mistakes" Bush alluded to when he couldn't otherwise identify any mistakes he made as President during the Presidential debate).

[4] What kalabus is referring to is the fact that in Bush's SOTU speech he didn't even acknowledge the contributions of the Coalition nations in that conflict. Good thing he has Rummy to write thank you notes for him.

[5] The problem here is Bush, who doesn't want proliferation of WMDs, has no qualms about having new nukes developed by us--nukes that aren't needed, cost a helluva lot of money that would be better spent elsewhere, and that show the rest of the world that we want other people to take medicine we're not willing to take ourselves, i.e., a real double standard. It's like the preacher who preaches against prostitution shacking up with a hooker.

[6] If Bush or his Republican-controlled Congress had wanted it submitted to Congress for ratification, it would have been. This is the same President who didn't like the way Christie Todd Whitman, his appointment, was busting her butt trying to be effective. Ironic, or perhaps not so ironic at all: I really liked her as his appointment.

Bush holds forth the United States as somehow being above the law while expecting other nations to be held to international law. Is it any wonder there are so many (non-Muslim, non-fanatical) foreigners who regard the United States as a bully and not the shining example other Presidents portrayed us to be?

Kalabus is right; there is a huge credibility gap. The man who said "I'm a uniter" is anything but one, either out in the world or inside his own country.

We've always had a certain level of credibility problem, regardless of party in power, but this administration has screwed up so badly that any shred of credibility is gone. With a President whose only self-admitted mistakes involve the appointments he's made, I can't see how the rest of the world can possibly believe the guy. Here's reality. Here's what the President says. See? No correlation.

A recent one that sticks out right now has to do with the tax cuts. The President told us that the wealthy hire accountants and lawyers to get out of tax raises, right? Right. So why even bother cutting taxes for the wealthy? Even if they are taxed at high rates, the wealthy will find a way to get out of them.

So ban tax cuts for the wealthy. Raise the rates to 90% for the wealthy. It won't make any difference



I've already voted, and for guess who. The only way to fix this credibility problem, or to get back to a level where at least some of what is said is believable, we need to get rid of the sitting President.

The next thing we have to do is to drop the neo-con claptrap about world domination by the US. I know, that's not the exact phrasing used, but that's what it amounts to: the use of military force to get our ways as a primary focus, not the last resort.

A great danger lies along this path that the current administration has taken us. We might be the strongest military power in the world, but if the rest of the world gangs up on us, our military might looks pretty puny. Add to this an economy that isn't performing up to par regarding tax revenue and an administration who seems to think that money grows on trees, well, better read about the downfall of past empires. We have become too ambitious, too idealistic, and too spread out.

Moving off this path, we need to engage the rest of the world as much as we can. Yes, there are major problems out there, among them nuclear proliferation and terrorism. Nothing new about these problems, and what worked in the past will work again. This administration threw the baby out with the bath water, stubbornly not using methods that worked in the past due to Demos having used them, specifically Clinton.

So to be different, this administration wore blinders on problems that have been present through many administrations, rather than using all methods known to work. We need an administration that won't be blinded by loyalty to ideology that says anything Clinton did was wrong.

We also need an administration that won't blame the 9/11 terrorist attacks on failures of the previous administration. I know that was a common spin tactic during pre-9/11 times, but times have changed, as President Bush likes to remind us. However, we need to approach these changed times differently from what this administration has embraced.

Hardening airport security was a good move, and really should have been done long ago. Oh well. But we all know that more needs to be done to harden our security nation-wide. Removing our civil rights is one way to approach this, and like preemptive military strikes, should be the last resort, not the primary purpose. We need to make it very difficult for would-be terrorists to attack while preserving what America is about -- freedom, meaning civil rights. Innocent before proven guilty. Liberty first, or death.

We need to get our cojones back, and not in the cowboy sense of shoot-em-up. We need to be what Americans ought to be: free and courageous, yet cautious in a dangerous world. Give me liberty or give me death, sure. But make it hard to kill me too.

Iraq was supposed to become the bright, shining example of democracy for the ME by now. I'm pretty sure that's what President Bush expected as the aftermath of the liberation, but he was wrong. I personally did not believe him, and so did many others. I did not believe his talking heads, and I did not believe the supporters of his way. President Bush has never had any credibility with me, personally.

Now, speaking for the world is a tough thing for an individual to do, one who has only traveled to Canada when the boarder was fairly open. All I can do reliably is to speak for myself and those who I come across in my daily routines. If this reflects world attitudes, then so be it. That the US lacks credibility world-wide makes sense from here, because we don't believe the present leadership ourselves. Well, half of us don't. Maybe more than half, and I strongly suspect that this is the case.

After Nov. 2, we'll have a better sense of this.



I hope we never again engage in an Iraq-like conflict. I hope that not only will our intelligence community actually do its job, but that future administrations will act carefully when deciding to use preemptive military strikes or liberations. I hope we will learn from this period of history and not decline into a second-rate country. I hope we will have the wisdom to fix the mistakes made over the past three + years.

1. Do you believe we have a credibility problem? Why or why not?

Absolutely not. In fact, all of the issues being addressed here came about precisely because we were very credible. This might be mere semantics, but I think it is very important to make sure we are addressing the real issue. You have a credibility problem when you say you're going to do something, and you don't do it. The supposed 'world uproar' occurred precisely because we did indeed do exactly what we said we would do, regardless of their feelings about it. This issue has nothing to do with the finding or not finding WMD in Iraq. If you think that is incorrect, please list one major country that supported our action beforehand, but then changed their mind after the fact.

3. If you don't feel we have a credibility problem, how do you think the next Iraq-like conflict will be received globally?

First, I think one of main reasons we invaded Iraq was precisely to make sure we didn't have to do it again. So, the situation shouldn't come up, and, if it does, it is a different and separate issue. Second, I'm not sure I care. If the US needs to do something to insure its safety, world opinion of that action is a secondary concern. Funny, how so many of the countries opposed to our action in Iraq were the very ones trying to get us involved in Kosovo, a conflict to which they were much more intimately tied. World opinion is inherently self-interest based, and I'm not thrilled with the notion that we should cater to other nation's self-interest at the expense of our own. Third, it depends on the outcome of the Iraq conflict. If in fact a stable government is created in Iraq, which leads to a more stable Middle East, which leads to a safer world, then any subsequent act would have to be viewed from the perspective that those opposed were on the wrong side of history, in which case subsequent action would be both even less likely to occur, and a much easier case to make.

1. Do you believe we have a credibility problem? Why or why not?
We absolutely have a credibility problem. You are right Hobbes, we didn't start out that way in 2000, which is one of the main reasons we have gotten into this mess. However, it should be abundantly clear to everyone that we do now, in 2004, have a credibility problem.

I would consider the litmus test here to be very similiar to the third question I asked. If a new conflict were to arise, the United States claimed that the country was an imminent threat and needed to be dealt with - would everyone jump on board as part of a new "coalition of the willing" or would we find ourselves largely going it alone if we decided the action was necessary. Personally, I think that you are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses if you believe countries would be willing to just "trust us" and come along for the ride.

I cited this article in another thread which documents some of the worldviews on the United States. 10 Newspapers did surveys amongst our allies and only 2 of them had results supporting President Bush.

Hobbes suggested in that thread where I originally posted this that this was a likability poll and not a credibility poll. You may have a point Hobbes, but a large part of credibility involves whether or not someone likes you and whether they feel they can trust you to make the right decisions. This poll is clear evidence that the majority of the allies here don't feel that way.


2. If you feel the United States does have a credibility problem, what do you believe is the right way to fix it? What will the candidate you intend to vote for do about it?
The right way to fix it is to remove all of the neo-cons bent on world domination from power, and the only way that can be done is to vote Bush out of office. The agenda they are pushing is dangerous, and I don't think it is a position that America needs to be in.

It also involves mending some relationships internationally and making sure that we take rational actions, have transparency of information and don't resort to extreme methods like invasion unless absolutely necessary.

1. Do you believe we have a credibility problem? Why or why not?


Yes. Bush didn't start it. We've had it for generations. If we focus on post-WWII post-Marshall plan alone, we have dozens of examples of America promoting dictatorships while espousing freedom, for example.

During the Vietnam War, American propagandists told the Vietnamese to 'fight the terrorists' and that America would help them fight terror.

The rest of the world knows what it means to put John Negroponte into Iraq. The world knows what he covered up in Honduras: death squads trained by the CIA. Horrific, widespread human rights violations. And yes, terror. State sponsored terror.

That, if nothing else, would have wiped out our credibility in Iraq. Then there's Abu Ghraib. And the cluster bombing of Baghdad before that.


2. If you feel the United States does have a credibility problem, what do you believe is the right way to fix it? What will the candidate you intend to vote for do about it?

The only way to fix it is to apologize and change. And that change must be widespread. We need to stop profitting and purchasing from corporations who are hand in hand with dictators.

We need to be openly, actively, sincerely against dictators, sweatshops, the overthrowing of democratically elected leaders such as Aristide. We need to find out if the Haitians want Aristide back. If so, he needs to return. We need to jail every last coup leader, and then hunt down the people in our own government who helped these murderers, and we need to jail them, too.

I am going to vote for Kerry, and then I'm going to hold him accountable. I know I can't do much if he lets us down, but I'll do my best to spread the word and maybe a third party candidate won't look so bad next time. Americans are not happy this election. I'm hoping this means change will be possible if Kerry wins and disappoints. It's change I'll be pushing for. In any case, we'll see what he'll do. I did like what he said about Aristide. So let's see if he'll follow through and make it happen. It's not too late for Haiti. Haitians don't have to have another dictatorship like Papa Docs. And Chavez had better be welcome at the White House, now that his people have shown so clearly he is their choice. Some fences need mending there.



3. If you don't feel we have a credibility problem, how do you think the next Iraq-like conflict will be received globally?

I do think we have a credibility problem. And the next 'Iraq problem' isn't my worry. My worry is the first (and for us, maybe last) nuclear attack on America problem.

1. Do you believe we have a credibility problem? Why or why not?

Of course, now more than ever. Bush said there where WMD's in Iraq and those where never discovered so naturally there never where any. That would obviously create a credibility gap.

2. If you feel the United States does have a credibility problem, what do you believe is the right way to fix it? What will the candidate you intend to vote for do about it?

This is assuming that the candidate will be able to fix it, which will not happen within the four years of the office. No matter who the president is this "credibility" is more with the American intelligence as to the single CiC.

Is not this credibility gap shared by the Russians, French and Germans? From Joe Barton's letter to Chirac,speaking of the results of an investigation of the oil for food program.



Possibly there would have been no war had sanctions been allowed to work. The Bush administration may, along with most other Western governments and the prior Clinton administration,have been wrong about WMD's. Several Western governments were intentionally undermining UN sanctions for economic gain. Yep, there is a credibility gap. We should be quite wary of the French, Germans and Russians in the future.