Thursday, 04 March 2004

America the Bad Cop? A comment from one of Instapundit's readers confirms the view from abroad: In four short years, America's image has gone from "the world's policeman" to Dirty Harry.

Further, whether they intended it or not, I think Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld make an effective good cop/bad cop pairing. Same for Tony Blair and George Bush. I love'em all, and I feel blessed that these people were in these positions at this time.

American society has always had a deep and abiding respect for the individual. Our heroes stand out from the crowd, and stand up for what's right even if it means standing alone; sometimes we even have a grudging admiration for someone who "takes the law into his own hands," and applies his own moral code to a situation where our legal systems have failed to provide justice. We may condemn the vigilante for stepping outside the law, but if the result pleases us then we've been known to let it slide.

At the same time, we realize (at least in the abstract) that power corrupts. The authority figure who steps over the line, the man with the badge who abuses his powers, is not a hero in our culture: He's a villain. In our escapist fantasies, where justice comes from the barrel of a gun, the star of the show is always the little guy: Rambo wasn't a general, Dirty Harry wasn't the chief of police — and if they were, we'd have been horrified by their actions.

So the idea that the President of the United States is playing the bad cop on the world stage is not something I'd take as a blessing, even if I had supported the war in Iraq. The idea that the President saw fit to exaggerate the threat Saddam Hussein posed, and misinform the people in order to achieve his ends, is deeply disturbing: Instead of doing the hard yards to make his case for a pre-emptive war, Bush sold the general public a bill of goods that included mushroom clouds, nerve gas, Al Qaeda ties, and a wealth of other claims that all turned out (ahem) not to be true.

That doesn't make Bush a hero in my book. I think America was better served by playing the good cop, like Clinton and Bush Sr. and Reagan did; we haven't had a President who played "bad cop" since Nixon, when he tried to convince North Vietnam that he was a madman. Clinton managed to fight a war in Europe without doing this much damage to our alliances and our image; Bush Sr. worked within the international system to expel Saddam from Kuwait (and recognized the limits of what he could achieve); Reagan charmed the Europeans into accepting short-range nuclear missiles on their soil.

All these achievements required that America play the good cop, and all these achievements are beyond the capabilities of George W. Bush — who rejects the very idea that international law can be made to serve American interests. By running roughshod over would-be allies, Bush has weakened America's global leadership: Even among nations that joined our "coalition of the willing," America's credibility and goodwill have been eroded. We may appreciate that Tony Blair has done a better job than our own leaders (!) of stating our case for war, but we all know Great Britain is not our military equal: If Britain's the good cop and America's the bad cop, then Dirty Harry is running the station.

I think America would be better off if we were perceived as the good cop, and just because Bush couldn't walk and chew gum doesn't mean it can't be done: A capable leader should be able to fight the terrorist threat and maintain America's image as one of the good guys. We shouldn't be forced to choose one or the other just because Bush lacked the skills to do both.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:47 am. comments.