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Sept. 14, 2005 - It’s a venue, and an audience, that President George W. Bush loathes. The United Nations’s General Assembly Hall, complete with its grand marble podium, has giant ambitions and tiny means. It’s a place of lofty words and lowly politicking. In fact Bush dislikes the place so much he often tells reporters how he’d love to reach into the normally silent rows of world leaders and shake them up with his bare hands.
That was especially true three years ago, when Bush marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by challenging the world body to back him and confront Saddam Hussein. At the time, Bush declared he had been “more than patient” with the Iraqi leader and warned that “the first time we may be completely certain he has nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one.” He ended his plea with a simple challenge: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”
Of course the U.N. didn’t accept Bush’s case for war. But the president’s speech to the same group this week suggests that the U.N., now celebrating its 60th anniversary, is anything but irrelevant to the Bush administration. In fact, Bush’s speech represented no less than three course corrections for the White House and three statements of solidarity with the international community.
The first was domestic, not international. Bush started by talking about Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, as did the speakers before him. It’s an extraordinary thing to see the United States at the receiving end of sympathy from the Gabon President Omar Bongo and the Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson. Bush followed by effectively correcting the impression that he and his administration left in the first days after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. A few days after Katrina struck, Bush told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that he didn’t expect much help from the rest of the world and didn’t much need it. “I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars, but this country is going to rise up and take care of it,” he said. “You know, we’d love help, but we’re going to take care of our own business as well, and there’s no doubt in my mind we’ll succeed.”
Coupled with bureaucratic roadblocks at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Bush’s comments convinced many countries that their offers of help had been rejected. For the last two weeks Bush’s aides have repeatedly stated they never rejected anything, and Bush underscored that message at the U.N. by reversing his earlier comments to ABC. “To every nation, every province, and every community across the world that is standing with the American people in this hour of need, I offer the thanks of my nation,” he told the world leaders on Wednesday. “Your response, like the response to last year's tsunami, has shown once again that the world is more compassionate and hopeful when we act together.”
The second course correction was to clean up after his new U.N. ambassador, John Bolton. Bolton’s hard-charging tactics on the U.N.’s reform agenda left many nations with the impression that the president was backing off his commitment to helping the world’s poor. Bolton wanted to eliminate all references to the so-called U.N. Millennium Development Goals, especially the idea that countries should spend at least .7 percent of their economic output on aid to combat poverty. Bush effectively ended that debate Wednesday. “We are committed to the Millennium Development goals,” he said. “We have a moral obligation to help others—and a moral duty to make sure our actions are effective.”
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