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The 2012 GOP Field and Foreign Policy

While he ran a campaign that was not focused on foreign policy, in 1999, Bush spoke out against Clinton policies in Kosovo, expressed his opinion that troops shouldn’t be committed to stop ethnic cleansing in non-strategic interests, given a thorough speech on his views on defense spending and technology, shared his thoughts on a number […]

While he ran a campaign that was not focused on foreign policy, in 1999, Bush spoke out against Clinton policies in Kosovo, expressed his opinion that troops shouldn’t be committed to stop ethnic cleansing in non-strategic interests, given a thorough speech on his views on defense spending and technology, shared his thoughts on a number of treaties, and given interviews on his views on Russia and China. ~Ben Domenech

That sounds good, except that the part about Kosovo is completely wrong. As I said the other day, Bush staked out a conventional position supporting Clinton’s war. This was the standard internationalist consensus at the time, and Bush went along with it. He not only supported the war, but followed McCain’s lead in saying that introducing ground forces should not be ruled out. I went looking for more on what Bush did have to say on Kosovo, and discovered that we was largely echoing Clinton’s arguments for attacking Yugoslavia. To the extent that he offered any criticism, Bush was mostly copying what McCain had already said up to that point.

Here’s an old story dated April 9, 1999, which was originally published in The Houston Chronicle:

Gov. George W. Bush, undergoing his harshest national criticism yet for the vagueness of his policy on the Balkan crisis, Thursday sharpened his position to say that NATO’s use of military force should restore Kosovo to its native ethnic Albanian population.

“I would define the mission as to restoring Kosovo so the Kosovoians can move back in and at the same time teach Mr. (Slobodan) Milosevic that NATO and its allies and the United States will not tolerate genocide,” said Bush, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

The United States and NATO have been trying to halt the campaign of “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovars by Milosevic, the Yugoslavian president, with airstrikes against Yugoslavia and the Serb army.

In his strongest and most extensive comments yet on the 2-week-old bombing campaign, Bush said, “I’m concerned that a thug like Milosevic, if left unchecked, would set a bad example for other ‘ethnic cleansers’ or other people willing to commit ethnic genocide.”

Bush has been widely criticized for being slow to adopt a position on Kosovo and then for making vague statements on the subject.

Newsweek said of Bush: “GOP front-runner equivocates over bombing. Make up your mind, Nacho Man!” And the conservative Wall Street Journal called Bush’s original stance on Kosovo “so vague and tepid as to be almost Clintonian.” Numerous other pundits have chimed in with similar remarks.

Bush shrugged off such criticism Thursday.

“Not at all. I took a very measured approach. I took my time in making what I thought was a very important statement,” Bush said. “I’m going to get criticized. I understand that. But I’m going to speak on my timetable and nobody else’s.”

On Candidate Bush and Kosovo, Domenech is just wrong on the position that Bush took. As we can see from the article, Bush received some criticism for being slow to articulate a position, but he had already announced the formation of his exploratory committee the month before, and he was widely considered to be the front-runner with few serious rivals.

To date, hardly any of the “candidates” Domenech has been criticizing for their silence on foreign policy issues have formed exploratory committees, and it remains to be seen whether many of them ever will. One would look in vain for substantive statements from then-Gov. Bush on the Balkans or almost any other major foreign policy issue prior to March 1999, and it’s strange to expect politicians to make detailed statements about these issues before they have started their campaigns. There aren’t very many official candidates yet, so it makes no sense to expect them to behave as Domenech thinks candidates should. If Mitch Daniels announces his candidacy, that’s when his critics can reasonably start demanding that he give more substantive answers on other areas of policy. The same goes for the rest of the 2012 field.

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