Mr. President, Watch Your Lips

When all is said and done, the foreign policy of the United States is what the President says it is. Experts and advisers help define that policy and carry out its goals. But it is the President who has the final word, whose voice is given most credence at home and around the world. It is what the President says that sets the course of U.S. international relations.

George Bush has been around Washington a long time, long enough to understand that even the most seemingly offhand presidential comment can have significant global consequences. In recent weeks he has not always remembered that.

Consider the continuing buildup of U.S. and other forces in the anti-Iraq coalition and what flows from it. By common military estimate, those forces are nearing a level where offensive action could soon be undertaken. By a conjunction of events, this has occurred while Bush has been campaigning for his party’s candidates. Bush has alluded often in the campaign to what is going on in the Persian Gulf area, in so doing implicitly describing American policy there. But he has tended to do so using the emotional rhetoric of the stump, not the carefully weighed sentences of statecraft. The results have been more perplexing than illuminating, even to some of Bush’s closest aides.

Saddam Hussein is a dangerous and evil man, and the United States has done the right thing in opposing his expansionism. But the Iraqi dictator is not another Hitler, let alone--as Bush would have it--worse than Hitler. At some point there may be no alternative to using military power to repeal Iraq’s aggression and to punish the aggressor. It is useful and even morally necessary that everyone concerned be alerted to that somber possibility. But the campaign trail is not the place from which that message should be sent.

Ad-lib remarks made in a partisan context threaten to trivialize issues of deadly seriousness. The shaping of U.S. foreign policy requires the most careful thought. Expressing that policy requires equal care. Lately, Saddam Hussein may have been left confused about what Bush has been saying. So, unhappily, have many Americans.