George W. Queeg

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Zolang 90% van de Amerikanen niet weten waar Irak ligt, 95% van de
bevolking geen paspoort heeft (gehad) en 60% volgens peilingen achter
Bush staat, maar niets kan zeggen over wat z'n policies inhouden, zal
het Bush en c.s. worst wezen wat de rest van de wereld denkt.

We gaan een cynisch week-end in :((.

Groet,

Cees

P.S. De US-schepen die in de Middellandse zee waren zijn nu, nadat de
Amerikanen tot de ontdekking kwamen dat de Turken of niet, of te laat
willen toestaan dat de VS gebruikt maakt van het Turks luchtruim of
grondgebied, onderweg naar de Rode Zee. Zodra ze daar aangekomen zijn
zal Bush naar verwachting niet langer wachten op de VN (en de rest
van de wereld).

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/14KRUG.html
Aboard the U.S.S. Caine, it was the business with the strawberries
that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with the
captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush's quart of strawberries?

Over the past few weeks there has been an epidemic of epiphanies.
There's a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush's policy
on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel
with the goal; who wouldn't want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown?
But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do
the job. And more people than you would think — including a fair
number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department
and, yes, the Pentagon — don't just question the competence of Mr.
Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America's leadership has
lost touch with reality.

If that sounds harsh, consider the debacle of recent diplomacy — a
debacle brought on by awesome arrogance and a vastly inflated sense
of self-importance.

Mr. Bush's inner circle seems amazed that the tactics that work so
well on journalists and Democrats don't work on the rest of the
world. They've made promises, oblivious to the fact that most
countries don't trust their word. They've made threats. They've done
the aura-of-inevitability thing — how many times now have
administration officials claimed to have lined up the necessary votes
in the Security Council? They've warned other countries that if they
oppose America's will they are objectively pro-terrorist. Yet still
the world balks.

Wasn't someone at the State Department allowed to point out that in
matters nonmilitary, the U.S. isn't all that dominant — that Russia
and Turkey need the European market more than they need ours, that
Europe gives more than twice as much foreign aid as we do and that in
much of the world public opinion matters? Apparently not.

And to what end has Mr. Bush alienated all our most valuable allies?
(And I mean all: Tony Blair may be with us, but British public
opinion is now virulently anti-Bush.) The original reasons given for
making Iraq an immediate priority have collapsed. No evidence has
ever surfaced of the supposed link with Al Qaeda, or of an active
nuclear program. And the administration's eagerness to believe that
an Iraqi nuclear program does exist has led to a series of
embarrassing debacles, capped by the case of the forged Niger papers,
which supposedly supported that claim. At this point it is clear that
deposing Saddam has become an obsession, detached from any real
rationale.

What really has the insiders panicked, however, is the
irresponsibility of Mr. Bush and his team, their almost childish
unwillingness to face up to problems that they don't feel like
dealing with right now.

I've talked in this column about the administration's eerie passivity
in the face of a stalling economy and an exploding budget deficit:
reality isn't allowed to intrude on the obsession with long-run tax
cuts. That same "don't bother me, I'm busy" attitude is driving
foreign policy experts, inside and outside the government, to
despair.

Need I point out that North Korea, not Iraq, is the clear and present
danger? Kim Jong Il's nuclear program isn't a rumor or a forgery;
it's an incipient bomb assembly line. Yet the administration insists
that it's a mere "regional" crisis, and refuses even to talk to Mr.
Kim.

The Nelson Report, an influential foreign policy newsletter, says:
"It would be difficult to exaggerate the growing mixture of anger,
despair, disgust and fear actuating the foreign policy community in
Washington as the attack on Iraq moves closer, and the North Korea
crisis festers with no coherent U.S. policy. . . . We are at the
point now where foreign policy generally, and Korea policy
specifically, may become George Bush's `Waco.' . . . This time, it's
Kim Jong Il (and Saddam)
playing David Koresh. . . . Sober minds wrestle with how to break
into the mind of
George Bush."

We all hope that the war with Iraq is a swift victory, with a minimum
of civilian
casualties. But more and more people now realize that even if all
goes well at first,
it will have been the wrong war, fought for the wrong reasons — and
there will be a
heavy price to pay.

Alas, the epiphanies of the pundits have almost surely come too late.
The odds are that by the time you read my next column, the war will
already have started.

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