[Mb-civic] Bush II - the cupboard is bare

[Alexander Harper]

Quentin Peel (FT) is a pragmatist and hardly a bleeding heart liberal. He lambasts Bush in this article and is really irrefutable. Poor world, poor USA, poor all of us. Such a predictable mess we are in, how could it happen?

Al Baraka

Quentin Peel: Bush has full agenda but no ideas 
By Quentin Peel
Published: January 19 2005 21:42 | Last updated: January 19 2005 21:42

We should pity the poor speechwriters who had to draft President George W. Bush's inaugural address for on Thursday. They must have been horribly aware that the last re-elected president to deliver a memorable speech was Abraham Lincoln.

By now, of course, the White House wordsmiths will have done their job. There will be solemnity, and soundbites for TV, and an attempt both to convey the conservative message that brought Mr Bush back to office and be inclusive towards those who opposed his re-election.

Yet the real problem is more profound. The president has a domestic agenda that still sounds radical, even if it depends on a delinquent budget deficit. On foreign policy, however, he has simply run out of ideas. Almost all the big themes of his first term have proved bankrupt, if not downright counter-productive. Barring some blinding flash of inspiration, he has found nothing to put in their place.

The rest of the world is waiting with bated breath. In Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, there is a desperate hope that Bush II will prove more intelligent, more sensitive and less high-handed in its pursuit of global security and stability. But expectations are limited. The clumsiness of Bush I has badly damaged the standing of the sole superpower around the world.

According to a new opinion poll conducted for the BBC World Service by GlobeScan and the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, more than half the people questioned - 58 per cent - said Mr Bush's re-election had made the world more dangerous. Only India, Poland and the Philippines out of 21 countries believed the world was safer.

Some of the most negative feelings were found in western Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Most negative of all was Turkey, once a staunch US ally, where 82 per cent believed his re-election would harm global security. That reaction has certainly got through to the White House. Officials have been streaming across the Atlantic to tell their counterparts in Europe that repairing the transatlantic alliance is top of the president's agenda. Condoleezza Rice, the incoming secretary of state, told the US Senate in her confirmation hearing this week that allies and multilateral institutions mattered. "The time for diplomacy is now," she said.

That is the message the old allies want to hear. But will it be only a change in style, not substance? Bush II is still driven by the same people and the same ideological mindset as Bush I, Ms Rice included.

Let us start with Iraq. The only policy is a desperate hope that the elections at the end of the month will produce an Iraqi administration capable of ending the insurgency and allowing US troops to go home. The reality is that Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war, and the country has become the biggest terrorist recruiting ground in the world. It is a disastrous policy failure, without a Plan B.

On neighbouring Iran, another member of Mr Bush's infamous "axis of evil", the administration is split and bereft of ideas. The hardliners want to intervene militarily to overthrow the mullahs, while the doves know that would be insane. The result is that Mr Bush has allowed, through gritted teeth, Britain, France and Germany to negotiate a diplomatic deal.

Washington does not believe in it. The report by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine that US special forces are on the ground in Iran seeking to identify nuclear sites as potential targets has a ring of truth, not least because the Pentagon and Iran have joined forces to dismiss it. But in reality, the US needs Iran as a stabilising force, in Iraq and Afghanistan, not as another target for "regime change".

There is fractionally more hope for progress in Israel, thanks to the election of the moderate Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian leader, and the creation of a new Israeli coalition between Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres. But in Washington there is no sign of change in the Middle East team advising Mr Bush. Hitherto he has allowed his agenda to be determined by Mr Sharon. US policy has been no policy. Ms Rice may get more engaged, but will the default position change?

A string of other examples can be cited where the US cupboard is bare: North Korea has calmly carried on accumulating nuclear warheads. In Russia, Mr Putin is becoming ever more authoritarian, with apparent impunity. On Africa, Congress and the State department have declared that massacres in Sudan's Darfur region amount to genocide, but then washed their hands of finding a solution.

Part of the problem lies with getting so hopelessly bogged down in Iraq. It has consumed US time and money and manpower at the expense of everything else. Another part is the visceral dislike at the highest levels of the administration of international institutions and arrangements. Whether it was the Kyoto treaty on global warming, the International Criminal Court or the United Nations in any of its forms, Bush I balked at any involvement.

There is no sign of a new policy on global warming, something that would have great influence in Europe. The US is not going to do a deal on Kyoto, but what about an alternative idea from the world's largest polluter?

Ms Rice says things will change. She wants "a conversation, not a monologue". Fine words. Four years of Bush I have simply proved that the US has a blinkered third-class president and an ideologically led second-class administration. An optimist would say that it cannot get any worse.

quentin.peel at ft.com
 
 


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