Americans have been understandably traumatized by 9-11, and only in
the past two months has broad public opinion turned tentatively
against the administration.
In the world of expert opinion, however, the neocons have always been
a tiny, radical minority.
The Bush policy is not just arrogant and isolating.
It also makes America a less safe place.
From The American Prospect, 11/1/03 issue:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/10/kuttner-r.html
A Foreign-Policy Emergency
By Robert Kuttner
The hallmark of the Bush foreign policy has been a naive radicalism
married to an operational incompetence.
A small clique with a preconceived blueprint took advantage of a
national emergency and a callow president, blowing a containable
threat into war while dismissing more ominous menaces.
These people are out to remake the world, with little sense of risk,
proportion or history.
At this writing, the president's national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, has seized some authority over the Iraq policy from
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who responded with adolescent
pique.
The long-abused Secretary of State Colin Powell offered new respect
for the UN.
President Bush even directly contradicted Vice President ***** Cheney's
discredited claim of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
In a different administration, these shifts would signal that the
chief executive, clearly in control, had recognized the misjudgments
and costs of a failed policy, demoted those responsible and shifted
authority to others.
But Bush seems incapable of that kind of decisiveness or discernment.
These are mere skirmishes, indicative of the absence of leadership at
the top.
Bush is as callow as ever.
The man even boasts that he never reads the papers.
By mid-October, the administration was mainly in PR mode, with Cheney
insisting that Iraq is on the mend; the latest UN initiative,
meanwhile, was extinct, a casualty of U.S. refusal to give the UN
authority.
The Bush presidency remained a kind of regency, in which the real
power reposes with Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neoconservative
intellectuals.
And American foreign policy remained captive to the same bellicose
dreams of unilateralism and hegemony.
Meanwhile, little progress has been made in stabilizing Afghanistan or
rooting out al-Qaeda.
The so-called road map to a durable Israeli-Palestinian peace is in
tatters, while the administration fails to rein in Ariel Sharon's
excesses.
America's own homeland security is in the hands of an agency that has
largely failed to assist first responders or coordinate the federal
bureaucratic fragmentation.
Instead, the administration keeps taking short cuts at the expense of
civil liberty.
________________________________________________________
In short, we are at the mercy of a gang of right wing frauds. But you
knew that.
Harry
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