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COMMENTARY
March 15, 2003
Sand in the eyes
The Sunday summit in the Azores is a new departure for President George W. Bush who has previously avoided the kind of "action man" diplomacy of Bill Clinton and several other presidential predecessors. He will meet with the British prime minister Tony Blair and the Spanish Jose Maria Aznar and their Portuguese host in the hope of finding their way through the diplomatic acid rain from New York to Baghdad. This has been a very bad week for the Bush administration and its allies actually worse than the week before. Having via "the U.N. route" given its enemies six months to organize it is still patiently harvesting the blows. If the (formal) war does not start next week then it will be worse than this one was; though not as bad as the week after that. If the war does start -- things will be terrible for a few days as the world's peacenickels vent their lungs; but then the war will be won Iraq will be liberated and protesters will start forgetting what it was all about or turning their attention to the defence of surviving monstrous regimes in North Korea or Iran or Syria. Indeed each day of this last week things got worse on the diplomatic front as the U.S. stooped to seeking cosmetic support from six unwilling unaffiliated nations whose bad luck was to be sitting in rotation on the Security Council trying their best to stand out of the dust-up between the rival diplomatic gangs of the U.S. and France. Adding an extra dimension to the farce Britain's U.N. ambassador Sir Jeremy Quentin Greenstock KCMG got well ahead of his government which was itself getting ahead of Washington in offering concessions to anyone who asked. But that was after the British had tabled their six conditions for calling off the airborne Saddam-removers (soon reduced to five and no fixed deadline). Dominique de Villepin France's poetical foreign minister missed what his own President might have called "a wonderful opportunity to shut up" by rejecting the British proposal almost instantaneously and several hours before the Iraqis had rejected it or anyone else. This laid bare the present French policy of acting directly as Saddam's diplomatic protector. M. de Villepin's flight to Africa to brass-knuckle former French colonies into rejecting the Anglo-American-Spanish efforts was in the same kind. It drew responses from both London and Washington that went to the edge of diplomatic language. The only happy moment for Mr. Bush and his allies was when Guinea briefly announced it might join Bulgaria around the Security Council table in the ultimatum league. The visit from M. de Villepin had apparently proved counter-productive. But within the day its President changed his mind -- after consulting his witch doctor according to the story going round the Council table. (This from the London Daily Telegraph; my attempts to confirm it with Conakry have failed and my computer nearly crashed when I tried to call up the Guinean government website. Don't go there.) Yet again the most effective U.S. diplomacy has proved to be that of Donald Rumsfeld the defence secretary. His understated remark that the U.S. could if necessary go into Iraq without British help shook up and sobered a Blair government and more particularly a Straw foreign office that had already entered the first stages of panic. Message in hand they were quickly able to recollect former promises to proceed with or without U.N. backing. Similarly Mr. Rumsfeld's musing aloud about pulling back U.S. servicemen in South Korea sobered the new government of President Roh Moo-hyun which turned abruptly on its heels now demanding that the U.S. leave "every soldier in his present place" until further notice; and anti-American demonstrations in Seoul and elsewhere ended abruptly. There are times when what is needed is a sharp slap on the face; and your ally responds Thanks, I needed that. A different kind of panic was setting in from the other side and it was whetted by President Bush's foolish promise to force a vote in the U.N. "this week" (i.e. the one that is now over). Innumerable "hawks" filled my inbox and I should think many others with expressions of disgust when Mr. Bush for the first time in the memory of any of us made a finite promise that he could not keep. The idea of a quarter million soldiers sailors and airmen who have been breathing sand and salt for many months now having to continue waiting indefinitely was too much for any of them. One passes a point when further delay is catastrophic to morale and that moment is nearing together with the war. The French and Iraq's other allies are betting they can keep the U.S. strung out just a little longer -- long enough for the catastrophe to set in as anti-American sentiment and action continues to mount around the globe. They like the Americans have put everything on the line. They imagine they are about to win big that the U.S. will to depose Saddam in the face of their opposition is about to crack. They have placed one of history's huge bets for rather more than they could ever afford and will either win or lose it all. But this bet is in two parts. If the U.S. does go (formally) to war in time -- and I should think Mr. Bush is made aware hourly of the situation at desert and sea level around the Gulf -- the French and anti-American demonstrators around the world will be hoping it goes very badly and will be able to blame Bush and America for things like massive civilian casualties from Saddam's use of genocidal weapons a Kuwait-style inferno in the oil fields a U.S. confrontation with Turks invading Kurdistan or best of all some faulty U.S. targeting. They have been able to give Saddam so far at least an extra four months to prepare his revenge when the invasion is signalled. We can only wait and see what happens. Meanwhile President Bush yesterday went back into the Rose Garden with Secretary Powell -- the least astute of his several major foreign policy advisers -- to talk about "road maps" to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The timing marked it as another attempt to shore up Tony Blair who with the other Europeans continue to obsess about apparent U.S. indifference to the "peace process" in that quarter. What Mr. Bush announced was more ambiguous than what has been generally reported. He said that once the Palestinian side has a prime minister in place with effective authority he will proceed with the next round of U.S. arm-twisting. The subtlety in this is that the newly-appointed Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas ("Abu Mazin") does not appear to have been granted any serious authority only the title of "prime minister" for purposes of the usual negotiating con. The real prospects for a legally-bound transparent democratic terror-free Palestine will emerge in the upshot of the Iraq war. The war will at least reduce the stock of Hamas for whom Iraq is the principal backer; though it will leave Iran's Hezbollah operatives and the Syrian-Lebanese sponsors of Palestinian terror organizations still in the field. It will barring some accident also leave the terror master Yasser Arafat very much in business. As of yesterday he was stalling on the ratification of his new prime minister's appointment to be sure his colleagues were clear that he Arafat retained the exclusive right to control Palestinian foreign and security policy that he would continue to personally manage funds and could summon cabinet meetings as before. Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon having survived an election the big terror hit in Haifa and with his military entirely engaged in the double function of hunting down terrorists in Gaza while watching the skies and Lebanon for treats from Saddam and the external terror networks is determined to wait out the Iraqi campaign before committing himself to anything of consequence. He and all the rest of us are on hold. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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