April 15, 2005, It's Not a Lie... if YOU Believe It...
The great aphorism of Seinfeld's George Costanza might apply to this Gerard Baker piece in relatively new side-bar source (Murdoch's) the Times of London, in which the author asserts that George and Condi are, in fact, trying to make a warmer and fuzzy Washington, and that contrary to the obvious (which, just because it's obvious, doesn't make it untrue), the nomination of the likes of career-UN-basher John Bolton as American representative to the United Nations is not a signal that Term II will be a clone of Term I, but the opposite (don't ask me how...)
Mr. Baker asserts:
It has been generally assumed in the rarefied world of foreign policy practitioners and pundits that Mr Bolton’s nomination is a kind of lie-detector test applied to the Administration’s second-term rhetoric. For all the nice language of the President’s garland-strewn trip to Europe in February, for all Condoleezza Rice’s sharp suits and winning smiles, for all the talk of pages turned and pasts behind us, the Bolton nomination is said to reveal that the second Bush term is going to be a straight rerun of the first.But the truth, I think, is precisely the opposite. Mr Bolton has gone to the UN not just because Dr Rice wanted him out of the State Department building. His job will be not to pour scorn on multilateralist approaches to international problems, but, however improbable it may seem, to use his rather special skills to make them work. The second Bush term will place a much higher premium on the value of international support, and work much harder to get it.
Two big developments lie behind this change of approach. The first is the remarkable ascendancy of Dr Rice. She did not distinguish herself much as National Security Adviser in the first Bush term. Seeing her job as one of interpreting events and mediating disputes for the President, she did not play the part of a foreign policymaking principal.
Now she is, in truth, in charge of foreign policy. Donald Rumsfeld is still around but he is a diminished figure, assumed to be on his way out within a year or so. Dick Cheney is still there, but his influence over the President has waned as the Secretary of State’s has waxed. The fact is that Dr Rice now enjoys the closest relationship a secretary of state has had with a president since Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon more than 30 years ago.
Although her own world view is still a little cloudy, it is very clear that it is not the robust, UN-despising, Europe-denigrating one in vogue at the Pentagon and in the Vice-President’s office. She won a clear victory on the first big foreign-policy question of the new term — whether to back Europe’s diplomacy on Iran; and she has won a host of other, smaller arguments.
But there is an even bigger reason why change is now in the air in Washington. There is a growing confidence across the Bush Administration that the hard and unpopular choices made in the first term have begun to bear fruit. Iraq is rapidly becoming the success the Left has feared. There is talk at the Pentagon that the first withdrawal of US troops could take place next year. There is evident excitement and optimism about the broader Middle East; democratic change from a free and peaceful Palestine to Afghanistan is no longer a neocon fantasy.
This has created not simply a sense of vindication in Washington but also a belief that the second term need not be so preoccupied with divisive issues. This has made the Bush team less defensive about the decisions made in the first term. They know Europeans won’t ever admit that the Iraq war was wise, but they know too that even the French cannot continue to insist that it was a disaster.
It's good to see that Murdoch outlets the world over have the same view of reality: the senseless slaughter of American soldiers and foreign civilians in an exercise that will almost certainly destabilize our nation's financial position (not to mention it's standing should it ever need international support again) is the definition of "success".
Right wing triumphalism these days frequently reminds me of the court-reporter read-back in the courtroom scene in Woody Allen's Bananas. Would that either said triumphalism (or Woody himself these days) were actually funny...
Comments
Iraq is becoming a success? Not in any newspapers outside of the US.
As for Bolton, I want him confirmed. The more spectacular the foul-ups, the better the chances for some wins in the 2006 mid-terms and in 2008. I want Bushie the Chimp to get a lot of what he wants, because then he'll fail, as usual, and we can maybe get rid of his henchmen.
Posted by G. D. Frogsdong at April 19, 2005 8:33 AM