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Although a few nations are sending troops, near daily guerrilla attacks - many of them deadly - and growing doubts about the basis for the war are complicating Washington's search for peacekeepers to replace exhausted American troops in Iraq. (italics mine)
When did the definition of strong leadership become how few people are willing to follow you? Or the ferocity of your petulance?
Interesting to consider our President's response, on his African trip, to the admittedly strong criticism of his Iraq policy by Nelson Mandela, which was to act as if this heroic figure and former President of South Africa doesn't exist. To be fair, Mandela was out of the country. But if the President of the United States had asked for a meeting to discuss their differences, can anyone imagine Mandela not accepting?
What's so enraging about our present predicament in Iraq is how predictable it was. And let's not forget that both Germany and France clearly indicated, once Bush declared the war over, their willingness to mend fences.
Here's Jim Hoagland, one of our non neo-con foreign policy pundits, generally supportive of the Bush doctrine, in an early July discussion of our increasing isolation.
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But Bush is no conventional incumbent. He is so deeply involved in remaking Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East that he lacks a foreign policy firewall for 2004. His presidency is irretrievably tied to events in those remote and devastated precincts. Bush must use every asset he possesses every day to achieve, at a minimum, non-failure.
Bush and his increasingly assertive White House foreign policy staff will have to stay on the offensive through the election season. They should begin by moderating the administration's tendency to go it mostly alone.
They should seek greater help from America's traditional friends and partners in managing the messy postwar aftermaths of rapid military victories in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
That thought is making headway in public opinion and, I think, at the White House. But this is not a one-way street: It is not only the administration that needs to engage in a fundamental rethinking of the highly fluid international scene created by overwhelming U.S. military power and Bush's unilateralist style in diplomacy.
The complicated hubris of "remaking Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East I'd like to leave for another post.
Not a one-way street? Isn't that the very essence of the Bush doctrine, that it is?
But this is not about knocking Hoagland, tempting though that is. His article is worth reading because his approach, and the challenges he poses to the countries in the other lane of that two way street are ones, in a slightly different form, that are going to be directed at Bush's domestic critics, i.e., Democrats, centrist Republicans, and us liberal lefties.
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France, Germany, Russia and other countries that opposed the war in Iraq have yet to communicate in a convincing manner the final outcome they want to see inside Iraq. Nor have many of them indicated what they are prepared to contribute to bringing that outcome about should the United States seek the greater international involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan that is now being urged on Washington.
Is it better for France's quest for "multipolarity" if the United States succeeds or fails in Iraq? Do the hard-liners of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party want Germany involved in any way in bolstering America's new "imperialism"?
Thinking about our answers is the next step we need to take, beyond making the most of the well-deserved pratfall this administration has experienced, tripping over it's own muddled assertions about its own muddled policies.