Austin American-Statesman , TX
Oct 20 2007
The small stuff is all Bush sweats
Elizabeth Sullivan, THE (CLEVELAND) PLAIN DEALER
The president is smilingly oblivious.
What did Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates talk about when the
secretaries of state and defense recently met with Vladimir Putin in
Moscow?
President Bush admitted to reporters Wednesday that neither had yet
briefed him on the meeting held five days earlier.
What about those anti-U.S. comments the Russian president uttered
Tuesday in Tehran while making nice-nice with Iranian firebrand
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The president had few specifics.
"I’d rather spend some time with Vladimir Putin, finding out exactly
what went on," Bush said at his news conference.
Or the SCHIP bill Bush vetoed?
Bush told reporters he was not "dialed in" early enough to know what
lawmakers were up to in broadening state-sponsored health-care access
for children.
The president said he admires the exiled Tibetan Dalai Lama "a lot."
Yet Bush then admitted that his fixation has become such a leitmotif
in U.S.-Chinese relations that he lectures Chinese leader Hu Jintao
"every time I meet with him" on the need to sit down with the Dalai
Lama and to allow religious freedom.
The postwar world order with America at its political and economic
helm is fracturing over Iraq, trade issues, globalization and the
rise of oilgopolies and the countries that profit from them,
including Russia and Iran. But at this critical juncture, the White
House remains preoccupied with divisive side issues and minutiae,
marshaling ever-smaller groups for important U.S. goals while leaders
such as Putin engage in public derision of U.S. means and ends.
Bush and Rice finally have awoken to the need for a legacy
breakthrough on Middle East peace. She’s been knocking heads
together, trying to get everyone to agree to attend a U.S.-sponsored
peace conference to delineate the contours of a Palestinian state.
Yet without the old U.S. ability to jab and poke and provoke
compromise, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
The Palestinian leadership has been forcibly bifurcated and
diminished, with Mahmoud Abbas representing only the old guard and a
shrinking middle class. Israeli leader Ehud Olmert is likely marking
time, despite Israel’s recent, still-unexplained air strike on a
Syrian target.
Moderate Arab Sunni leaders in Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia who
once fell in line with U.S. wishes now are mesmerized instead by the
catastrophic prospects they envision when the talks fail and they get
branded by al-Qaida sympathizers within their populaces as Israel’s
and Washington’s quislings.
Bush is doing the right thing in pressing hard on Democrats to
abandon their foolishly mistimed House rebuke to the Turks for the
90-year-old massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians.
Horrendous as the killings were, wiping generations and whole
families from the planet, they happened in a historical space and in
the context of a war that remains to be fully and fairly studied.
More to the point, during this tricky moment in U.S.-Turkish
relations – with the Turks poised to cross the Iraqi border in force
to confront Iraqi Kurds who are sheltering Kurdish guerrillas who’ve
been murdering Turkish troops – now is not the time for political
pandering.
Enough pressure has come from the White House to force House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi to back away from the edge of this cliff and acknowledge
that she no longer will push to bring the Armenia resolution to a
full House vote.
But is U.S. political intervention too little, too late?
In the emotionally charged aftermath of the recent murders of 13
Turkish soldiers, apparently by Turkish Kurds harbored inside Iraq,
the failure to staunch this dual crisis may have given it all the
momentum it needs. Turkey and Iraq – and the Kurds who inhabit the
mountains that straddle their border – are being propelled inexorably
toward a widening conflict in which Iraqi dissolution is the booby
prize, and diminished U.S. influence the harbinger of more trouble to
come.
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