No Way to Make Friends By Fareed Zakaria

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/articles.html

Bush could surely have arranged to meet in Baghdad with troops from allied countries who are also fighting and dying in Iraq
By Fareed Zakaria

President Bush’s Thanksgiving trip to Iraq was a generous and bold-hearted gesture of support to American troops. What made it such a success, however, was that it managed to severely limit an otherwise unavoidable aspect of travel—contact with foreigners. When President Bush has had to go beyond U.S. Army bases in recent weeks, the tours have not gone so well.

Traveling through East Asia last week, I noted how poorly most observers rated President Bush's recent trip there. Even more striking, however, was the comparison repeatedly made between Bush's visit and that of Chinese leader Hu Jintao—with a thumping majority believing Hu had done better.

In Thailand at the meeting for Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation, "there was no question that Hu was the better appreciated one," a Thai official said to me. "He outshone Bush in most of the attendeew' eyes." The trips ended with the two making back-to-back visits to Australia. Bush was greeted with demonstrations, his address to Parliament interrupted by hecklers. Hu, on the other hand, got a 20-minute standing ovation from Parliament. "It is Hu's visit rather than George W. Bush's that will provide a lingering sense of satisfaction and security about Australia's place in the region,"wrote The Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch and not given to knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

What is going on here? How does the chief representative of the world's oldest constitutional democracy lose a popularity contest to the leader of a Leninist party?...

Do Americans want a leader they can't access? Are they aware of how inaccessible a leader Bush is? Wasn't it one of his selling points that he was the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with? How can you have a beer with someone who lives in a bubble?

And like so many of these fools, he imagines that bush is fighting the war that he likes to imagine in his head...and is therefore frequwntly found criticizing its conduct, but not the pernicious nature of the thing at its roots.

He's not a hawk. He's a cosmopolite. Are you thinking of that guy from Johns Hopkins maybe whose name I can't remember?