"Fireworks in Washington, Despair Around the World" by Robin Cook

Worth reading in its entirety...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1395463,00.html

<>A successful search for a new strategy can only start with a recognition that the present strategy has comprehensively failed. But the Bush administration II that took office yesterday is stuffed with people who are in denial about the dire situation of their forces occupying Iraq. In the couple of months since election day, George Bush has promoted the very people who thought conquering Iraq was a good idea and eased out anyone with a record of worrying about the consequences. Thus Condoleezza Rice, who was author of the alarmist claim that Saddam could produce a mushroom cloud, replaces Colin Powell, who warned the president that if he broke Iraq he would own the process of putting it back together again.

Perhaps wisely, those who crafted yesterday's inauguration speech hit the erase button any time the word Iraq crept into the text. Sinai and the Temple Mount got walk-on parts to provide biblical flavouring, but no location of contemporary controversy in the region got a mention. The only hint in the speech that there might be a war going on was a reverential reference to the sacrifice and service of US troops. Piquantly, at this point the television cameras cut away to a shot of Dick Cheney looking suitably solemn, neatly reminding the informed viewer of the humbug of a president and vice-president thanking US troops for facing dangers in Iraq which they took care to avoid for themselves in Vietnam.

Not that Iraq was unusual in being left out of the script. There were no specifics about anything else, either. Instead, we were invited to drift along with a stream of generalities, untroubled by hard problems or real-world solutions. Freedom and liberty are universal values. The founding fathers of the US constitution, admirable though they may have been, do not hold patent rights over those concepts. They are embedded in the roots of the separate tradition of European social democracy and we must not let George Bush appropriate them to provide an ideological cover for his new imperialism.

Nor should we accept the implicit assumption of Bush's muscular foreign policy that freedom can be delivered from 38,000ft through the bomb doors. One of the rare passages of the speech when Bush appeared animated by his own text, rather than engaged in formal recitation, was when he saluted the declaration of independence and the sounding of the liberty bell. But those were celebrations of freedom from foreign dominance - not to put too fine a point on it, independence from the British. He needs to grasp that other nations are just as attached to freedom from foreign intervention, including domination by America.

The president and his speechwriters have yet to confront the tension between their rhetoric about freedom, which is universally popular, and their practice of projecting US firepower, which is resented in equal measure. That explains why, on the very day when the president set forward his mission to bring liberty to the world, a poll revealed that a large majority of its inhabitants believe that he will actually make it more dangerous. The first indication of whether they are right to worry will be whether the Bush administration mediate their differences with Iran through the state department or through the US air force.