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President Bush has reached the limit of his abilities
Posted: Saturday, April 13, 2002
ABSTRACT: independent.co.uk
By Fergal Keane
There were signs of Mr Bush's weakness long before the 11 September crisis. The hesitancy of his initial response when the Chinese seized a US spy plane in the early months of the administration was an example. That incident was resolved because the wiser minds in the administration, like Colin Powell, persuaded Mr Bush to ignore the hard right which seeks to turn every encounter with the Chinese into the opening battle of a new Cold War. But the bogeymen of the right were not defeated. The likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz bided their time. In the wake of 11 September they have become an increasingly powerful force in the White House. The sorry fact is that most of this bunch haven't had an original political idea since Nixon sat in the White House.
And they are dealing with a President who has no real ideas of his own. Certainly he has instincts but they are a poor substitute for strategic intelligence. The President's politics are so fundamentally immature that when confronted with a real world of hard choices he is floundering. So George Bush ends up caught in the crossfire between the wise – Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice – and the dangerous – Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
The latter are an arrogant, angry crew and God help us all if they triumph. It was their influence, and the siren voices of right-wing columnists and talk show hosts, which kept Mr Bush from intervening in the Middle East, repeating the mantra that Arafat was a terrorist just like bin Laden. They peddle the illusion that to secure America's destiny you simply need to shoot faster than the other guy. They resemble nothing so much as a lynch posse from the Old West who see their quarry on the horizon but fail to notice the miles of burning desert in between. Bush is the Walter Burns figure, the hesitant sheriff who says: "Gee boys I'm not so sure." But he follows them into the wilderness anyway.
For the moment Colin Powell has the President's ear but it would be foolish to imagine this will last. He has persuaded Mr Bush that America needs to intervene in the Middle East. But if he goes a step further and suggests putting massive American pressure on the Israelis (along with similar arm-twisting of Arafat) to sit down at peace talks, the right-wingers will raise hell. They are already doing that, aided by the pro-Israeli lobby and by large numbers of Congressmen from both parties.
They correctly sense that George Bush is weak. Lets not forget he was elected without a true popular mandate so that even if he were a strong strategist, he would be operating from a position of weakness. So he has swung from being tough on Sharon to watering down the administration's demand for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Operating against this background General Powell's mission seems doomed to fail and when it does the belligerent posse in Washington will be in the ascendant. They will urge Mr Bush into war in Iraq with no concern for its wider implications. The war on terror will be defined entirely in terms of narrow self- interest with the world obliged to go to hell. The tragedy is that the wrong man is sitting in the White House. It shouldn't be George Bush or Al Gore either. Step forward, if only, President Colin Powell.
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