Read the rest of it here.
From today’s Guardian …
Those outside America, in the chanceries of Europe and beyond, who hoped that this would be a passing phase, like a Florida hurricane that wreaks havoc only to blow over, will instead have to adjust to a different reality.
For four years many hoped that the course charted by President Bush – a muscular go-it-alone view of a world divided between the forces of darkness and those of light – would prove to be a blip. Come November 2, 2004, they wanted to believe, normal service would be resumed. The United States would return to the old way of doing business, in concert with allies and with respect for the international system the US itself had done so much to create. The norms of foreign policy pursued by every president from Roosevelt to Clinton, including the first George Bush, would be revived. Senator Kerry promised as much.
Now that fantasy will be shelved. The White House is not about to ditch the approach of the last four years. Why would it? Despite the mayhem and murder in Iraq, despite the death of more than 1,000 US soldiers and countless (and uncounted) Iraqis, despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction, despite Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration won the approval of the American people. If Bush had lost the neo-conservative project would have been buried forever. But he won, and the neo-cons will welcome that as sweet vindication.
So it will be full steam ahead. “There are real threats that have to be dealt with,” Danielle Pletka of the impeccably neo-con American Enterprise Institute told the Guardian yesterday. Iran would not go away – indeed, Ms Pletka warned, “force might be the only option” – nor would North Korea. “We can’t all pretend that the world would be a prettier place if only George W Bush was not the president.”
There were plenty of people around the globe who used to think precisely that way, hoping that the past four years were a bad dream which would end yesterday. Now they have to navi gate around a geopolitical landscape in which President Bush is the dominant, fixed feature.
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