Posted on 11/15/2003 3:32:32 PM PST by Pokey78
I have been watching George W Bush for five or six years now and it pretty much goes the same every time. He decides on his goal (tax cuts, missile defence, re-taking the Senate), the received opinion says it's never gonna happen, and somehow by the end of the day the chips have all fallen his way. But I confess for the first time I find it hard to see how this week can end well, and even harder to see what he ever expected to get out of it in the first place.
According to The Spectator, "George Bush needs to be pictured with the Queen to impress voters in the forthcoming presidential election", which must be one of the loopiest assertions even by the Speccie's recent standards, at least since their claim that the (non-) looting of the Baghdad museum was a put-up job by American art dealers. The notion that footage of "Bush riding in a carriage alongside the Queen" could be a decisive factor next November is true only in the sense that those disastrous pictures of Michael Dukakis looking wimpy in a tank were a decisive factor.
"Poor George. Born with a silver foot in his mouth," sneered the then Texas Governor Ann Richards, mocking her opponent as an idiot son of privilege. Having successfully reinvented himself as an easygoing Crawford rancher, Bush has nothing to gain by palling around with royalty. Besides, he always looks like a goofball in white tie.
Meanwhile, elderly Saddamite concubines like Tony Benn and George Galloway, their young followers in the "Support The Brave Iraqi Resistance" movement, and the many European admirers of the right of the Palestinian people to self-detonation have everything to gain. I have covered enough G8s and Summits of the Americas to know how it goes when the world's press flies in to cover a formal non-event.
You stroll into the media centre, the deputy assistant press secretary hands you a piece of paper saying, "Today Mrs Bush will be taking tea with HRH The Duchess of Gloucester (no press admittance)", and so you wander back outside and your nostrils catch the heady whiff of an anti-globalisation protester from round the corner, and even though they are the usual lamebrains with the giant Bush and Blair puppets you've seen a gazillion times you find yourself idly speculating - like that lady from Australian television who recently posed a group of Iraqi children on a live munitions dump - just what it would take to set them off. Even if it is only Harold Pinter, Lady Antonia and five Taliban from West Bromwich toppling that Bush statue at Thursday's demo, by the time it's on the BBC it will be the biggest turn-out since the relief of Mafeking.
My colleague and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who is flying in to cover events for The Daily Telegraph this week, suggests that it could be like Venezuela in 1958, when a mob attacked Nixon's car and tried to kill him, and his coolness under fire was a huge hit with the folks back home. Well, maybe. But Caracas is one thing, London's quite another.
When the crazies jumping up and down in the street yelling "Death to the Great Satan!" are the citizenry of your closest ally, you can bet there will be at least a few Democratic presidential candidates ready to make hay and demanding to know, "Who lost Britain?" The argument will be that these scenes demonstrate just how total America's isolation is. Rumour already has it that certain elements in the rogue State Department set Bush up for this debacle to remind him in the starkest way just what happens when you listen to hard men like Rummy instead of the emollient types at Foggy Bottom.
Perhaps they did. Or perhaps it is just the State Department's usual incompetence, that they failed to understand just how much more complicated Iraq's political dynamic is in Britain: most of Mr Blair's party opposed the war, but so did many ex-John Major cabinet heavyweights (if you'll pardon the oxymoron) and a hefty chunk of Telegraph group columnists. The many anglospherist romantics on the US Right ought to note not the loonies in the street but the lack of any really spirited rebuttal from much of the UK establishment.
As to the derangement of the crowd, they are impervious to reason. After two years of warnings from clapped-out Arabists that the incendiary "Arab street" was about to explode in anti-American rage across the Middle East, it remains as unrousable as ever. Instead, it is the explosive European street that remains implacably pro-Saddam, pro-Yasser, pro-jihad, pro-Taliban misogynist homophobes, pro-anyone as long as they are anti-American.
The demonstrations this coming week are best considered in the light of several smaller events: on Remembrance Day in Melbourne, "anti-war protesters" shrieked their way through the service; in Ottawa, "anti-war protesters" sprayed slogans on the National War Memorial a few hours before the start of the ceremony. Bush-hatred is just a form of cultural self-hatred.
That's why this week will be a good test of US resolve. The Islamists can't win militarily. They can only win by demoralising America into jacking it in. That's a high price to pay for a Palace photo-op.
How does he DO it?!
A casual line in an opinion article, that says a huge amount about our government.
And about Colin Powell's failure at his job.
L
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