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LoungeMachine
08-22-2006, 01:41 PM
SFGate: World Views

Blair feels let down by Bush as shared foreign policy crumbles

Reuters

Is the long-running Bush-Blair lovefest now on the wane?
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's joined-at-the-hip, unquestioning support of George W. Bush's disastrous foreign policy, dating from the run-up to the American leader's Iraq war, has made for a long-running, trans-Atlantic love story. Now, the Daily Mail reports, even Blair is beginning to see that he may have stuck too close to Bush for too long. Was he really Bush's "lapdog," as Britain's tabloids derisively dubbed him? Even as Bush, at yesterday's White House press conference, insisted on following his policy in Iraq, such as it is, could it be that Blair is finally starting to "get" the meaning of the criticism that countless pundits and millions of his countrymen have been voicing for so long?

A senior official at Blair's Downing Street office told the Daily Mail that his boss "broadly agrees" with loutish Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's reported description of Bush's foreign policy as "crap" (a leaked remark that has found many commentators and ordinary citizens in the U.K. applauding Prescott's sentiment even if they may not favor the way he expressed it). The Daily Mail's Downing Street source said: "We all feel badly let down by Bush. We thought we had persuaded him to take the Israel-Palestine situation seriously, but we were wrong. How can anyone have faith in a man of such low intellect?"

Does Bush believe his own rhetoric about his Iraq and Middle East policies' "success"?
"Our foreign policy is just plain wrong," he writes, dismissing Bush's pat "axis of evil" phrase as a "lazy description" of a "complex problem." He notes: "Foreign affairs is a world of relative values; it is no place for evangelism, which elevates belief over knowledge, conviction over judgment and instinct over understanding." Today, he explains, there "is a real threat from Muslim fundamentalism, but it takes many forms and arises for many reasons. If you do not understand or accept its variety, and treat all examples of extremism as if they were the same, you make it harder to deal with and end up playing into the hands of its advocates."

However, he adds, "it is now clear from leaked documents from the period between 9/11 and military action against Iraq that...Blair and [Bush] share the same view of the world....[Blair's] own party does not like this, the people of the United Kingdom don't like it much, and it does not serve British interests....The British-American relationship needs to be rebalanced. Such a rebalancing cannot happen until after Bush and Blair have gone."


Bush on Iraq: "We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."


Commentator Iain Macwhirter blasts Blair and the cabinet ministers who let him get away with expanding prime ministerial power at the expense of Parliament's. "It was Blair, personally, who signed up to the [Bush] Middle East strategy, not his government, still less Britain," Macwhirter writes. Referring to the Iraq war's American, neoconservative cheerleaders as "people who think...the U.S. is involved in a war of Christian good against Muslim evil, and that only the absolute triumph of Israel over its Arab neighbors is going to make the world safe for America," he notes that, "despite the disaster in Iraq, [they] still seem to exert an extraordinary influence in the Pentagon and the White House, as America's support for the abortive Israeli invasion of Lebanon confirmed." (Sunday Herald)


Of Bush's approach to Iraq and the Middle East, Macwhirter observes: "That the policy is crap seems beyond argument. The latest Israeli incursion, supposedly to deal a fatal blow to Hezbollah, has ended with the nearest thing to a defeat...the Israeli Defense Force[s have] experienced since 1948." As the war has ended - for now - he concludes, "[t]he pro-Iranian militias of [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah have lived to fight another day, launch their rockets at Israel and spread their virulent anti-Semitism across the Middle East. To have made heroes of Hezbollah is surely the greatest cock-up in the Middle East since, well, the last one."

With the latest war's outcome and Britain's pro-U.S. role in it all in mind, columnist Richard Stott wrote in the U.K.'s Sunday Mirror: "Bush's Middle East policy...is in tatters. The only chance of any long-term settlement there is to resolve the Israel-Palestine impasse. But Bush sees that only through the prism of destroying Arab 'terrorism' as represented by Hezbollah on one side and Hamas on the other. He backed Israel to destroy Hezbollah before a ceasefire was arranged and he was wrong....This latest debacle leaves the war on terror in an even worse state than before and peace further away than ever. Given Prescott's seaman's grasp of the vernacular, crap seems to be rather underplaying it."

Nickdfresh
08-22-2006, 01:47 PM
"Our foreign policy is just plain wrong," he writes, dismissing Bush's pat "axis of evil" phrase as a "lazy description" of a "complex problem." He notes: "Foreign affairs is a world of relative values; it is no place for evangelism, which elevates belief over knowledge, conviction over judgment and instinct over understanding." Today, he explains, there "is a real threat from Muslim fundamentalism, but it takes many forms and arises for many reasons. If you do not understand or accept its variety, and treat all examples of extremism as if they were the same, you make it harder to deal with and end up playing into the hands of its advocates."

--DPM John Prescott

A-fucking-men!