World Affairs: December 2003 Archives
After eluding coalition forces for months and vowing never to be taken alive, a disheveled Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hidden hole near a farmhouse and was captured without firing a shot, coalition authorities announced Sunday.
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: Objectively Pro-Communist.
Rocky Mountain News columnist Bill Johnson and photographer Todd Heisler are travelling to Baghdad and reporting back daily with slideshows and their impressions.
Over at TAPPED, Nick Confessore brings together a few threads to demonstrate the harm Bush has inflicted on our national interests with his foreign policy bunglings. He starts with this insightful op-ed by Fareed Zakaria which asks why Bush was overshadowed by Chinese President Hu Jintao on his recent East Asia trip.
In Thailand at the meeting for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, "there was no question that Hu was the better appreciated one," a Thai official said to me. "He outshone Bush in most of the attendees' eyes." The trips ended with the two making back-to-back visits to Australia. Bush was greeted with demonstrations, his address to Parliament interrupted by hecklers. Hu, on the other hand, got a 20-minute standing ovation from Parliament. "It is Hu's visit rather than George W. Bush's that will provide a lingering sense of satisfaction and security about Australia's place in the region," wrote the Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch and not given to knee-jerk anti-Americanism.What is going on here? How does the chief representative of the world's oldest constitutional democracy lose a popularity contest to the leader of a Leninist party?
Confessore goes on to cite Zbigniew Brzezinski recent speech at the American Prospect sponsered New American Strategies for Security and Peace conference which touched on Dean Acheson's solicitation for French support during the Cuban Missle Crisis:
The former Secretary of State briefed the French President and then said to him at the end of the briefing, I would now like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons. The French President responded by saying, I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the President of the United States is good enough for me. Please tell him that France stands with America.Would any foreign leader today react the same way to an American emissary who would go abroad and say that country X is armed with weapons of mass destruction which threaten the United States? There's food for thought in that question.
Confessore concludes that Bush's abandonment of America's long-standing policies will cause the greatest harm to ourselves.
The United States did not build the old international system out of altruism, but out of enlightened self-interest, to use a hoary old phrase. Finding creative and cooperative ways of getting the world to align its interests with ours was the source of much of America's prestige and strength for decades. The Bush administration's policies have begun to unravel that accomplishment. And it's a disaster in the making -- for us.
Luckily though, he's found someone who can see his way clearly through the mess Bush will be leaving for us in 2004.
Incidentally, the only Democratic candidate who I think really, really understands this -- who has systematically thought it through for himself and knows how to articulate the issues at hand -- is Wesley Clark. Much of his thinking was on display in this excerpt, published in The Washington Monthly, from his new book, Winning Modern Wars. I highly recommend reading it for an understanding of the very real fruits of multilateralism.
Clark isn't just a pretty face in a shiny uniform as some opined in the opening days of his campaign. He's been dealing with these issues his entire career and has proven himself time and time again. The man knows what he's talking about. Help him clean up this mess.
