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COLUMN
EIGHTY-EIGHT, APRIL 1, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)
BY PAUL KRUGMAN
IS BUSH A LITTLE NUTS?
Subject: George W. Queeg
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 15:12:59 -0800
From: "venire" venire@znet.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
March 14, 2003
George W. Queeg
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Aboard the U.S.S. Caine, it was the business with the
strawberries that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with
the captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush's quart of strawberries?
Over the past few weeks there has been an epidemic of
epiphanies. There's a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush's
policy on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel with
the goal; who wouldn't want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are
finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people
than you would think " including a fair number of people in the Treasury
Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon " don't just question
the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America's
leadership has lost touch with reality.
If that sounds harsh, consider the debacle of recent
diplomacy " a debacle brought on by awesome arrogance and a vastly inflated
sense of self-importance.
Mr. Bush's inner circle seems amazed that the tactics that
work so well on journalists and Democrats don't work on the rest of the world.
They've made promises, oblivious to the fact that most countries don't trust
their word. They've made threats. They've done the aura-of-inevitability thing
" how many times now have administration officials claimed to have lined up
the necessary votes in the Security Council? They've warned other countries that
if they oppose America's will they are objectively pro-terrorist. Yet still the
world balks.
Wasn't someone at the State Department allowed to point out
that in matters nonmilitary, the U.S. isn't all that dominant " that Russia
and Turkey need the European market more than they need ours, that Europe gives
more than twice as much foreign aid as we do and that in much of the world
public opinion matters? Apparently not.
And to what end has Mr. Bush alienated all our most
valuable allies? (And I mean all: Tony Blair may be with us, but British public
opinion is now virulently anti-Bush.) The original reasons given for making Iraq
an immediate priority have collapsed. No evidence has ever surfaced of the
supposed link with Al Qaeda, or of an active nuclear program. And the
administration's eagerness to believe that an Iraqi nuclear program does exist
has led to a series of embarrassing debacles, capped by the case of the forged
Niger papers, which supposedly supported that claim. At this point it is clear
that deposing Saddam has become an obsession, detached from any real rationale.
What really has the insiders panicked, however, is the
irresponsibility of Mr. Bush and his team, their almost childish unwillingness
to face up to problems that they don't feel like dealing with right now.
I've talked in this column about the administration's eerie
passivity in the face of a stalling economy and an exploding budget deficit:
reality isn't allowed to intrude on the obsession with long-run tax cuts. That
same "don't bother me, I'm busy" attitude is driving foreign policy
experts, inside and outside the government, to despair.
Need I point out that North Korea, not Iraq, is the clear
and present danger? Kim Jong Il's nuclear program isn't a rumor or a forgery;
it's an incipient bomb assembly line. Yet the administration insists that it's a
mere "regional" crisis, and refuses even to talk to Mr. Kim.
The Nelson Report, an influential foreign policy
newsletter, says: "It would be difficult to exaggerate the growing mixture
of anger, despair, disgust and fear actuating the foreign policy community in
Washington as the attack on Iraq moves closer, and the North Korea crisis
festers with no coherent U.S. policy. . . . We are at the point now where
foreign policy generally, and Korea policy specifically, may become George
Bush's `Waco.' . . . This time, it's Kim Jong Il (and Saddam) playing David
Koresh. . . . Sober minds wrestle with how to break into the mind of George
Bush."
We all hope that the war with Iraq is a swift victory, with
a minimum of civilian casualties. But more and more people now realize that even
if all goes well at first, it will have been the wrong war, fought for the wrong
reasons " and there will be a heavy price to pay.
Alas, the epiphanies of the pundits have almost surely come too late. The odds are that by the time you read my next column, the war will already have started.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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