American Collective

Expansive encounters

This week, while most of us went about our daily business of survival, huge sunspots erupted on the face of the sun, sending millions of tonnes of flaming gas hurtling across space, slamming into the Earth’s magnetosphere and causing a G5 geomagnetic storm.

You’d have thought that’d be enough to be getting on with.

Actually, no. On the surface of Earth, it was business as usual for human beings.

And it was quite a week for President Bush. The United States Commander-in-Chief rounded up his whistle-stop Asian tour then arrived home eager to allay domestic concerns about the increasingly perilous situation in Iraq.

On his trip, the Prez had what the New York Times called “an unusually expansive encounter with reporters aboard Air Force One” in which he sounded “more reflective than usual”.

It seems the Asian tour, however sheltered and shuttled it may have been, left an impression on Bush. Minutes after exiting a meeting with moderate Islamic leaders in Bali, Bush is reported to have turned to his staff “with something of a puzzled look on his face” and said, “Do they really believe we think all Muslims are terrorists?” Apparently, he was also “distressed” to learn that the US is considered pro-Israeli at the expense of the Palestinian cause.

Said David E. Sanger in the NYT: “It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.”

Earlier this month, the Washington-based Advisory Group for Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World issued a report called Changing Minds, Winning Peace, which alerted the president to the “shocking” level of hostility towards the United States. This week, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a leading Republican foreign policy voice, decried US efforts to improve the American image among Muslims as “all thumbs”.

In six days, Bush did Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia, all at what one of his senior officials called “warp speed”.

On the tour, he laid out “a different dynamic” in dealing with North Korea (as reported in last week’s Diary). The new approach, said Bush, “requires a degree of patience”, and involves a large dose of Chinese diplomacy. “We’ll see what happens,” he shrugged, brushing aside North Korea’s response that the American offer was “laughable”. When it comes to Kim Jong-il, Bush “just can’t respect anybody that would really let his people starve and shrink in size as a result of malnutrition.”

Well, that’s a relief!

Washington, it must be said, is sounding less unilateral by the day. The realities in Iraq, and the issues of Iranian and North Korean nuclear proliferation, have hit the neo-conservative confidence pretty hard. They’d never admit it, of course, but there is some backing-down going on, spattered with conciliatory language.

Just listen to Bush’s new tone: “I’ve been saying all along that not every policy issue needs to be dealt with by force. There are ways to achieve common objectives, and this is a common objective.” Asked if he was suspicious of European intervention on the Iranian nuclear issue, he said, “No, not in this case. I believe, in this case, they generally are concerned about Iran developing nuclear weapons. They understand the consequences. I appreciate it very much.”

“It’s the same approach we’re taking in North Korea as well,” Bush added, “a collective voice trying to convince a leader to change behaviour.”

Collective? Wasn’t that a Soviet thing?

Nevertheless, don’t panic, there is still some of the old folksy Bush with whom we’re so familiar.

The love-in between Bush and Australian prime minister John Howard continued when Bush called his pal a “sheriff” in Asia, helping keep the peace, Texas-style.

Bush’s speech to the “always raucous” (NYT) Australian parliament was met with several bursts of heckling. Bob Brown, leader of the Greens, stood up and shouted, “But we are not a sheriff!” He was ordered to leave the hall, but refused. Bush, wrote the NYT, “took the heckling with a smile, sipped a cup of water, and said, “I love free speech,” prompting broad applause.”

Hu are you kidding?

However, charming as Bush sounds, it was Hu Jintao, faceless bureaucrat and leader of China, who stole the show in the merry old Land of Oz.

To everyone’s surprise, particularly the Diary’s, Hu turned on the charm, and his Australian hosts, who only the day before had been heckling Dubya, took Hu to their collective bosom.

Of course, signing a deal for $21 billion is always going to endear you to your hosts.

And that was the big difference. Bush’s problem is that he only ever brings bad news. As one official conceded: “People are tired of hearing that they are the front line of terrorism, and over time they come to blame the messenger.”

Hu came with a different message: flourishing economic and cultural ties (the message once associated with a visit from the USA).

TheNYT put it like this: “The Chinese leader played the gregarious; the American president the introverted.”

These are strange times we live in.

Bush stayed in Australia for 21 hours, Hu for three days. Bush went to a private barbecue, Hu took a cruise on Sydney harbour, held a press conference, and attended a banquet in Canberra.

Australia will remain China’s biggest gas provider for the next quarter of a century.

That is, unless Bush’s speechwriters get to work.

You’ve never had it so mixed

Back in Washington, centre of the political universe, the fallout continues from defense secretary Don Rumsfeld’s leaked memo.

The supposedly private communication, which did the rounds of the US press last week and was allegedly written for the eyes of Pentagon leaders, was surprisingly frank about America’s progress in its war on terrorism.

Rummy called the US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan “a long, hard slog” (not, perhaps, the way the Bush administration wants things depicted to the electorate), and questioned whether the US is “winning or losing the global war on terror”.

Oops!

Results in shutting down al-Qaida were described as “mixed”. Rumsfeld confesses that the US has “not yet made truly bold moves”.

Don’t expect to see these candid revelations as slogans in Bush’s re-election campaign: “Vote Bush for a long, hard slog in places you never heard of, a mixed record against terrorists, and a good chance of losing the war on terror.”

Rummy rejected the charge that his memo stood in stark contrast to the administration’s “rosy” portrayal of the war effort. Slate said the memo “reads eerily like some internal mid-‘60s document from The Pentagon Papers”. The International Herald Tribune described the Defense Don as “known for his relentless focus on positive achievements” (not unlike the Diary). Quite right, of course: wasn’t this war in Iraq declared over months ago?

The Washington Post described the rambunctious Rummy as marching into the Pentagon briefing room “[a]rmed with a dictionary and a gleam in the eye”.

Yikes!

“I re-read the memo in the paper, and I thought, ‘Not bad,’” said Rummy, with trademark humility. “I don’t think anyone who’s ever come into a position like Secretary of Defense is asked to cage their brain and stop thinking.”

How naive can you get?!?

Rumsfeld opened his dictionary and proceeded to present a definition of “slog” that meant “hitting an enemy hard”.

Yeah, right.

Rumsfeld’s memos are known in the business as “snowflakes”. This is either because they arrive in a steady flurry, or because they are ice cold and melt in the palm of your hand.

Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, said approvingly of the memo, “It’s almost like a coach at half-time making adjustments.”

Where’s the oranges?

Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, was not so impressed. He described the memo as “the first bit of introspection that I’ve even whiffed” from the Pentagon, adding “there’s a little self-doubt setting in.”

Rumsfeld has been under sustained pressure in recent months and has taken much of the blame for military and intelligence failures. The New York Times suggests that “Rumsfeld is a canny player who knows exactly what he is doing when he drafts internal memos and makes them public.”

Was this a deliberate leak? “Perhaps,” says the NYT, “he is really making a case for another huge increase in the Pentagon’s already swollen budget.”

[For the record, more US servicemen and women have died in the last two years in Afghanistan and Iraq than did in Vietnam in the years 1963 and 1964 (Harper’s Index)]

Divine defense

The controversy surrounding Rumsfeld and the Pentagon and the confused distress of Bush in Asia is tied in with remarks made by Lieutenant-General William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, that have been brought to the nation’s attention in recent weeks (i.e. run repeatedly on TV shows).

Boykin, a born-again evangelical Christian, has described the war on Muslim extremism a war against “a guy called Satan”, and called Allah “an idol”, not a “real God”.

Boykin believes Bush won the presidency despite receiving fewer popular votes than Al Gore, “because God put him there for a time such as this.”

Rumsfeld chose not to criticise Boykin’s comments, pointing instead to the general’s “outstanding” service record, and saying, “There are a lot of things that are said by people in the military, or civilian life, or in the Congress, or in the executive branch, that are their views, and that’s the way we live. We’re a free people.”

Bush, whose remarks to the Australian parliament sounded remarkably similar, was forced on his Asian tour to embarrassedly tell Muslim clerics that Boykin “didn’t reflect my opinion”. “There was kind of a sense that Americans believe that Muslims are terrorists,” the President said, dumbfounded.

All this in the week that the Red Cross was bombed in Iraq on the first day of Ramadan, leaving at least 36 people dead.

Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, sent a letter to Rumsfeld questioning the propriety of Boykin’s comments. Rumsfeld’s response was to act ignorant. “It may be somewhere around the building,” he shrugged, “but I am not aware of it.”

There is talk of anger at Rummy’s “high-handedness” and “lack of respect” – and this is from within his own country, and party.

Said one Republican in the NYT, “The worst thing that can happen in Washington is if you’re a cabinet member, you think you’re bigger than the president.”

Figures of the week

114
The number of US troops killed by hostile fire in the war in Iraq

115
The number of US troops killed in Iraq since President Bush declared major combat over in front of a White House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished”

71%
US public support for the Iraq war in April

52%
US public support for the war as of this week

Quotes of the week

“The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react.”
President George W. Bush on the situation in Iraq.

“Security is a problem, we don’t deny it.”
US secretary of state Colin Powell on Iraq

“We will never ask for armed protection because this means that we are putting aside our neutrality, and this is unacceptable.”
Nada Doumani, Red Cross spokeswoman

“We did not fight the Americans, we did not fight the Europeans, we only fought on Palestinian land against the Israeli enemy who took our home. So why have America and Europe put us on the list of terrorists, when we never touched their interests?”
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas.

“If this escalation continues as Rowling concludes the saga, there may be an epidemic of Hogwarts headaches for years to come.”
Howard J. Bennett, a paediatrician in north-west Washington, who has published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Hogwarts Headaches – Misery for Muggles”, which suggests J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are inducing headaches in younger readers.

Contact the Diary Editor: Dominic.Hilton@openDemocracy.net