Untitled Document
President Bush has reached a dead end in his foreign policy, but he has failed
to recognise his quandary. His belief that the polite reception he received in
Europe is a vindication of his previous adventures is a vestige of fantasy.
As the strains of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, filled the Concert
Noble in Brussels, Bush behaved as though the mood music itself was a dramatic
new phase in the transatlantic relationship. He gives no indication that he grasps
the exhaustion of his policy. His reductio ad absurdum was reached with his statement
on Iran: "This notion that the US is getting ready to attack Iran is simply
ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table." Including,
presumably, the "simply ridiculous".
Bush is scrambling to cobble together policies across the board. At the last
minute he rescued his summit with Vladimir Putin, who refuses to soften his
authoritarian measures, with a step toward safeguarding Russian plutonium that
could be used for nuclear weapons production. This programme was negotiated
by Bill Clinton and neglected by Bush until two weeks ago.
The European reception for Bush was not an embrace of his neoconservative world
view, but an attempt to put it in the past. New Europe is trying to compartmentalise
old Bush. To the extent that he promises to be different, the Europeans encourage
him; to the extent that he is the same, they pretend it's not happening.
The Europeans, including the British government, feel privately that the past
three years have been hijacked by Iraq. Facing the grinding, bloody and unending
reality of Iraq doesn't mean accepting Bush's original premises, but getting
on with the task of stability. Ceasing the finger-pointing is the basis for
European consensus on its new, if not publicly articulated, policy: containment
of Bush. Naturally, Bush misses the nuances and ambiguities.
Of course, he has already contained himself, or at least his pre-emption doctrine,
which seems to have been good for one-time use only. None of the allies is willing
to repeat the experience. Bush can't manage another such military show anyway,
as his army is pinned down in Iraq.
The problem of Iran is in many ways the opposite of Iraq. The Europeans have
committed their credibility to negotiations, the Iranians have diplomatic means
to preclude unilateral US action, and Bush - who, according to European officials,
has no sense of what to do - is boxed in, whether he understands it or not.
The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, seeking to impress French intellectuals
while in Paris, referred to Iran as totalitarian, as if the authoritarian Shia
regime neatly fitted the Soviet Union model. With this rhetorical legerdemain,
she extended the overstretched analogy of the "war on terrorism" as
the equivalent of the cold war to Persia. Her lack of intellectual adeptness
dismayed her interlocutors. One of the French told me Rice was "deaf to
all argument", but no one engaged her gaffe because "good manners
are back".
Regardless of Rice's wordplay, it is not a policy. Rice has vaguely threatened
to refer Iran to the UN security council. The "simply ridiculous"
remains on the table at the same time as the US is unengaged in diplomacy. Bush
doesn't know whether to join the Europeans in guaranteeing an agreement to prevent
Iran from developing nuclear weapons or not.
"So long as Iran remains within the non-proliferation treaty and the [UN
weapons] inspectors remain on the ground there, there's nothing the US can do
within the security council," John Ritch, the former US ambassador to the
UN International Atomic Energy Agency, told me.
The argument for keeping the Iranians within the treaty was overwhelming, he
said. "As long as they are in the inspection system it gives us maximum
opportunity to evaluate every step of their nuclear development ... The US should
be willing to support a European-brokered deal under which the Iranians forgo
their right to build a domestic nuclear enrichment and processing capability.
Ultimately, the way to promote a satisfactory outcome is to empower the Europeans
by asserting that the US will back up a sound agreement."
Bush has hummed a few bars of rapprochement. With their applause, the Europeans
have begun to angle him into a corner on Iran. In time Bush must either join
the negotiations or regress to neoconservatism, which would wreck the European
relationship. If he chooses a course that is not "simply ridiculous",
on his next visit the Europeans might be willing to play Beethoven's Third Symphony,
the Eroica.
· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and
author of The Clinton Wars
sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com
