Failure Is Too Soft a Term
But remarkably after 6 years, if you use Google to search using the term "failure" and click on "I'm Feeling Lucky," you will still get this page. And we still would very much like to know who's paid for that.
The Failure of George W. Bush
By Thierry de Montbrial
Nov 23, 2006, 04:06
Two years from the end of its last mandate, the failure of the forty-third presidency of the United States, sanctioned by the ballot boxes during the midterm elections on Tuesday November 7, affects the entire planet.
Five years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the reality on the ground is anything but reassuring. Between the war lords and the return of the Taliban, the authority of president Karzai is at best symbolic, in spite of the support of the United States and the presence of the NATO forces. The situation has worsened in particular because of the concessions that the Pakistani president, General Musharraf, had to make in order to pacify the tribes in Western Pakistan, and Afghanistan has never before produced such a large quantity of drugs.
In Iraq, the rebuilding is impossible without a return to internal peace, and the preconditions for internal peace are today out of reach. The various communities are tearing each other apart. The country is threatening to explode. The rate of the losses of the occupying forces is increasing. The distress of the American military is clear. As this situation is prolonged, their objective possibilities of intervention elsewhere in the world are reduced. The credibility of the superpower has been severely affected.
Washington has let the situation in the Middle East spoil, since George W. Bush never wanted to or never dared interfere. Prisoner of its ideology, this administration did not understand that no reconciliation between the Judeo-Christian and Moslem worlds is conceivable, unless there is a viable settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. By letting Israel carry out its war of thirty-four days against Lebanon, the position of Washington has weakened even more, from the simple fact that the Hebrew State, even though it did not militarily lose this war, nor did it win it. We are here in the domain of psychology and for Israel not to win a war is to lose it.
Such is the context in which Iran and North Korea scoff at America. Did Iran really make the choice to obtain nuclear weapons fast? A more probable assumption is that Tehran wants to reach the nuclear threshold, i.e. to develop technologies which would one day allow it to cross the final straight line. This is the case of Japan.
Meanwhile, the regime of the mullahs is considered to be strengthened by the international context. With a certain complicity by Russia and China, it intends to show that no stabilization of the Middle East as a whole, in particular in Iraq or in Lebanon, is possible without its participation.
Read the rest of it here.
