Another article. c.i.
*******************
George W. Queeg
March 14, 2003
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/14KRUG.html?ex=1048648295&ei=1&en=260b59f35b8fc01a
