George Bush, At Sea in the Desert0By Michael Winship

[kpete]

George Bush, At Sea in the Desert

By Michael Winship
May 30, 2008


Editor’s Note: Over the past four-plus years, a chasm has been widening in the Middle East between the Bush administration's self-image as a key player calling the shots and the deepening anti-Americanism pervading both allied and adversarial nations.

Despite all the polling data and the open hostility to U.S. initiatives, President George W. Bush seems oblivious to this reality, as Michael Winship points out in this guest essay:

President Bush’s recent speech before the Knesset, ostensibly to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday, was not only a display of political cynicism at its worst – using a diplomatic occasion to perpetrate an unseemly attack on Barack Obama – but a microcosm for the disregard with which the President holds the rest of the world. And vice versa.

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So, as Bush thoughtlessly careens into the last months of his presidency, a good portion of the rest of the world has decided it can spin on quite well without him. Even Israel.

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Such defiance isn’t just because George Bush is a lame duck. So bereft is his administration’s Middle East policy of initiative or consistent purpose that the United States has lost what little credibility it had left.

It’s becoming clearer as Egyptian newspaper editor and human rights activist Hisham Qassem says, “America is neither loved nor feared.”

Instead, we’re the lumbering, addled giant, aimlessly kicking desert sand, irritating the world instead of leading it.

more at:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/052908b.html