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Roundup: Media's Take

H.D.S. Greenway: The Neocons Are Losing Influence

H.D.S. Greenway, in the Boston Globe (July 9 2004):

WHEN IS the last time you heard Donald Rumsfeld insult an ally? The defense secretary used to insult an ally a week. The men from Mars in Rumsfeld's inner circle had nothing but contempt for the un-warlike Europeans from Venus, as Robert Kagan famously put it. But in recent months Rumsfeld has become strangely quiet. The Bush administration never admits it has made a mistake, but you can detect shifts in policy by signals sent out, and one of them may be a muzzled Rumsfeld.

The fact is that the administration needs allies now. Iraq has gone so badly that the old go-it-alone neoconservatives have had to take a back seat, and the Bush forces are out courting countries it formerly disdained. So intensive was this effort to internationalize Iraq in the month of June that John Kerry began to see one of his key issues being coopted.

The Bush administration came into office with a big chip on its shoulder, and long before 9/11, America's allies watched in dismay at what wags called the bonfire of the treaties -- Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, et al. But it was Iraq that caused the great divide between the United States and its European allies, and not all the fault lay with the Americans. The French saying they would veto any UN resolution to go to war against Iraq no matter what the circumstances ended any chance for a united international effort to prod Iraq into compliance with UN Resolution 1441.

We now know that Saddam Hussein doubted Western resolve to disarm him, and even though the overall French position on Iraq certainly looks better in hindsight, it began to seem at the time that the real fight was about curtailing American power, not Iraq's. Rumsfeld's crack"old Europe" being less important to the United States as the new Europeans who had just emerged from Soviet power further inflamed trans-Atlantic sensibilities.

Last month, however, President Bush traveled from Washington no less than four times to meet with and to soothe ruffled allies. He went from the beaches of Normandy, where the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being celebrated, to the G-8 summit in Georgia, to Ireland for a European Union meeting, and lastly to Istanbul for a NATO summit....