How the world sees the Bush plan: A last throw of the dice

How the world sees the Bush plan: A last throw of the dice
By Alan Cowell
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: January 12, 2007

LONDON: Whatever the impact in Baghdad or in Baquba of President George W. Bush's new plan for Iraq, it has won few converts across a worried world, where dismay and hostility toward the U.S. expedition have grown while support trickles away.

Perhaps, some people whispered Friday in the Middle East, Arab leaders might privately welcome the effect of 20,000 more U.S. soldiers, but would not say so publicly unless their presence swung the battle for Baghdad. Maybe, others ventured, this moment recalled President Richard M. Nixon's invasion of Cambodia — "extension of the fight amid promises of withdrawal," as a German columnist put it.

But even Britain, the onetime cheer- leader for the White House, offered only an ambiguous response to the president's announcement, saying London remained on track to withdraw, not increase, its forces.

For some, the response was a study in haughty indifference. "It hasn't changed anything," said Bernard Bot, the Dutch foreign minister, whose country withdrew its troops from the Iraq coalition in 2005.

Others painted their analogies in a more apocalyptic hue. In France, the newspaper Le Monde published a cartoon depicting Bush as a bulldozer driver shoveling American soldiers into a ditch in the shape of Iraq. In Germany, the liberal Sueddeutsche Zeitung, said: "Bush hopes to douse the Iraqi fire with the blood of Americans."

Bush's announcement had been keenly awaited across the globe, particularly since the publication of a report by the Iraq Study Group had fed speculation that he might adopt a strategy avoiding higher troop levels and including diplomacy toward Syria and Iran.

But the speech Wednesday dashed those hopes, confirming, for some, the sense that Europe and the United States will not overcome a fundamental rift between American interventionism and a softer European approach.

"Europeans and Germans believe you have to talk to regimes you don't like," said Eberhard Sandschneider, director of the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister, said only a broad political strategy would enable Iraq to "recover stability, and beyond Iraq, stability in the region." That was the view, too, among Spanish officials. "Only political solutions can solve the crisis that affects stability in the region," said Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos.

There was also some sympathy for the American dilemma: This was not just an escalation, many analysts sensed, but a defining event, a last throw of the dice that would measure U.S. prestige and credibility against the clamor of its adversaries.

"This is a dangerous gamble," said the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, where the government formally supported the new strategy. In London, the anti-war Independent declared in an editorial: "The U.S. military is now being called upon to fight the battle for Baghdad all over again, in circumstances that are infinitely more complex than they were the first time around."

In both the Arab world and Israel, analysts expressed a keen sense that the war could turn into a zero-sum game, even if America scaled back its avowed ambitions for a democratic Iraq and aimed simply to mold stability and moderation.

"If the U.S. gets out before achieving these limited aims, Iraq is going to descend into mass chaos. We can see the country splinter," said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel and now a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. "The region will be further radicalized. Iran would become the regional hegemon."

That same fear pervades many Arab societies. "The withdrawal would signify defeat, which would result in strengthening all the enemies' desire for expansion, such as Iran's persistence in developing its nuclear weapons, and Al Qaeda would double its activities in Iraq and the whole region," said an opinion article in the Thursday edition of the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Alawsat, which is close to the Saudi royal family and published in London.

Some saw the Arab approach in more nuanced terms. Mansoor al-Jamri, editor in chief of the Bahrain newspaper Al Wasat said he thought it was likely that some Arab leaders support the troop increase, if for no other reason that to offset Iran's rising influence, but that they would never express such an opinion.

"There is a mixed feeling," Jamri said. "If America is involved more in some way to secure Iraqi politics and secure the situation, I think some Iraqis and some Arab government will like it."

But there is a deeper pessimism, reflecting a widely held Arab view that the American presence is the source of Iraq's woes. "Bush's strategy of surging troops is nothing new," said Bassem Alim, a Saudi lawyer and political writer. "He did that last year when he announced an additional 40,000 troops were being sent to Iraq. That didn't do the job, and I don't think that an additional 20,000 troops will do the job either. Either Bush doesn't understand the situation or he is blinded by his evangelical beliefs."

Yet an immediate American withdrawal would be deeply troubling in many parts of the Arab world.

An Arab diplomat based in Egypt, who spoke in return for anonymity, said: "The other side of the coin is the immediate departure of American troops will leave such a vacuum in power, it will have two results — Iran will fill the vacuum where it can, and the whole country will explode. It will be worse than a civil war. If the Americans leave immediately, Iran will be the winner."

Or, as John Howard, the Australian prime minister and a close ally of Bush's, put it: "You can't sort of have a middle position on this. You can't be sort of against what the president is trying to do and yet be in favor of defeating the terrorists in Iraq. You have to understand that if America, the most powerful country in the world, our strongest ally, is defeated in Iraq or retreats in circumstances of defeat in Iraq, that would be the greatest propaganda victory the terrorists could ever win."