WASHINGTON: If foreign observers are increasingly confused about US foreign policy under President George W. Bush or even whether it occupies the same planetary space as the rest of the world, they are not alone.
Serious US analysts, too, are scratching their heads at the incoherence in the administration’s public statements about its policies or even about reality itself. Such incoherence has been made especially manifest over the past ten days at nearly opposite ends of the world: the Middle East and Venezuela.
As Secretary of State Colin Powell, believing that he had been given a mandate to demand an immediate Israeli withdrawal from devastated Palestinian towns and camps (“Enough is enough,” said Bush), meandered around the Middle East, senior officials back home, including Bush himself, continued blaming Palestine Authority (PA) chief Yasser Arafat for the violence.
In the middle of the trip, the White House sent the Pentagon’s hawk-in-chief, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to address a pro-Israel rally outside the Capitol organized by right- wing Jewish and fundamentalist Christian groups around the theme of ‘Yasser Arafat Equals Osama bin Laden.’
Wolfowitz shared the podium with former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who has said he believes the incumbent, Ariel Sharon, is too soft on the Palestinians.
“When I saw Wolfowitz stand in Washington and say, ‘I support Sharon’ while we were meeting with Secretary of State Powell, this told me something,” noted Saeb Erekat, a top PA negotiator. “We don’t have a sign saying ‘stupid’ on our foreheads.” And when Bush greeted Powell back at the White House on Thursday, he went out of his way to praise Sharon as a “man of peace” although the Israeli premier had — for nearly two weeks — defied Bush’s demand that Israel withdraw its troops without delay.
By contrast, UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, who surveyed the devastation of the Jenin Refugee Camp on the same day, concluded “Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict.” It was left to unnamed “senior officials” to explain to White House reporters that there really was no contradiction between Bush’s early demands for an immediate Israeli withdrawal and Bush’s praise of the man who had so ostentatiously stiffed him. “Don’t nuance it to death,” one official told the New York Times.
A similar dynamic emerged after the collapse of a military coup d’etat against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias, which top administration officials, had initially greeted with undisguised rapture. Once the coup got under way, administration officials accepted as fact the coup-makers’ self-serving account of what had taken place but broadcast that version and suggested that Cuban troops might be supporting Chavez without the slightest offer of evidence for any of its assertions.
In the Mideast case, the problem of “mixed signals” was even clearer, making it much easier for Sharon to believe that he had a “green light” for continuing his attacks on Palestinian communities all over the West Bank despite Bush’s demands for an immediate withdrawal.
Thus, while Powell was consistent in echoing those demands, other officials, notably Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, made clear their lack of enthusiasm for the mission.
At the same time, Bush, his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, and National Security Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice either went silent or said different things at different times about the urgency with which Bush expected Sharon would comply with his wishes. In both cases, the US found itself completely isolated from its traditional allies, who criticized the administration not only for incoherence and/or cynicism, but also for insisting on interpretations of reality that were so patently at odds with the real thing.
Latin American leaders acted as one in denouncing Chavez’s ouster as a coup the same afternoon that US officials said there was no reason for a fuss. Washington’s European allies made little secret of their own disgust and distress at the administration’s refusal to criticise Sharon even as he flouted Powell and wreaked havoc on the Palestinians. This pattern is becoming a notable feature of the Bush administration. Journalist Michael Kinsley describes it as a tendency to “construct an alternative reality on some topic, and to regard anyone who objects to it as a sniveling dweeb obsessed with ‘nuance’.” —Dawn/InterPress Service.
