October 12, 2003	Sunday	Sha'aban 15, 1424

WASHINGTON: This has not been a good month for US President George W. Bush’s robust, tough-minded foreign policy. The world has begun to push back.

The latest examples:

— In Iraq, since Bush declared major hostilities to be over in May, over 90 American soldiers have been killed in action. The administration’s hand-picked chief weapons inspector — a former member of the United Nations teams that until 1998 scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction — conceded that no hard evidence has yet been found in Iraq. While the interim report asserted evidence of active Iraqi weapons programmes, the lack of actual weapons has been a further embarrassment, after Bush used the suspected existence of such weapons as a principal motive for the military attack.

— At the United Nations, Washington’s initiative to have the United Nations take greater responsibility Iraq but remain under US command has encountered a stone wall of opposition, including from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

— Bush appeared to condone an Israeli air raid on a suspected Palestinian training camp in Syria, further draining the dwindling reservoir of goodwill for the US in the Arab world.

— North Korea suggested in an announcement that it has begun to assemble a nuclear weapon, despite US demands that Pyongyang dismantle its nuclear programme.

— The president of Taiwan, once a bedrock supporter of the United States in East Asia, challenged the “One China” principle, the basic US policy formulation that has maintained an uneasy peace between Taiwan and mainland China.

The list goes on, including the political struggles of some of Bush’s strongest foreign supporters including British PM Tony Blair, who has come under heavy criticism for participating in the invasion of Iraq.

Even within the Bush administration, a long-simmering internal rivalry between the Pentagon and the State Department bubbled to the surface when Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld erupted in anger at a NATO meeting to tell a German broadcaster that he had not been consulted by the White House about a new plan that would dilute some of his authority over Iraqi occupation and reconstruction.

Perhaps the surest sign that things were not going well for the administration was the decision to go on a public relations blitz including speeches by the president himself to assure voters that the Iraq venture has been a military and political success.

Yet voters are apparently not buying it.

For the first time since the terrorist attacks two years ago on New York and Washington, Bush’s approval ratings dropped below 50 per cent in major opinion polls.

The contest for the presidential nomination of the opposition Democratic Party is already in full swing, with nine candidates campaigning actively and agreeing on only one theme: The Bush presidency, especially its foreign policy, has been calamitous for the United States.

Such attacks will not disappear. Against the economic backdrop of a fitful economic recovery that has yet to yield results in the lagging US labour market, the political climate has grown increasingly hostile for George W. Bush among not only foreign leaders but voters and now even the US Congress, where his Republican Party holds narrow majorities.

Waning influence over Congress could lead to further political setbacks for Bush, including a rejection or dismantling of his request for another 87 billion dollars for the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq, which legislators are still debating.—dpa