History Forum / General / British History / November 2003

I'd rather have them than a Nuclear Power Station or reservoir.

MWC

I don't know you but you did use their arguments...

Indeed.  And Neville is not the only deluded clown with his eyes wide
shut.  David E. Sanger of the New York Times, who accompanied Dubya on
his sanitised whirlwind trip to and from Australia's capital, comments
that Bush seems to have just managed to get a glimmering of exactly
how hated he is.  It came, apparently, as a shock to the Texas boy in
a bubble of delusion:

WHITE HOUSE MEMO

By DAVID E. SANGER

New York Times

CANBERRA, Australia, Oct. 23 — Minutes after President Bush finished
an hourlong meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of
Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled
look on his face.

"Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?" he
asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to
hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested
in the creation of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel,
despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that.

It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so
surprised.

In his six-day dash from Tokyo to the Philippines to Singapore,
Indonesia and Australia, rarely did the searing suspicions of
America's intentions — and the intentions of Mr. Bush himself — pierce
the president's fearsome security bubble. But when they did, they
revealed a huge gulf between how the president views himself, and how
Asians view George W. Bush's America.

By and large the encounters were painfully polite, even when Mr. Bush
decided to take on directly Malaysia's cantankerous prime minister,
Mahathir Mohamad, who declared that Jews run the world, and run it
from the United States. More boisterous in their anti-Bush enthusiasm
were the members of the Australian Parliament who heckled him during a
speech, shouting that the United States had no right to become the
world's sheriff.

White House officials wrote off the first to the anti-Semitic
mutterings of a soon-to-be-retired autocrat, and the second to the
local traditions of parliamentary decorum here, which bear a close
resemblance to Australian rugby rules. But beneath both incidents lay
uncomfortable realities for Mr. Bush: Mr. Mahathir's speech drew a
standing ovation from world leaders at a major Islamic conference last
week — including American allies — and polls show that Mr. Bush's
approach to the world is deeply unpopular among Australians.

Yet for his part, Mr. Bush seemed determined to show that Iraq was a
special case and to dispel the impression held in many parts of the
world that he is impatient, trigger-happy and uninterested in building
alliances. He sounds like a man who believes himself genuinely
misunderstood.

"I've been saying all along that not every policy issue needs to be
dealt with by force," Mr. Bush insisted in the conference room of Air
Force One as he left Bali and headed here to Australia's capital.

He invited reporters to look at how he is now handling North Korea.
Mr. Bush spent most of his visit whipping South Korea, Japan, Russia
and China into a common approach — telling North Korea that some form
of written guarantee of the country's security, in return for full
disarmament of its nuclear programs, is the best deal it will ever
get.

Similarly, he welcomed Europe's intervention to get Iran to stop its
nuclear program, saying he was happy to have someone else play the
heavy. "It's the same approach," he said, "the kind of approach we're
taking in North Korea as well, a collective voice trying to convince a
leader to change behavior."

But even some of Mr. Bush's aides concede that Mr. Bush has only begun
to discover the gap between the picture of a benign superpower that he
sees, and the far more calculating, self-interested, anti-Muslim
America the world perceives as he speeds by behind dark windows.

"On a trip like this he can get a glimpse of it, but only a glimpse,"
one senior official who sat in on several meetings said. "Of course,
when you are moving at warp speed, there isn't a lot of time to think
about what you are hearing."

Notably missing from this trip were the big crowds that have almost
always turned out for a glimpse of the world's most powerful leader.
To some extent, that was planned: Thailand, where Mr. Bush stayed the
longest for the annual Asian economic forum, gave workers a holiday
and made it clear that protests would not be tolerated.

In Indonesia, the Secret Service would not let the president get more
than a mile off the grounds of the airport in Bali — the
overwhelmingly Hindu island of the world's largest Islamic nation. The
result was that only ordinary Indonesians to see the first American
president to to visit their country in more that a decade were selling
Coke from a stand outside the airport fence.

Similarly, in Australia Mr. Bush visited only this prim-and-proper
capital, where few Australians without government business ever step.
(Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, was beginning to take a much more
extensive tour of the country as Mr. Bush was leaving.)

All this is in sharp contrast to the last presidential tour of the
region, when President Bill Clinton visited Vietnam at the end of
2000, talking to mayors about housing and health care, touring ancient
temples and new factories, his car weaving through streets packed
five- and six-deep with Vietnamese who said America, once an enemy,
was now the path to prosperity.

That, of course, was a different time, and Mr. Bush's aides say Mr.
Clinton viewed Southeast Asia through the cheery glasses of economic
globalization, while Mr. Bush is forcing governments that would rather
turn the other way to face the threats brewing in their own villages.

It is an unpleasant message, and the risk facing Mr. Bush is that
important parts of it get lost in translation. In Indonesia and the
Philippines, one American official with long experience in Asia noted
during the president's tour, "people are tired of hearing that they
are the front line of terrorism, and over time they come to blame the
messenger."

Mr. Bush, in his exchange with reporters on Air Force One, expressed
some regret that he did not have the time to explain himself better.
"There was kind of a sense that American believe that Muslims are
terrorists," he said, and he tried to defuse that by assuring them
that "Americans know that these terrorists are hiding behind Islam in
order to create fear and chaos and death." And he tried to explain his
Middle East policy, he said, but seemed to acknowledge that his
message probably did not sink in.

"I didn't really have time to go in further than that," he said.

The recent shrieking from the Liberal Party over the Green Senators'
mild but important interjection shows how outraged they are at the
idea of forthright representatives of democracy pricking this deluded
deluder's bubble of deceit.  In a bizzare outburst, one of John
Howard's attack dogs hit back at the Greens, comparing them to the
Nazis.  Using a tortuous line of argument, Liberal Senator George
Brandis tried desperately to link the Australian Greens to their
German counterparts, who Brandis claimed were, deep down, racist,
anti-immigration, anti-democratic and fanatics.  This weird
association has been widely derided as utter nonsense (if Bob Brown is
a racist, he's been hiding it well) and a clear indication that the
Australian Government is rattled by the warmth of the reception to the
Greens' "heckling" by the electorate.

It's also an indication of how angry Howard's government is that their
careful stage-management of the Bush visit didn't turn up the results
they wanted.  The papers were meant to be full of bland but positive
descriptions of Little Johnny strutting the stage with the "Leader of
the Free World".  Instead the Australian and foreign press were
focused on all the wrong things - the depth of anger in a wide portion
of the Australian public over Bush and Howard's lies about Iraq's
so-called "threat" and the hypocritical farce of the illegal detention
of Hicks and Habib at the Guantanamo gulag.

Bush flew back to the US blinking in disbelief.  "They don't like me?
How can this be?"

Think about it George.

And morons like Neville are mumbling about how "impolite" it was to
interupt Dubya's banal speech with something as inconvenient as the
truth.  Hilarious. Ask that kid Ali, the one with no arms and no
family, how "impolite" it was to shatter his life over a pack of
f.cking lies.

The Greens can be very satisfied.  "Mission Accomplished", as Dubya
would say.
Cheers,

Tim O'Neill