British journalist Patrick Seale writes:
"Although the Bush administration is reluctant to admit it, the United States is facing what is arguably its worst crisis since the Second World War. It is a crisis of leadership, of reputation, of military capability and of moral authority. A radical change of strategy and of high-level government personnel is urgently required, but can the embattled President George W Bush, whose qualities of mind and character leave much to be desired, bring it about?
"Few observers believe he can rise to the challenge. Newsweek this week described the administration as 'the most foolhardy civilian leadership in the modern history of the United States.' Referring to the war in Iraq, the news magazine wrote: 'American soldiers have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.'
"Bush is coming to Europe this month in a desperate bid to boost his domestic standing and his international image, but the differences are too great to be papered over. Relations with key European countries have been strained almost to breaking point by his earlier disdain for his allies, by his cult of military power, his unilateralist policies, his dangerous doctrine of pre-emption, and his apparent indifference to basic civil rights and the Geneva Conventions.
"Writing this week in Britain's Financial Times, Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, said: 'a vacuum has opened up at the heart of world politics where US leadership ought to be found.'
"Bush, he added, had 'gambled on Iraq and lost. The US could no longer impose its will on Iraq 'because it lacks the moral authority to do so.'
"These remarks by a leading British commentator are significant because Freedman had been an early supporter of the war. They have been echoed by many senior Americans.
"The unpalatable truth is that the Bush administration has failed in almost everything it has touched. The war in Iraq, based on lies and incompetence, has been a catastrophe, its always doubtful legitimacy fatally undermined by the torture of Iraqi detainees. The 'war on terror' has greatly increased, rather than diminished, the threat from radical political Islam, both to the US itself and to its friends, as countries like Saudi Arabia are learning to their cost.
"Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at the very heart of the region's discontents, has been allowed to sink to new depths of barbarism, largely owing to Bush's irresponsible support for Israel's bull-dozing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"For all these reasons, US relations with the Arab and Muslim world have never been so bad and Americans have rarely been so hated. The terrorists, who last weekend seized hostages in the compound at Al Khobar, were reported to be looking for Americans to kill."
Read the whole thing, and send it to your friends and enemies. It's useful to know how the U.S. looks outside its parochial borders.
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