GEORGE Bush pulled out of a speech to the European Parliament when MEPs wouldn't guarantee a standing ovation.
Senior White House officials said the President would only go to Strasbourg to talk about Iraq if he had a stage-managed welcome.
A source close to negotiations said last night: "President Bush agreed to a speech but insisted he get a standing ovation like at the State of the Union address.
"His people also insisted there were no protests, or heckling.
"I believe it would be a crucial speech for Mr Bush to make in light of the opposition here to war. But unless he only gets adulation and praise, then it will never happen."
Mr Bush's every appearance in the US is stage-managed, with audiences full of supporters.
It was hoped he would speak after he welcomed Warsaw pact nations to Nato in Prague last November. But his refusal to speak to EU leaders face-to-face is seen as a key factor in the split between the US-UK coalition and Europe.
The source added: "Relations between the EU and the US are worsening fast - this won't help."
On the subject of North Korea, there are two groups of people in Washington today: People who are terrified, and people who aren't paying attention. Unfortunately, the latter category seems to include the president of the United States.
In recent days, Pyongyang has begun an escalating series of military provocations. On February 20, a North Korean fighter jet crossed into South Korean airspace, leading Seoul to scramble its own jets and put a missile battery on high alert. On February 24, North Korea greeted the inauguration of South Korea's new president by launching an anti-ship missile into the Sea of Japan. And, on March 1, North Korean MiGs trailed a U.S. spy plane for 22 minutes, the first such incident since 1969. "If an encounter like this happens again," a former North Korean general told The Washington Post, "I think they will shoot down the U.S. plane. North Koreans don't have any fear of war."
But all this pales before the provocation looming in the distance: Pyongyang's reopening of the Yongbyon nuclear reprocessing plant. U.S. spy satellites show feverish activity around the long- dormant site, and Bush administration officials say they expect it will be reopened within weeks. "Once they start reprocessing," an American official recently told The New York Times' David Sanger, "it's a [nuclear] bomb a month from now until summer." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Congress in February that North Korea might well sell that nuclear material to "a non- state actor or a rogue state."
Not long ago, administration officials were telling journalists that the reopening of Yongbyon was a "red line." More recently, as Pyongyang has gotten closer to crossing it, the Bush team has taken a more accommodating line--suggesting that the plant's reactivation will jolt North Korea's neighbors into finally applying serious diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. But that's probably a pipe dream. Once North Korea starts turning spent fuel rods into plutonium, its willingness to negotiate away Yongbyon will dramatically diminish. And, if it becomes clear that diplomatic overtures are worthless, the Bush administration will feel enormous pressure to do something to prevent Pyongyang from producing bombs that could end up in Al Qaeda's hands.
Already, hawks inside and outside the Bush administration are tiptoeing in the direction of a preemptive strike. In the March issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik writes, "Not only does the North's belligerence leave us no choice but to `think' about war, we cannot exclude the possibility of initiating military action ourselves." Defense Policy Review Board Chairman Richard Perle recently said the Bush administration needed to consider ways to "neutralize" North Korea's massive military firepower. As the Nelson Report, an influential Washington newsletter on Asian policy, put it last week, "The dirty little secret ... is that some Bush hard-liners not only are willing to risk war, they think that if the U.S. pushes hard enough, N. Korea will prove to be a paper tiger and swiftly collapse." When Pyongyang begins building nukes and the U.S. military is done toppling Saddam, that dirty little secret will become a full-blown policy option.
Given these circumstances, you'd think the president and his top advisers would be frantic. Instead, they're eerily sanguine. For weeks now, Bush officials have been denying that North Korea's behavior constitutes a "crisis." Secretary of State Colin Powell called Pyongyang's missile test "fairly innocuous" and "not surprising." One Bush official told Sanger that "nothing is happening--and no one knows how we will respond when the bomb-making starts."
The administration would like observers to interpret its calm as steely resolve. But it actually signifies a refusal to face reality. The Bush administration says it wants multilateral talks with Pyongyang and a series of other countries, including South Korea, Russia, China, and Japan. The theory behind this approach is that only a united front among North Korea's neighbors can exert the pressure necessary to convince Kim Jong Il to turn back. But the diplomatic reality is that there is no united front. North Korea adamantly rejects multilateral talks, and South Korea, Russia, and China adamantly refuse to turn the screws. The Bush administration is paying the price for having helped fuel the anti- Americanism that elected an ultra-soft-line president in Seoul last December. And it cannot pull out all the diplomatic stops with Moscow and Beijing since its highest priority is convincing those governments not to veto an Iraq resolution at the Security Council. The unhappy result is that the United States is basically facing this crisis alone.
Recognizing this diplomatic reality means accepting unconditional, one-on-one talks with Pyongyang. There's a modest chance such negotiations could defer the reopening of Yongbyon. (One China insider speculated to Chris Nelson recently that, if the United States made progress in such negotiations, Beijing might use its leverage with Pyongyang to help secure a deal.) But, whether or not such talks avert an international crisis, they would create a domestic political one. For conservatives--who have called Bill Clinton an appeaser and a dupe for his 1994 deal with Kim Jong Il--unconditional, bilateral talks by the Bush administration would constitute something close to a betrayal. Indeed, when senior Bushies seemed to contemplate them last fall, they were roundly denounced on the right. And now the president has reportedly prohibited top officials from even raising the possibility.
The administration may be waiting to begin bilateral talks until after an Iraq war, when presumably it will be in a position of overwhelming domestic political strength. But, by that time, Yongbyon may well be up and running (many experts think North Korea will deliberately start the reactor while the United States is at war), and thus it will probably be too late. Today, when it really matters, the Bush administration effectively has no policy at all.
If the Bush administration does understand that it will eventually have to sit down with Pyongyang, then its current delay represents the inexcusable privileging of politics over national security. If, on the other hand, it has no intention of engaging in such talks, its current stalling tactics may stem from a very different calculation: That the United States can only fight one war at a time. As Stanley Kurtz put it approvingly recently in National Review Online, "If our policy is to strike when we may and must, silence makes a good deal of sense."
This has so far been too chilling an interpretation for most observers. But, in either case, the United States is much closer to the brink than most Americansrealize. And, whether out of political self- interest or ideological zeal, the Bush administration doesn't seem to mind.
wo weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims I am not making this up that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel.
This idea has received only fleeting attention in the mainstream discussion of our looming invasion of Iraq, and it would not deserve more except for three things: (1) The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think. (2) It has interesting ripples in our domestic politics. (3) It has, like many dubious theories, sprouted from a seed of truth. Israel is part of the story. And why shouldn't it be?
The conspiracy theory appears in several variations, ranging from malignant to merely cynical, but it goes something like this: A cadre of pro-Zionist zealots within the Bush administration and among its media chorus (the "amen corner," as the isolationist Pat Buchanan crudely called them last time we threatened Iraq) has long schemed to make the Middle East safer for Israel by uprooting the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein. They have finally succeeded, the theory goes, in pushing their agenda up to the desk of a gullible president.
Exhibit A for this plot is a document entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared in 1996 by a group of American defense thinkers for the hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. This study proposed an aggressive redirection of Israeli strategy, including a plan for "removing Saddam Hussein from power." Three of the authors of the prescription Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser are now prominent "embeds" in the Bush administration.
The "Clean Break" group, interestingly, did not call for an American conquest of Saddam. With President Bill Clinton in office, there was little hope of that. They proposed that Israel handle it together with Jordan and Turkey. Jordan's Hashemite dynasty would share the management of Iraq with the Shiites presumably leaving the fate of the poor Kurds in Turkish hands. As for America, the document proposed that Israel adopt a new policy of self-reliance, immediately declining economic aid and, eventually, military assistance. This was all a bit much, even for the ultranationalist Mr. Netanyahu.
A less conspiracy-minded observer might point out that the longstanding Bushite animosity toward Iraq is complex and hardly secret, and the fact that our interests coincide with Israel's does not mean that a Zionist fifth column has hijacked the president's brain. But that would not satisfy the yearning for a simple story.
Reinforcing this sinister narrative is the suspicion that the presidential mastermind Karl Rove designed the war as shameless pandering to Florida's Jewish voters and to the tens of millions of evangelical Christians who have taken up Israel as a passion. (Many evangelicals love Israel because in their Biblical end-of-days scenario, the gathering of Jews in the Holy Land is necessary for the Second Coming. Inconveniently for the Jews, the story calls for them to either abandon their beliefs or be exterminated in time for the great rapture.)
While the polls show that the attitudes of American Jews on a war with Iraq are not appreciably different from those of the general electorate, most of the big Jewish organizations and many donors (with the important exception of Hollywood donors) are backing war.
I don't for a second believe that Mr. Bush is marching to war to secure the votes of Palm Beach County. But Republican strategists do foresee and savor the fact that a victory in Iraq could give the president new inroads with a small but politically active and traditionally Democratic constituency.
"If the policy succeeds in the war and the peace," one Republican strategist said, "then I think you'll see a further tectonic shift of Jewish political support, both in terms of money and votes, toward Bush. That's not why it's being done, but it will be a consequence if they're successful."
Mr. Bush may also be enjoying the way the question of Israel and the Palestinians has sown strife within the antiwar ranks. Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist Jewish magazine Tikkun, says he was blackballed from speaking at an antiwar rally in San Francisco because some of the sponsors refused to have a "pro-Israel" speaker, an incident that prompted considerable gloating among hawks.
You hear lowbrow versions of the it's-really-about-Israel theory at protest rallies, especially in Europe, where selective sympathy for the Palestinians runs high. You can hear more sophisticated versions, sometimes whispered or oblique, among scholars, op-ed writers and politicians. They speak of the "Israel-centric" war on terror or "Sharon's war."
Making the world safer for us defusing terrorism and beginning to reform a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for happens to make the world safer for Israel as well. But the idea that Israel's interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign policy is simple-minded and offensive. (There is also a simple-minded and offensive flip side, which holds that opposition to the war is heavily fueled by anti-Semitism another sweeping slander with a grain of truth in it.)
What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire good for the Jews. Even though Israel is a likely target of Iraqi reprisals when war breaks out, it is the only country I know of where polls show overwhelming support for an invasion to oust Saddam, preferably sooner.
The administration prefers not to advertise Israel alongside Bulgaria and Spain on its marquee of allied supporters, for the same reason it has gone to tremendous lengths to keep Israel out of the coming war. No one wants to feed the dangerous idea that this is, as the jihad propagandists claim, a war of Americans and Zionists against Arabs and Islam.
There are obvious reasons that Israelis would like to rid the region of a man who trains terrorists and pays blood money to suicide bombers' families. But the deeper explanation, says Stephen Cohen, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, is profound despair over the bloody dead end in which Israeli-Palestinian politics sit. A conquest of Iraq offers the prospect that the United States will take the region in hand. It is, to many Israelis, the only hope of change for the better.
In his speech last week to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush for the first time seemed to embrace this thankless responsibility. He declared that success in Iraq could break the impasse and move Israel and the Palestinians toward the obvious two-state solution. He underscored this as "my personal commitment."
The speech may have been a sop to European opinion, but a successful war would offer Mr. Bush a precious opportunity. A lot of people wish that he had engaged the Palestinian question intensively and earlier, if only to gain some credibility with the Arabs prior to disarming Saddam. But later would still be better than never.
The question is, What will Mr. Bush make of this moment? If the U.S. manages to make a more benign Iraq and perhaps a chastened Syria the Israelis could decide to dig in their heels: Our friend Mr. Bush is here, he's on our side; we can now sit tight, wait for the Palestinians to read the handwriting on the walls of Baghdad and maybe offer them half a state.
Or the Americans could seize the opportunity to say to Ariel Sharon, who has shown no prior gift for strategic statesmanship: "We are here now you know we won't let you down. It's time to roll back the settlements and close a deal."
Will Mr. Bush choose to lead on this? We know now that the man isn't afraid of a big gamble. But we also know that he likes his stories black and white, and no amount of conquest will make the Middle East a simple plot.
wo weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims I am not making this up that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
