The Guardian's Max Hastings finds himself dragged by the facts, his fingernails leaving scratch trails in the dirt, to grudging and qualified admission of George Bush's success in the Middle East. His chief criticism of what the administration has accomplished seems to be that he doesn't like the "triumphalist mode" that the White House exudes. Some of what he writes follows:
The greatest danger for those of us who dislike George Bush is that our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail. No reasonable person can oppose the president's commitment to Islamic democracy. Most western Bushophobes are motivated not by dissent about objectives, but by a belief that the Washington neocons' methods are crass, and more likely to escalate a confrontation between the west and Islam than to defuse it.
Such scepticism, however, should not prevent us from stepping back to reassess the progress of the Bush project, and satisfy ourselves that mere prejudice is not blinding us to the possibility that western liberals are wrong; that the Republicans' grand strategy is getting somewhere.
It seems wrong for either neocon true believers or liberal sceptics to rush to judgment. We of the latter persuasion must keep reciting the mantra: "We want Iraq to come right, even if this vindicates George Bush."
Those who say that Iraqis are incapable of making a democracy work may well be proved right. But until we see what happens on the ground over the months ahead, we should not write off the possibility that the Iraqi people will forge some sort of accommodation. A premature coalition withdrawal promises catastrophe for them, not us.
Hastings is holding his nose as he gives credit where it's due, but he at least has the honesty to acknowledge that much of what Bush has accomplished, though halting and precarious, would never have been accomplished in any other way by any other nation and certainly not by the U.N:
Here, indeed, is the nub of the issue about American foreign policy. The Bush vision is founded upon the exercise of military power. It is hard to regard Condoleezza Rice's "charm offensive" or the state department's protestations that in the second Bush term diplomacy will blossom, as more than cosmetic. The president himself has declared that, while he welcomes more allies, they must accept that the game will be played on Washington's terms.
We must respect American power, and also acknowledge that the world sometimes has much need of it. As Sir Michael Howard, wisest of British strategic thinkers, often remarks: "If America does not do things, nobody else will." We should acknowledge the limitations of the UN. The pitiful performance of many international peacekeeping contingents, not least in Afghanistan, highlights the feebleness of what passes for European security policy.
Although the Bush team knows how to wage war they are inept at diplomacy and stand to lose all unless they become more sensitive to the feelings of others:
Yet it still seems reasonable to question the optimism currently prevailing among Washington's neocons, because this remains founded upon a woefully simplistic vision. It is true that, in some chronic, unstable regions, some bad governments - those of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein - have been removed by the Americans. But the fragile advantages gained will be lost, unless Washington can match its boldness in the deployment of military power with a new sensitivity to alien cultures, matched by far more subtle political skills.
We're quite sure that Mr. Hastings is not pleased with President Bush's nomination of the decidedly insensitive and unsubtle John Bolton to be our representative at the U.N. We're confident that Mr. Bolton is emphatically not what Mr. Hastings had in mind, but we wonder whose diplomatic skills he thinks the Bush people should emulate. Those of the esteemed Kofi Annan? Bill Clinton? Jacques Chirac? Gerhard Schroeder? Vladimir Putin? These men are exemplars of the art of getting nothing done while simultaneously filling one's own wallet.
For our part, we think the administration's diplomacy is working just fine considering the difficulties it faces. Unlike the gentlemen listed above, the White House's diplomacy is based upon a realistic assessment of the people with whom we must deal. Some of them, to be sure, can be motivated by emoluments, others can be moved only by fear, still others are intransigently hostile and must be dealt with by force.
The enlightened ones in the salons of Europe believe all men are vulnerable to the blandishments of reason and self-interest. They're convinced that everyone can be seduced by economic bribes if the seducer is skillful enough. Lacking ideology and religious conviction themselves, they fail to understand the power these exert in the lives of others, and have been making this same error since at least the 1930's. They couldn't see the true nature of the Nazis or the communists in the 20th century, and they fail to see what makes the jihadis so implacable today. Their blindness would be the death of the West were it not for men like Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush who have a clearer vision, who recognize that men are often driven by imperatives other than simple greed, and have had the courage and steadfastness to do what needs to be done to preserve us from them.