What is needed is a shift from shock and awe to reassurance
Martin Kettle in Brussels
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
Like him or not, Doug Wead reflected to reporters at the weekend, George Bush was going to be "a huge historical figure". It was therefore legitimate, Wead thought, to release secret tapes he had made of his old friend's private conversations. Whether Wead, a former aide to the first president Bush, was right or wrong about that is a separate issue, though I'm certainly glad he's not my friend. But he was spot on about one thing. Bush is a big figure all right.
Watching and listening to Bush in Brussels yesterday it was impossible not to see that this is a very different politician from the one who was taped by Wead as he weighed his first run for the White House in the late 1990s. "It's me versus the world," the Texas governor told Wead then. "The good news is, the world is on my side. Or more than half of it anyway." That cockiness, so irksome to so many for so long, and so destructive, is gone now, or is perhaps more skilfully concealed. In any event, there was a new maturity about Bush yesterday which we deny at our peril.
Let's admit the limitations of yesterday's speech straight away. In 32 minutes, Bush covered more than a dozen difficult world and regional issues. Some of what he said about some of those issues was pretty perfunctory, inevitable in such a wide-ranging, almost scatter-gun, address. There was not much on Africa, and barely a mention of Asia. The section on Afghanistan was thin.
Much of what he did say was held together by constructive ambiguity. In the meatiest section of the speech, the part dealing with the Middle East, Bush's clear willingness to engage and to encourage others to engage - important changes of position - was vitiated by the number of conditions, spoken and unspoken, that he clearly attaches to the US's own role. Of the three most difficult issues between the US and Europe highlighted by Peter Mandelson in an interview yesterday - Iran, China and Nato - Bush addressed only the first.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1419922,00.html