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[ThatHawaiiGuy]

Hostility to Bush has started to move across the Atlantic
By James Harding
Published: September 27 2003 5:00 / Last Updated: September 27 2003 5:00

In his nearly three years in office, George W. Bushhas prompted millions of people around the world to take to the streets in protest at US administration policy.


They have, until now, made little difference. Whether people have been demonstrating against the US's unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto treaty on the environment, voicing their concerns over the treatment of Guantanamo detainees or marching against war in Iraq, a Bush administration buoyed by popular support at home has pursued its agenda apparently impervious to international criticism.

In the last week, however, overseas hostility to Mr Bush has begun to make a dent on domestic US politics and even the president's re- election prospects.

International reluctance to provide troops and financial resources in Iraq is forcing the Pentagon to consider disrupting the lives of more American families and businesses by calling up additional reserves - the part-time soldiers who are required to leave their careers at short notice to serve.

[Works out great will create jobs while they are gone...bummer will be when they get back and their job is gone, not because they were replaced (which is illeagal) but because the position was eliminated...]

"Since it doesn't look like we'll have a coalition brigade, we have no choice but to plan for American forces," General John Abizaid, the commander of US forces in the Gulf, said this week.

The call-up of more reserves threatens to weigh on what Gen Abizaid acknowledged was already battered morale following the extension of many reservist tours of duty in Iraq by several months.

"Everybody that's there needs to know when they're coming home. I will ensure that the new guys coming in know when they're coming home. It is not right now and it needs to be fixed," he said.

The strain on the reserves has the potential to play out politically beyond military communities. "It is a huge problem for Bush," says Norm Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. The White House faces both "disgruntlement" and the possibility of falling re-enlistment rates in 2004, he says.

Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, points out that the deployment of more reserves may only hit the families of 30,000-40,000 people, but the call-up nevertheless "has a political cost . . . The complaints and the whole attitude create a climate where people perceive the war as a negative."

[War = negative?!!! How can that be?]

The public opinion polls this week have already started showing a marked turn against Mr Bush. The president's approval ratings have generally fallen to around 50 per cent - the NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll this week had Mr Bush's approval rating at just 49 per cent, the lowest level in his presidency.

[The above paragraph seems manufactured they can make those poles read whatever they want...they only ask a 1000 people or so...powers that be preparing shrub for an out...?]

A plurality of Americans are now telling pollsters they disapprove of Mr Bush's handling of Iraq and, for the first time since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, a White House request for national security spending is opposed by the majority of Americans surveyed.

The paltry international financial commitments to Iraq reconstruction is adding to the sense of burden on the American taxpayer and making for a more critical Congress as it considers Mr Bush's demand for $87bn (€79bn, £53bn) for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Democrats, sensing that they could yet confound the Washington pundits and dash Mr Bush's re-election hopes in 2004, have seized on the president's failure to secure overseas assistance.

Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said this week that Mr Bush's foreign policy had "so poisoned the well" before the war that next month's international donors' conference was not expected to deliver more than $2bn-$3bn in support. The White House is asking for $20bn to rebuild Iraq.

In a debate between the Democratic candidates for the presidency, Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut senator, said: "If George Bush had a better, more multilateral foreign policy, we wouldn't have to finance this alone. Again he went to the United Nations this time like a beggar and was turned down by the nations of the world."

Just three weeks after Mr Bush made a national television address in which he said his commanders in Iraq had requested another multinational division to "share the burden more broadly", the president's credibility is being tested as that support proves slow in coming.

At the UN this week, the change in the stature of a man the White House has liked to present as a "foreign policy" president was, perhaps, most evident. When Mr Bush spoke to world leaders at the General Assembly a year ago, he dominated the agenda. This year the General Assembly belonged not to Mr Bush but to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general.

Emboldened by a difficult year of diplomacy and the death in Iraq of UN special representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Mr Annan denounced unilateralism, warned against the principle of pre-emption and the use of ad hoc coalitions to fight wars and admonished world leaders for shirking the difficult task of reforming the UN to cope with new threats and a new distribution of power.

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=105...


Interesting times indeed.