(1) The missing link in 9/11

When terrorists attacked on 9/11, America didn't know what hit it. There were two "theories": terror for its own sake and a "clash of civilizations". Bush was a bragging, self-righteous president, whose brashness stemmed from the fact that he barely made it to the presidency. He gratuitously indicted an "axis of evil", which as it was really a "triad" (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) seemed to indicate that he was not too clear on what exactly he had in mind. He also offered Americans an anti-missile shield in contravention of the anti-ballistic missiles treaty. Objectively, 9/11 made a fool of him. But the USA, with a long history of war-mongering, was willing to follow whatever lead he provided.

Of the triad of evil, the one that Bush had in mind from the beginning was Iraq. There were various reasons for this. Iraq was the most vulnerable of the three. Bush's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was complicit with Iraq's terrorist tactics against the Kurds and wanted to erase this blotch in his public record. Bush's vicepresident, Dick Cheney, was also an Iraq-hater, despite his reluctant support of president George H.W. Bush, in whose administration he had served, in his statesman-like decision to not to occupy Iraq during the Gulf or First Iraqi war. The obsession with Iraq of the younger Bush's administration set off a chain of lies, misrepresentations, distortions, and deliberately skewed intelligence. In addition, Bush himself was the primary author of a policy of torture when he approved the practice of "rendition" consisting in handing terrorism suspects over to countries where he knew that they would be subjected to the worst imaginable human-rights abuses.

There was a missing link in the chain leading to 9/11, and that was Israel. Before the terrorist attack, the Palestinians had started the Second Intifada and had been recurring to suicide bombings after the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister. The responsibility for 9/11 was immediately traced to Osama bin Laden and the terrorist al Qaida organization which he had founded. This fact sustained the "clash of civilizations" thesis and made 9/11 seem like part of an Islamic jihad. It was deliberately ignored that in every anti-American tirade by bin Laden, he had mentioned the Israel/Palestine issue. Inescapably, the motivation for 9/11 should have been significantly traced to Israel and its treatment of its Palestinian subjects and to the Israeli policy of invading with Jewish settlements the Palestinian West Bank.

Osama bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan, which was ruled by the fanatical Taliban. When America demanded that he be turned over to its jurisdiction, it was turned down. The War on Afghanistan ensued, which was accepted internationally as justified. The Taliban did deserve what they got. Bush gloated that the operation had been a "bargain", in which he unwittingly was making a fool of himself again. Besides, as Osama bin Laden was not captured--and still hasn't been captured despite continuous military operations in the badlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan--the war was only partially successful. To pursue its basic objective by wringing information that could lead to bin Laden (and to the circumstances of 9/11), the USA transferred 680 prisoners from Afghanistan to the Guantanamo base in Cuba, where they could be kept at the disposal of the American military, ultimately as Bush's captives.

The War of Afghanistan was a perfectly understandable American reaction, but it had been declared to be part of a "war on terror", and immediately Bush and his people--as it turned out, the American people in general--started over-reacting. War on terror is a meaningless concept. America now gave it concrete meaning as the destruction of Iraq, which in time has been so costly that the "bargain" has resulted in the largest fiscal deficits in America's history, ultimately caused by Bush's plutocratic tax-cutting program, and the toppling of the dollar as the standard currency for national reserves, especially in the powerful economies of the Far East (China, Japan, and South Korea).

The shock of 9/11 was so traumatic that an investigation (9/11 panel) was initiated to determine how the terrorist attack had been possible in the first place. The results of this probe brought up some astounding revelations. The American intelligence services possessed all the basic bits of information about the 9/11 terrorist plot. They knew how it was to be carried out and they also knew who would carry it out, and not just in the general sense of al Qaida but in the specific sense of identified Muslim fanatics training in American flight schools. But the information was disperse and the picture was never put together coherently. Predicting events with precision is not indictable, but there were grounds for the belief that some alarm switches that should have were not thrown and even that some alarm switches were actually reversed.

The myopia of the American intelligence services could not all be placed at Bush's doorstep. It went back to the Clinton administrations. The American involvement in Somalia was ill-considered and it became ambiguous and vulnerable. Either America went into that torn country to stabilize it or it went there for famine relief. The American forces drifted into the political chaos and paid the consequences. The Somali fiasco impacted American policy to the lamentable extreme that when genocide was going on in Rwanda, the USA was in the vanguard of states urging international abstention. America attacked Sudan on wrong evidence. There is merit in the case that driving Osama bin Laden from Sudan, as occurred under American pressure, was an intelligence blunder. From Sudan, bin Laden went to Afghanistan where he had literally the keys to the city and could do as he pleased.

But the most astonishing aspect of the 9/11 panel's investigation was the gap on Pakistan. The in-tandem American relation with Pakistan went back to president Ronald Reagan's proxy war against the occupation of Afghanistan by the USSR. At the time, America was in league with Iraq against fundamentalist Iran, but through Pakistan it ended up backing the fanatical Taliban. When the Taliban took power, which they couldn't have without Pakistani support, the USA in effect helped create a terrorist platform for bin Laden and al Qaida. Arguably, therefore, America itself laid the basis for 9/11.

(2) The Second Iraqi war

America's war on Iraq was from its inception based on missteps, lies, and arrogance. The first wrong move was the fixation on Iraq itself. A balance of rights and wrongs in the world would have shown that Saddam Hussein's regime, whatever its wrongdoings, was not the worst of global ills. The Israel/Palestine conflict easily beat it as a strategic priority. Once Iraq was targeted, the lies came in torrents. The main accusation against Iraq was that it possessed "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). This was the result of a combination of upfront lying and self-deception. The self-deception, which gradually became patent, consisted in pressuring the intelligence services into providing specious arguments about Iraq's imaginary WMD program. One of the lies was that there existed a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, which a priori was an aberration. The 9/11 panel's conclusions were a whitewash of Bush and his advisors. As the investigation was extended to events surrounding the Second Iraqi war, the panel faulted America's intelligence agencies but it said nothing about how the administration had done all in its powers to distort intelligence reports. There was one and only one point in which it showed up the campaign of lies that preceded the war and that was in its finding that there was absolutely no Hussein/bin Laden terrorist alliance.

An important and understandably unacknowledged influence for the Second Iraqi war was the Israel/Palestine problem. Sharon's harsh repressive policy and the security walls in the West Bank were beginning to have a wasting effect on the Palestinian insurrection and its suicidal-terrorism tactic. But the Second Intifada had not been entirely suppressed. The only Arab state that still could be a menace to Israel was Iraq. In deciding to destroy Iraq, Bush was at least in part doing it for Israel's sense of security. In addition, it would give him a powerful lever with which to influence the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. As Bush had already demonstrated that the USA would back Israel to the hilt, more than under any previous American president, war on Iraq would clinch the irresistibility of its one-sided policy.

The see-through lies of the Bush administration provoked international opposition to America's war project. Despite habitual American hostility to the UN, which was not mitigated by Bush, the USA understood that the project of going to war against Iraq would be bolstered by the sanction of the Security Council. But it was precisely there that America's war-like stance came up against the most adamant resistance. It was led by France, among America's traditional allies, but it was unconcealed and resolute on the part of Russia and China. Even secretary general Kofi Annan, who had reached his position through American backing, declared that a war on Iraq without the support of the Security Council would constitute a violation of the UN charter. When American secretary of state Colin Powell saw the way things were going, he openly started contravening the charter by seeking a consensus in the Security Council in disregard of the veto power of the permanent members of the body.

There was also resistance to the war in the American Congress, where the Democrats had a hair-thin majority in the Senate. A compromise was reached whereby congressional support would be forthcoming if the UN sanctioned the war. A resolution in the Security Council was obtained by which a new round of inspections in Iraq would commence and war would be declared if evidence of WMD, or even of the intent of obtaining WMD, was discovered. None of this did anything to tone down the shrillness of the American campaign for war on Iraq. Bush had the support of the American media, wholly sold on the idea of war on terror, of which war on Iraq would be just another episode. The partiality of the media became so blatant--official government sources were given uncritical credibility--that, after the lies told by Bush and his administration gradually came to light, The New York Times issued a circular admonishing its editors and reporters to be less gullible. This reprimand incidentally did not apply to pro-Israel reporting on the Israel/Palestine conflict, which can be traced to the stark reality that in America, when all is said and done, the Jewish lobby is precisely the media, although it must be clear that Jewishness in America is indistinguishable from true-blue Americanism.

The go for war came when the American electorate gave the Republicans a wide majority in both houses of Congress. This made Bush's stridency more pronounced. By then, the biggest lie was that war on Iraq had already started by American and British methodical air bombardment on the pretext that Baghdad was being ringed by air defences. The USA was debasing the UN in a systematic way. It converted the conditional resolution for war into an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to surrender his country to American occupation. In this, as in all else, it had the total complicity of the Blair government in Britain. Finally, Bush declared, with more than a slight hysterical edge, that America's suburbs were being targeted by Iraqi terrorism and that the war was going forward come hell or high water.

The results of the Second Iraq war were foregone. The Iraqis, except for some militias, put up a token resistance. The oil industry installations were untouched and the bridges over the Euphrates river were not blown up. On 1 May 2003, Bush made a big fool of himself a third time when he declared the Second Iraqi war over. It was barely starting. Three crucial American errors are involved here. American arrogance led it to believe that invading a country without justification would go unresisted, worse, that Iraqis would welcome the invaders with open arms. The second error, which is attributable to Rumsfeld directly, lay in that the invasion was badly under-strength, which first was observed with the massive dilapidation of Iraq's rich cultural heritage, to which Rumsfeld responded with the lapidary "stuff happens". And third, and most damaging for the invaders, was that the Iraqis had not opposed the invasion as forcefully as they could because, from all that was seen later, they had made plans and taken provisions for an insurrectionary conflict. The Americans not only did not find WMD, which they knew was a lie they tried to foist on the world, but they also did not find arsenals where they were supposed to be.

The occupation of Iraq turned out to be the nightmare that the now chastened American media had to report daily. As in the case of America and 9/11, the American military in Iraq had no idea what they were dealing with when ferocious resistance to the occupation began almost before Bush, in a ridiculous victory rite, landed a slow plane on a moored carrier in San Diego. Here once again, American intelligence didn't know where to turn. The one thing it refused to accept was that Iraqis were embarked on a national resistance movement, the exception being Iraqi Kurdistan, which had been autonomous since the Gulf War and had no objection to American invasion. The American military authorities swung wildly from blaming Iraqi resistance to the hidden claw of Saddam Hussein to an Islamic jihad. When Hussein was caught, and the insurgency increased, the first theory was modified, probably correctly, to make the Baath party, Hussein's political base, the primary mover. But evidence of non-Iraqi involvement in the insurrection as well as overt Muslim hostility kept the jihad motif alive. The inference that jihadism and Baathism were both grounded on Iraqi nationalism was only occasionally and cautiously mentioned, although it was the only valid one and American appraisals did not dwell on it because it would be like an indictment of aggression.

(3) The battle of the "roadmaps"

The initial war euphoria emboldened the Bush administration, mainly through Powell, to put forward the so-called roadmap for a solution to the Israel/Palestine confrontation. It consisted in blaming Yasir Arafat for Palestinian terrorism and urging Israel to accept a Palestinian state in exchange for which it could retain most of the land it had expropriated in the West Bank. Sharon took a scornful look at it and came up with his own "roadmap". This one involved Israeli retrenchment from Gaza, where repression, under the cover of the Powell roadmap, was given free rein, but consolidation in the West Bank. Even Bush and Powell suspected that Sharon's roadmap was merely a pretext for more land-grabbing in the West Bank, but on a visit to Washington Sharon convinced Bush that he was really following the basics of the American roadmap. Arafat died and was succeeded as Palestinian leader by the conciliatory Mahmoud Abbas, who called for an end to the Intifada, which anyhow was on its last legs. Sharon in effect obtained exactly what he wanted.

The photographic evidence of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib detention center in Baghdad opened the Pandora's box of America's policy of disregarding the Geneva conventions and applying torture with the spurious justification that it was done in the interest of American security. Day to day revelations showed that Guantanamo was no better than an illegal concentration camp and that torture had become systemic within the American intelligence services and the armed forces. Although Bush and Rumsfeld went on insisting that torture was not really torture--an American crime writer called it "torture-lite"--American courts declared that the American executive could not deal with the captives from the Afghan war as it pleased. The Supreme Court enjoined the government to clean up its act in Guantanamo, but the administration only complied by instituting proceedings to weed out detainees who were literally mere bystanders from the real terrorism suspects. To any unprejudiced observer, these proceedings did not comply with the Supreme Court's decision and were patently military kangaroo courts to the extent that the suspected terrorists did not have defence lawyers and weren't even given access to the evidence against them. Some Guantanamo detainees were released by dribs and drabs, some went through the Bush-decreed rendition process, but the majority are still in indefinite detainment, which in effect makes Guantanamo a moderate-scale version of a cog in the former Soviet Gulag system. It is likely that in due time Bush will be indicted either by history or by judicial means as a war criminal. In real present time, the USA was not getting off scotfree from its repeated violations of international norms and the scorn with which it treated international condemnation.

Even before the Second Iraqi war got going, North Korea announced that it was processing nuclear fuel for the manufacture of atomic bombs. Iran did not boldly say so, but it too was engaged in a similar nuclear program with Russian assistance, which in theory also implied Russian supervision. North Korea probably acted because it either really felt threatened by America or it judged the moment was right given the international opposition to America's intended war on Iraq, or for both reasons. This alone should have made Washington re-direct its priorities from a mere suspected threat to a real, self-confessed threat, and here it must be considered that North Korea, despite its poverty and backwardness, has developed a fairly sophisticated missile arsenal. That nothing but threatening words and symbolic gestures ensued demonstrated how hollow the concept of war on terror was and how far Bush and his advisors had skewed American foreign policy. No one still really knows whether North Korea has or hasn't nuclear weapons, but as a nuclear menace it is far larger than Iraq ever was. As to Iran, the consensus is that it is not opening up to complete international inspection. Russia has Iranian nuclear potential to hand should American interference in its sphere of influence--the former republics of the USSR minus the Baltic states--become too insidious.

(4) The balance of the "war on terror"

War on terror was always predicated on reliable intelligence. The roiled world that the Second Iraqi war fomented brought to light the most monumental failure, not just of American intelligence, but of intelligence-gathering in any major power in history. Libya was caught in fraganti importing uranium and centrifuges for uranium-enrichment, a prior step to bomb-manufacture. Because of its support and active practice of international terrorism, Libya had been in the past the object of stinging military reprisals, not to speak of international sanctions and isolation. In spite of having the material means for a nuclear program, it lacked the expertise to carry it through. Faced with the evidence of another dereliction--this time with respect to the world consensus on nuclear non-proliferation--Libya's dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, probably had no choice but to fold and surrender the nuclear material he had been accumulating, which included blueprints for warheads.

Libya's supplier turned out to be Pakistan, where supposedly the pragmatic president Pervez Musharraf had already dismissed Abdul Qader Khan, the architect of Pakistan's nuclear program. Further probing uncovered that the Pakistani scientist had been engaged in serious nuclear-proliferation activities since the mid-1980s at least. North Korea's nuclear knowhow most likely originated in Pakistan in exchange for missile technology. Now, it begs rationality to believe that this had been going on without the knowledge of the Pakistani government (long before Musharraf but also under Musharraf), so basically Abdul Qader Khan was made a scapegoat for a world-wide nuclear terrorist threat that Pakistan actively promoted. This made inevitable two deductions, each equally astonishing: either American intelligence had been fooled by Pakistan or it had not been fooled but had allowed Pakistani nuclear-proliferation plans to go on. The first deduction was further proof that American intelligence, as it had shown in the case of the missing WMD in Iraq, was preposterously incompetent. There were many other failures to confirm this impression, but, at least in the case of Iraq, there was the mitigation that it had been frogmarched by the Bush administration for the purpose of its illegal international policies. The second deduction seemed prima facie absurd, but there was the precedent that it was America itself which through Pakistan had allowed the construction of the platform from which the devastating 9/11 terrorist raid was launched. The quandaries surrounding Pakistan are still in place, but in practice the Bush administration, which, because of the War on Afghanistan, had raised Pakistan to the status of "major ally", formally on a par with Israel, chose to look the other way, thus contributing one more to many arguments that war on terror was an imposture from the beginning, or that, even in the case it was undertaken with the best of intentions, it had been backfiring from the moment of its concoction.

Needless to say, the Second Iraqi war as war on terror far from lessening terrorism had only helped to make it intense in Iraq itself, where American troops are still taking fatal casualties, apart from the at least one hundred thousand Iraqi civilian deaths that have resulted from the occupation and the resistance to it. World-wide, terrorism became endemic after the Second Iraqi war. It hit Saudi Arabia particularly hard. On this score, however, it must be said that many manifestations of terrorism were pointless. The impression they left was that of terrorism eating its own tail in the sense of undermining whatever efficacy it might have. Besides, if news reports mirrored the facts, national authorities were acting expeditiously and either killing or capturing perpetrators of terrorism. The USA lowered the portcullis against terrorism through stringent security laws and blatant if understandable ethnic profiling. The only developed country that has experienced the devastation of terrorist attack was Spain. But in this assessment it must not be forgotten than 9/11 was not an ordinary event and that even American functionaries, starting with the president himself, admit that terrorism could strike again. Osama bin Laden, for one, regularly distributes tapes of himself wagging his finger at America and threatening reprisals. These threats are surely insubstantial, but, ironically, the most detested human being in America has acquired, and not just for Muslim fanatics, a tinge of the legendary, which of course would immediately fade if Americans finally laid their hands on him.

Perhaps the most momentous consequence of the war on terror is the fraught situation of the American economy, which is not to say that it is no longer the largest and most influential in the world or that Americans are not still per capita the richest of the citizens of any country (except for Luxembourg, but this is an economically lopsided juxtaposition). Apart from his axis of evil and Iraq follies, Bush's political agenda put tax-cutting on a pedestal, even though when he assumed the presidency America had the lowest tax rates of any industrialized nation. Bush's tax-cutting spree was so exuberant that even Republicans did the potential-deficit figures and had to tone it down. In America it is a common belief that tax-cutting and prosperity go together, which is not true at all if the real-life evidence of Europe has any probatory value. If there's any patent correlation, it is between tax-cutting and the huge recompenses that America's top executives either give themselves or are given by their corporations with only minimal shareholder approval. Basically, then, Bush was being pro-actively plutocratic.

The Afghanistan "bargain" surely made him and his administration undercount the financing that further war on terror would require. Even as he kept asking Congress for more and more fiscal allotments for his aggressive international policies, Bush not only stood by his tax cuts but offered to make them irreversible. There's a limit to how far Republicans can oppose the man who brought them so much electoral success and the situation of America's public finances are such that its projected budget deficits, together with the huge trade deficits that the USA normally lives with, have led to immense increases in the amount of international borrowing that the country does. This has resulted in the de facto devaluation of the dollar, first made palpable after the issuance of the Euro, the currency of the European Union (EU), which very quickly began trading at a rate that was unexpectedly higher than the American currency. The big foreign buyers of American government debt, mainly central banks, have gone on absorbing it, because if they stopped, or if they decided to sell even small portions of their dollar holdings, their currencies would appreciate, making their countries' exports less competitive, and undercutting drastically the value of their monetary reserves. But it is inescapable that sooner or later holding dollars will become an unsustainable liability and there will be a selling wave which will put an end to the already jeopardized standing of the American currency as a world standard. The argument that a greatly devalued dollar will boost America's exports leaves even the most sanguine economists unmoved.

In the light of the failure of Bush's policies, why was he so enthusiastically re-elected by the American electorate? There are various explanations and one unmentionable factor. American history does not support the creed that the USA is basically a peace-loving state. The USA in the last two centuries has made more wars--sometimes unabashedly bullying wars--than France and Germany combined. The Second Iraqi war and the subsequent occupation of Iraq was not a handicap for Bush. In American elections the incumbent usually has an edge which becomes more pronounced when the nation is in the midst of international conflict. For Americans generally, Bush was a likeable candidate--very much like ordinary Americans see themselves--and, in the aftermath of 9/11, they had no objections to his leadership, wherever he wanted to involve them. The unspeakable but possible influence on the election was that, even though Bush's Democratic opponent, John Kerry, is a practicing Catholic, he is of Jewish parentage. In America, white, “Anglo-Saxon” Protestants are still the decisive voting "bloc". It is not to be scoffed at that this force might not in its heart of hearts have wanted a Jew sneaking into the White House. However, proving this claim is nearly impossible. It is speculative but not entirely inconceivable.

If Bush and his intimate circle believed that the opposition to the Second Iraqi war was just another case of French duplicity and ingratitude, they made a big mistake. Germany was as firm against the war as France. Germany is by now fed up with being militarily apron-stringed to the USA. And public opinion in all of America's traditional allies, even in loyal Britain, was against the war. When Bush was first elected, the EU was already on its way towards its formation as something resembling an international entity with well-defined international goals not to speak of its own economic interests. Even so, Europe was disposed to follow America's unipolar lead, as it did in the Gulf war, and indeed, as in the War on Afghanistan. What Europe was not about to accept with crossed arms was an unilateral and arbitrary American destruction of a country. With his insensate, almost callow, grasp of international realities, Bush undid the western alliance that had been rock-solid for over half a century. On this account alone, Bush turned the once promising unipolar world that America had led into a multipolar world in which his country arouses dislike and distrust.

(5) The consequences of Bush's foreign policy

Even Russia had not been openly hostile to American foreign policies, despite the USA's needlessly antagonistic stance in supporting the extension of NATO to the former reluctant members of the Soviet empire. What the Second Iraqi war begot was the disarticulation of NATO, very nearly its inoperativeness, and the hardening of Russian attitudes towards the USA. China had never accepted American unipolar leadership--it abstained on the Gulf war in the Security Council, and would probably had done so again had the War on Afghanistan come before that body--and with the American aggression on Iraq, it found that it was no longer the odd man out of the unipolar world. Multipolarity, in sum, is now a fact of international affairs and China has as much weight in it as America does, a situation which would have been unthinkable a decade or less ago.

The only country that still gives America unstinting support is Israel, but the Israel/Palestine perspectives are not as promising as they might seem. In backing America without reservations, Israel is only pursuing its own foreign policy goals. America's roadmap paved the way for Sharon's roadmap. As Bush had initially feared, the Israeli roadmap is a disguise for definitive annexations and expansions in the West Bank. The American roadmap contemplated a reduction in the Jewish settlements to at least where they were when Sharon was elected in 2003. Israel has now fenced in East Jerusalem and surrounded it by further constructions in existing settlements. Some are saying that Abbas' peace policy is being repaid by Israeli rebuffs. As on other occasions, Israel is making offers of ceding occupied areas to the Palestinians, which it is immediately retracting with the same argument that it wielded against Arafat: that Palestinians have not disarmed and could become violent again. And then there is Iran, which Israel now considers its worst threat. America cannot give Israel assurances on this issue. It cannot invade Iran. It can only make tough-sounding noises and hope against hope that European negotiators can have some influence on the Iranians. And should Israel try to pull a stunt by attacking Iran, for which there surely are concrete plans, the consequences are too complex and fraught to forecast. Russia is the country that has the final say on how far Iran can go in developing nuclear arms and Russia is not at present disposed to accommodate America's connivance with anything Israel wants to do.

"War-on-terror Bush" has been exerting himself to pose for the world as "Freedom Bush". But few are being duped. The election in Afghanistan, a medieval, poppy-growing, warlord-infested country, was window-dressing. The election in Iraq, in which the Sunni heart of the country abstained, was illegitimate. Iraq is only a democracy in the American view of things, and in the American media, which once again are tilting the news as badly as they did prior to the attack on Iraq. Freedom Bush is really "Plutocracy Bush". The USA did not even blink when it turned over the bulk of contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq to the company, Halliburton, of which vicepresident Cheney had been the CEO. But it gets worse. Bush still has Cheney by his side. He retained Rumsfeld, the man most responsible for the occupation disaster in Iraq, as secretary of defense. He appointed Alberto Gonzales, the advocate of the legal mentality that justified torture as being in America's interest, as attorney general. And he named John Bolton, a man who once said that the UN was only useful to the extent that it followed America's dictates, as the American ambassador to that organization. Freedom Bush is still the same bungling hypocrite that War-on-terror Bush was. However, Freedom Bush, and his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, are being delusional.

Rice visited India and told its government that it should cease all economic cooperation with Iran. The Indians, who aspire to permanent membership in the Security Council veto power and all, looked embarrassed. Then America started pressuring the EU not to lift its embargo on arms sales to China, which was imposed over fifteen years ago when this country did not yet have the the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. As the Chinese had just reiterated their universally known policy that they will not tolerate a declaration of independence by Taiwan, the USA thought that it had a real case for the EU to ponder. The American press cackled that the EU was seeing reason. Literally the following day, the EU let it be known that it was going ahead with lifting the embargo, which anyway is senseless to the extent that, with or without it, China has within its reach any military technology it chooses to pursue. To spite the UN, Bush's America chose to channel aid to the countries recently struck by cataclysmic tsunamis through a "coalition". Darfur, the western Sudan, is today the area where more human-rights abuses are being committed in the world. The USA is obstructing UN efforts to intervene there because it insists that it will not recognize the International Criminal Court, which every major nation accepts, unless it grants its citizens immunity.

So given this record of delusions, where is America headed? All one can conclude here is that it is a country adrift, which is sad to say considering that only fourteen years ago, in the aftermath of the Gulf war, it was leading the world into what promised to be a glowing future. Realistically, the drifting began with Clinton, who couldn't make up his mind whether he was a liberal or just a poll-watcher. But Clinton never made the blunders that the younger Bush has. Perhaps the most telling example of the fecklessness and the delusive state of American foreign policy is the case of Taiwan.

Bush and Rice might have had reasons for believing that they had in Taiwan an unconditional ally, which in turn might have influenced their delusional attitude towards China. But as it happens, and only an idiot could ignore this, Taiwan, which is de facto independent, is not seriously going to confront China, because of plain horse sense and because half the Taiwanese agree with the One China policy of Beijing. Almost as if to tell the second Bush administration to come down from cloud nine, a delegation of Taiwan's Nationalist party visited China without a hint of protest in Taiwan itself. The American press made a todo with the visit that the Taiwanese delegation made to the monument to Sun Yat-sen, the founder of Republican China. What the press and apparently Bush and all his intelligence services combined ignored, or chose to ignore--at this stage it is hard to make hard statements about the extremes of American aimlessness--is that Chiang Kai-shek, the founder of modern Taiwan and the sworn enemy of communist China, was the author, together with Mao Zedong, of the One China policy and that the communist party of China has allowed a small shrine to his memory. Out-of-touch American foreign policy appeared to be tailored for the creation of allies such as Kyrgyzstan.

Before passing any conclusive judgments on America, it is only fair to say that Bush is easily qualifying as America's worst ever president. America is still America and it would be unpardonable to assume that it will not rebound in the future and become the leader of the multipolar world it created thoughtlessly, but in which its relative weigh is still incalculable.