TIME : Why Europe Ignores Bush

TIME - Tony Karon - : Why Europe Ignores Bush

Back in December, Robert Jensen opined that we were losing the war in Iraq, and that this was a good thing:

So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat, for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States — its people or their ideals — but of that empire. And it's essential the American empire be defeated and dismantled.

Evidence indicates that Jensen's appraisal may be correct. First, there is the disclosure that we are doing the unthinkable, something this administration said it would and could never do: negotiating with terrorists. The costs of war are crippling, and the military is understaffed and unable to meet its recruitment goals. The likely new Prime Minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is the head of a Shiite group based in Iran. This is not what anyone had in mind, I believe, when we undertook this ill-advised war.

The upshot of all this is that the US has lost credibility in the world, has extinguished the global good will and sympathy of the immediate post-9/11 period, and has demonstrated not our strength, but our limitations. And Europe, like the rest of the world, can see this as George W. Bush makes his fence-mending visits this week:

The net effect of Operation Iraqi Freedom has not been to make U.S. enemies tremble in the face of American power. Instead, it has made them more aware of the limits of that power. A two-year occupation by 150,000 U.S. troops has failed to subdue an insurgency by a Sunni Muslim force that U.S. officials insist numbers no more than 12,000. Today, U.S.officials concede that the insurgency can't be defeated militarily, and it has long been evident to the Europeans and others that Washington's military resources are badly overstretched by the mission in Iraq — and that Washington's bean-counters are not amused by the $5 billion monthly bill for its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

French foreign policy think tanks have long promoted the goal of “multipolarity” in a post-Cold War world, i.e. the preference for many different, competing power centers rather than the “unipolarity” of the U.S. as a single hyper-power. Multipolarity is no longer simply a strategic goal. It is an emerging reality.