Poor Mr. Bush: His Legacy on the Line
Yup, I've got some gripes about this Newsweek piece, too, starting with
- whoever could have guessed there would be a problem? (answer: someone paying attention)
- it pretends the Bushies don't want to strong arm Iran and Syria (right, and I'm a statuesque natural blonde) and
- isn't anyone else tired of having every single damned world problem described in the context of how it effects poor Mr. Bush (being as he's the only person in the universe who matters)? His legacy? Gag.
The Bush team didn't see this one coming. Maybe it was simply that too many other volcanoes were erupting at the same time. Iraq was tipping closer to civil war, Iran was getting more brazen by the day and North Korea's missiles were roiling East Asia. The president, meanwhile, was preoccupied with what would likely be a testy G8 summit hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin. True, the two top U.S. Mideast envoys—David Welch and Elliott Abrams—were in the region when hostilities began. But they had been reassured by Lebanese contacts that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, didn't plan to "stir things up" while Hamas and Israel contended over a kidnapped Israeli corporal, according to a senior U.S. diplomat who would divulge the details only if he remained anonymous. "You had six and a half years of, if not calm, basically a stable deterrence between Hizbullah and Israel," the official told NEWSWEEK. "I did not expect this at all."
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