Wow. There are so

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Wow. There are so many scales falling from so many eyes that you almost have to duck and cover!

I have to tell you that I’m a bit surprised. The Washington Post editorial page has been extremely supportive of the president’s Iraq policy for some time. But now he seems even to have lost them. The debate has become so polarized now that if you support anything but war next week you’re “anti-war” and perhaps also a “surrender monkey” and various other bad stuff. And it’s not that the Post has fundamentally changed its mind. “Military action to disarm Iraq [still] appears to us both inevitable and necessary,” today’s editorial says. But even the Post is calling for a delay of 30 to 45 days in order to gain more international support.

The key passage however comes here …

… with more diplomatic suppleness, more flexibility on timing and less arrogant tactics and rhetoric, the administration might have won the backing of long-standing friends such as Turkey, Mexico and Chile. In effect, Mr. Bush and some of his top aides, most notably Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, have managed to convince much of the world that French President Jacques Chirac is right and that America’s unrivaled power is a danger that somehow must be checked — ideally by the votes of other nations on the Security Council.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Or, wait … Well, never mind. We don’t have to go there.

As the Post aptly notes, we’ve made the job of the French government easy, alienating friendly governments which should have been our allies, not theirs. As each new government turns away from us, the president’s allies at home heap new abuse on the new defector, explaining how they’ve never been good allies to start with, and how this is still more evidence we shouldn’t rely on allies in the first place. It’s not a policy or even an argument. It’s a self-validating feedback loop which always leads to the same conclusion: we were right all along!

I’m not the first to note it, but this summit in the Azores really does capture our diplomatic isolation perfectly. In a certain poetic sense at least this is what’s become of our grand Atlantic alliance: not the combined strength of the great north Atlantic democracies, but three men on a tiny fleck in the middle of a great ocean. For Spain, I guess, these are salad days. I’m not sure a leader of Spain has stood so tall on the world stage since Philip II, certainly not since the Spanish Habsburg line ended. Then there’s Blair, the Odysseus who’s tied himself to our mast.

Our arms have never been stronger. And we’re about to show that. But we’re gravely diminishing the deeper sources of our power.

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