QandO

June 11, 2004

Mending Fences and making political hay
Posted by McQ

James Lakely of the Washington Times reports:

President Bush said he left the G-8 summit yesterday convinced that the "momentum of freedom" in the Middle East is building and relations with nations critical of the Iraq war have been mended, despite NATO giving little help to secure the country. [...] The meeting achieved broad agreement on a host of issues among the four nations that contributed troops to the war in Iraq -- the U.S., Britain, Italy and Japan, and the four that refused -- France, Germany, Russia and Canada.

But further NATO help seems to be something not in the cards, even though 16 of the 26 NATO countries are now involved in Iraq:

"I don't expect more troops from NATO to be offered up. That's an unrealistic expectation," Mr. Bush said.

The president has suggested, however, that NATO could help train the Iraqi forces who will eventually take over peacekeeping operations and let U.S. troops return home.

"That will come at the request of the Iraqi government," Mr. Bush said.

It may be on the domestic political level, though, that Bush scored his biggest points by removing Democrat arguments that the US has acted"unilaterally" and thereby ostracized itself internationally. Based on the reaction of the G-8 leaders to Bush's initiatives its going to be a rough week for the "everyone hates us" crowd.

Mr. Bush also used his one-on-one contact with the G-8 leaders this week to garner the unanimous support of the United Nations Security Council on the transfer of power to a sovereign, democratic Iraq.

"This [summit] gave us an opportunity of reviewing the major areas of concern to today's world, to better understand each other, and also to pool our efforts for peace and development and human rights," Mr. Chirac said.

By getting the UN back in the picture (yes, I know, I know, but politically a wise move) and having Chirac say nice things about "working together", much of the firepower of the Democrats has been diminished. It'll be interesting to see if Bush gets a little bounce in the polls from all of this.

TrackBack