Dubbya's diplomatic quagmire
Andrew Stephen
March 24 2003

So the Ay-zores "summit" - Americans always decide their own way of pronouncing foreign words, so the Ay-zores it became - did not work out and Bush addressed the nation on Monday night. Wearing the obligatory Stars and Stripes badge on his left lapel, he delivered would-be tough lines from his teleprompter that had been written by two speechwriters: "These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it" - exactly the kind of rhetoric Americans love, but which makes them so unpopular in much of the rest of the world.

As the tanks in Kuwait moved to the front line, Tony Blair secured his position back home. The rebellion in the Commons was the biggest in parliamentary memory, but such are the times, that it was portrayed as a "victory" for the Prime Minister. The House of Commons had had its moment. It had used it well.

There was one false note in Robin Cook's resignation speech. He was right to say the government deluded itself when ministers asserted that international hostility to the Iraq war was all the fault of President Chirac. Equally undeniable was his declaration that British interests were best protected by "multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules", rather than by sticking with a US that "can afford to go it alone". The dissonance was heard only when he made the most glancing of references to the decades of mass murder in Iraq. "The legal basis for our action in Kosovo," he said, "was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis. Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq."

The arguments have been heard, the speeches made, the resignations proffered (or not, as the case may be) and the mass protests duly ignored. Public opinion has apparently been squared, probably by the shameless pretence - in which the media, including the BBC, colluded - that US and British leaders had tried diplomacy in search of a peaceful solution, but failed. (In fact, the only diplomatic effort was to get other countries to abandon peace and support war.) By the time you read this, the bombs will have started to fall. On the merits of this war, there is very little more to be said.

The New Muslim Speeches Music Shop in Quetta does a fine line in posters and stickers depicting grenades, hand-held rocket launchers and other jihadi weapons of choice above slogans calling for youth to rise up against the west. It is a shack really, rather than a shop, part of a crowded bazaar just along from the bus station where a man with a muddy pelican stands. Any stranger who lingers long outside the music shop is quickly told to move on in warning whispers, for this is the gathering place every Thursday of a group of men with the silky black turbans and kohl-rimmed eyes that mark them out as Taliban.

The issue is American power. It has been the issue at the back of every big crisis since the end of the cold war. Is the United States bound to assert its dominant position, insisting that its interests must take precedence over all others? Or can this power be harnessed for the international good, not only respecting the rights of other countries but also listening hard to what they have to say?

The world's attention has shifted from the Balkans to Baghdad, but anyone tempted to trust President Bush's optimistic scenario for a future "prosperous and free" Iraq with "no more killings" should consider the real fate of Serbs, Albanians and everyone else in the former Yugoslavia since Nato forces intervened there.

Once the shooting starts, the stock market will wobble again like it did earlier this month, when it lost 6 per cent on Wednesday, falling to an eight-year low, only to climb back 15 per cent by the following Tuesday. "Wobble", by the way, is intended to suggest movement in one direction then the other, without trying to predict whether shares will move up or down first or whether they will finish the coming week higher or lower. Frankly, your guess is as good as mine - and at least as good as that of the overpaid City pundits who have misforecast the FTSE-100 index for the past three years.