and then there's the utter stupity of shrubbie's war:
US Pursuit of War Presages Review of Diplomatic Ties
Tue April 1, 2003 11:53 PM ET
By Jane Macartney, Asian Diplomatic Correspondent
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The United States has proved its readiness to pursue a war without allies. It needs to keep friends in the peace that will follow, especially in an Asia that offers a fertile breeding ground for would-be Islamic militants.
That challenge has been multiplied by Iraq's ability to slow, at least temporarily, the U.S. capture of Baghdad, thus widening the puncture in the image of the United States as the world's invincible and technologically overarching superpower.
The ramifications of even a brief slowdown in the U.S. military charge through Iraq are widespread, leading friends and allies to review their relations with Washington as they see a weakening of both U.S. hard power and its potent "soft power."
"Many traditional allies now question the U.S. ability to maintain stability, and even ask whether the U.S. is the cause of instability they now face," said Alan Dupont, fellow at the Strategic and Defense Study Center at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.
That instability ranges from popular anger at the war in Muslim-majority Indonesia, which was the site of the most deadly terror attack since the September 11 strikes when a car bomb killed 202 revellers in a Bali nightclub last October.
It includes U.S. ally Pakistan whose close partnership with Washington in the war on terror and the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan helped to fuel a surge in votes for Islamic parties in general elections last year.
And it encompasses South Korea where many now question the value of a close alliance with the United States and of playing host to nearly 40,000 U.S. troops when Washington is so reluctant to engage in talks with communist North Korea as it vies for attention by edging toward developing nuclear weapons.
REVIEWING RELATIONS
Many countries in Asia will be looking at the U.S. row with Old Europe and the split between Old and New Europe and wondering how the fallout from war in Iraq will help or hinder their own diplomatic ties with Washington and with their neighbors.
The outcome of the war in Iraq is not in doubt, but the unanswered questions of how long it will take to attain victory and who will win the peace are casting a lengthening shadow over U.S. diplomatic partnerships.
"When you look at whether this will actually enhance U.S. security and promote Western interests, the answer is negative," said Dupont. "The net result is deleterious to their own security and to other countries that shared that strategic goal."
It is a moment for friends, foes and allies in Asia to review their relations, even though actual shifts may be unlikely.
And it may push potential recruits from among Asia's nearly half a billion strong Muslim population to join the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, the man suspected to be the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks.
HARD POWER OR SOFT POWER
The U.S. plan to demonstrate its might in Iraq could have quite the opposite result, analysts said.
The costs to the United States even with the final outcome not in doubt stand to be substantial.
"It is not only the material power but the soft power," said Chris Reus-Smit of the Department of International Relations at the ANU. "This is essential to U.S. global influence and they are busy undercutting that powerbase."
American soft power is a phrase coined by U.S. political scientist Joseph Nye to denote cultural and diplomatic dominance that persuades rather than forces.
"Hard power works through coercion, using military stick and economic carrots to get others to do our will," wrote Nye, dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Soft power works through attraction."
For the administration of President Bush, hard power appears to be preferred.
The political calculation by officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was to show that the United States could tackle a country of Iraq's size with only a modest fraction of its armed forces, said Ron Huisken, defense analyst at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at the ANU.
"I think they hoped that would really put the wind up some of the other bad guys and bolster long-term U.S. deterrent capacities. And that turns out not to be true," he said.
Coming on top of the Bush administration's diplomatic failure to win the support of the coalition against terrorism over Iraq, its inability to make Russia and France toe the line and finally its defeat in persuading Turkey to allow in U.S. troops have all dealt a blow to U.S. superpower status.
"All these little things add up to denting the sense of invulnerability which particularly this crowd in Washington regards as the very essence, so essential for its long-term mission," said Huisken.
QUESTIONING POWER
"You don't want people questioning your power. Once they start doing that you have to start demonstrating it," he said, adding that some countries may even try to take advantage of perceptions of a weakened United States.
"Everybody just wants to have a crack at them, both large and small," he said.
Taking a crack at the United States was becoming easier even before the start of the war on Iraq on March 20 as U.S. economic power shows signs of waning.
"The U.S. empire is cresting. Its key alliances are weakening. The war against Iraq (and North Korea to come) will increase the cost of projecting U.S. power in the world," wrote David Roche of Independent Strategy in a report in early March.
"The simply sad truth is that we shall see much more increasingly deadly terrorism," he wrote.
"The more complex truth is that it will put the U.S. empire's network of alliances under great strain, so weakening it."
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