Duffy thinks that Bush is stuck:
Trapped By His Own Instincts
Try as he might, George Bush is making no progress on the Middle East. Here's why BY MICHAEL DUFFY
Sunday, Apr. 28, 2002
There are seven ages in a man's life, the poet says, and you can see at least three of them already in George W. Bush's presidency. First came his strange, complicated birth, his narrow escape from a Florida swamp, a President uncertain from the start. Next came the innocent clarity of September and the burst of national unity. The attacks and their aftermath seemed to end all the confusion about who was in charge and showed us what Bush was capable of after all: strength, leadership, even vision.
But he is now in a third age, more challenging than the previous two, where nothing is simple, and many of the tools that served Bush so well after 9/11 not only don't help him anymore but actually may be doing him harm. Four weeks after Bush leaped into the Middle East crisis by dispatching Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region, it is clear that the President has come back to where he started, unable or unwilling to end the bickering among his top advisers and struggling to implement a plan because he cannot craft one in the first place.
time.com |
