Bush is heading to Kennebunkport for some relaxing golf with Poppy [View All]

[Human Torch]

Dangerous Days
The world crisis has grown far too serious for the U.S. president to take an extended summer break.

By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 2 hours, 36 minutes ago



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14483814/site/newsweek/

George W. Bush is going to Kennebunkport, where he'll test his golf skills with Poppy. Maybe that's an unfair slap. After all, Bush's father also went to the family compound at Kennebunkport in the early stages of the Persian Gulf crisis in August 1990, and he ably managed that affair in the end. But the son's disengagement is of a more profound kind than mere place. Bush's approach to personal involvement in international affairs today is pretty much still what it was on inauguration day, Jan. 20, 2001. He doesn't want to be Bill Clinton, who gave presidential diplomacy a bad name with his frenzied (and often failed) efforts to cut various peace deals in his final months. Bush's instinct is to give the world its operating instructions—as he did again at his news conference on Monday—to reiterate his strategic goal of delivering freedom to the unfree, and then head off for some exercise.

Events, sadly, have rendered that approach inadequate. With matters flying out of control, the president can no longer merely hold occasional news conferences and utter his simple, already hoary formula that all terrorists are the same and that they all want to halt the advance of liberty. Not at a time when it's clear to everybody that the advance of liberty, messy as it is, has actually empowered Islamist parties in Iraq, in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories, and when Hezbollah and Iran want something quite different from Al Qaeda. Even Bush's domestic audience—to which he mainly directs his comments—no longer buys the absurdly one-dimensional notion that all terrorists are the same, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll that shows a majority of Americans now separate what's happening in Iraq from the war on terror.

Nor can Bush merely rely on making the occasional phone call, as he did to Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday over the North Korea problem. The crisis in the Middle East and Iran, especially, have reached such a level of complexity that only sustained intervention by the United States at the highest level can make a difference. Consider Lebanon. Left unaddressed in the recent U.N. ceasefire resolution was the critical issue of border control of weapons flows to Hizbullah from the northeast, in other words Syria (the resolution deals only with the southern border). Now Israeli officials—who are still in a state of shock over the sophistication of Hizbullah's weaponry—are expressing anger that countries like China, which sold Silkworm missiles to Iran, and Turkey, which shares a border with Iran, have allegedly permitted Tehran to send these weapons on to the militant group. Russia, meanwhile, refuses to end shipments to Syria of antitank missiles that, Israel charges, ended up shredding Israeli tanks. Only Washington possesses the alliance network and prestige to resolve a multidimensional problem like this.

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Now Bush has a little over two more years left to take the lead himself, to recognize his place in a long U.S. tradition of American presidents who have understood that their global responsibility is to solve the knottiest international problems no one else can master. But to do so Bush must change his whole approach. As he heads off to Kennebunkport, there's reason to doubt that he will.