WP, Froomkin: Overseas crises: coincidence or consequence of Bush policy?

[DeepModem Mom]

Coincidence or Consequence?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, July 27, 2006

As the Bush White House is jolted by one confounding overseas crisis after another, the obvious question emerges: Is it just a coincidence? Or is it a consequence of President Bush's foreign policy?...Consider this Greek chorus of three seasoned journalists, all long-time observers of the foreign scene....

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Michael Hirsch writes in Newsweek: "The Bush administration has fought the 'war on terror' (with)...one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other"...."Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the 'war on terror' has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start....The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it."

Jonathan Freedland writes in the Guardian: ...."Bush's animating idea has been that the peoples of the Middle East can be bombed into democracy and terrorised into moderation. It has proved one of the great lethal mistakes of his abominable presidency -- and the peoples of Israel and Lebanon are paying the price."

And, after watching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stubbornly block an international consensus for a humanitarian cease-fire in Lebanon, Christopher Dickey writes in Newsweek: "When I heard Condi talking in pitiless academic pieties today about 'strong and robust' mandates and 'dedicated and urgent action,' I actually felt sorry for her, for our government, and for Israel. As in Iraq three years ago, the administration has been blinded to the political realities by shock-and-awe military firepower. Clinging to its faith in precision-guided munitions and cluster bombs, it has decided to let Lebanon bleed, as if that's the way to build the future for peace and democracy."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html