Terrorism Takes a Back Seat to Trade On Bush's Duck and Cover Tour Of Asia

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By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: November 22, 2006

HONOLULU, Nov. 21 — Three years ago President Bush toured Asia just months after the fall of Baghdad, and declared that “every nation in Asia and across the world now faces a choice.”

In a series of high-energy stops across the Pacific, he urged leaders to pour money and manpower into rebuilding Iraq. In private meetings, he expressed confidence that Iraq would have a “demonstration effect” on states like North Korea and Iran, and urged Asian leaders to reshape the world with the United States.

Today, that moment appears as one of the high points of American power in Mr. Bush’s tenure. On the five-day tour of Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia that Mr. Bush completed with a visit here to the Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor on Tuesday, the sweep of the president’s agenda was diminished, his initiatives far more modest, his rallying calls for fighting terrorism more muted.

The question is why. Perhaps it was an example of what Graham E. Fuller, a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described recently as “superpower fatigue” — a sense that Washington is overstretched, and that other nations sense the opening that creates for them.

As Iraq grew ever more violent and complicated, Mr. Fuller wrote in the latest issue of The National Interest, “diverse countries have deployed a multiplicity of strategies and tactics designed to weaken, divert, alter, complicate, limit, delay or block the Bush agenda through death by a thousand cuts.”

article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/world/asia/22prexy.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=b94968824c3a0e6b&ex=1164344400&pagewanted=print



Bush's Duck And Cover Tour
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