The defeat of Spain's conservative government leaves the Bush administration even more isolated in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism.
Published March 16, 2004
President Bush is running out of friends in high places. With Sunday's defeat of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's conservative government, the president's full-fledged international allies are down to Britain's Tony Blair and ... who else?
Italy's Silvio Berlusconi? He's a Bush admirer and imitator, but he has been largely out of public view amid new corruption scandals and rumors of cosmetic surgery. Mexico's Vicente Fox? His relations with Bush have never been quite the same since the White House backed off promised immigration reforms in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Russia's Vladimir Putin? President Bush once claimed that he had looked into Putin's eyes and seen his soul. But Putin broke with the Bush administration on Iraq, and he has bristled more recently at White House criticism of his rigged re-election.
Internationally, popular approval of the Bush administration is even harder to find. In choosing to support the war in Iraq, Blair, Aznar and Berlusconi ignored broad public opposition at home. On other important issues, too, the White House often has found itself isolated in the world community. The one major exception to the rule can be found among the former Soviet satellites, where people and governments feel a genuine bond based on Washington's democratic leadership throughout the Cold War.
White House officials took umbrage the other day when Democrat John Kerry claimed that some foreign leaders had privately told him they hope he defeats President Bush in November. It was an imprudent assertion for Kerry to make, but does anyone seriously doubt that it's true? How many of our traditional allies in "old Europe" would cast secret ballots for Bush?
Of course, no president can allow U.S. policy to be dictated by international opinion. On some issues, such as forcing a tougher response to Iran's nuclear violations, the Bush administration has been on the right side. But this White House doesn't seem to understand that some challenges - most urgently, the war against terrorism - require broad international cooperation.
The loss of Spain's military contingent in Iraq will be only symbolic, because the commitment was largely symbolic in the first place. Barely 1,000 Spanish troops have been based in Iraq. Their presence, along with nominal forces from several other countries, have done nothing to alter either the perception or the reality that the war has been almost entirely an Anglo-American affair. Yet Aznar and his party paid a real political price for the symbolic favor the Bush administration insisted on.
Spain's troops weren't needed in Iraq, but the rigorous help of Spain (and Germany and France and dozens of other governments whose security interests should coincide with ours) is absolutely essential in the broader war against terrorism. Two-and-a-half years ago, the United States had the world on its side as it sought to find and punish those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. The squandering of that broad international support represents the most alarming failure of the Bush presidency - and President Bush isn't the only world leader whose political future has been threatened as a result.
