America’s Leadership Crisis
Printable Version
By Scott Bates, Al Sharq
April 26, 2006
In a beautiful meeting hall in Doha, a former American official close to President Bush spoke of the potential for a new war in Persian Gulf. “There is a storm gathering between Iran and the rest of the world”, said Robert Blackwill, a man who had just a year ago been in charge of Iraq policy for the Bush White House. As Blackwill continued with dark warnings about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a shudder went through the assembled crowd.
Last week, I sat with over five hundred delegates from seventy countries at a gathering designed to discuss roads to democracy, development and free trade in the Persian Gulf and across the Middle East. The Doha Forum is a very special gathering that included elected officials from dozens of nations, former officials, members of the media from every corner of the globe.
What had been a collegial and optimistic gathering turned decidedly grim with pronouncements from the representative of the Bush White House. “Haven’t they learned a thing from Iraq?” a European official whispered. As Blackwill finished his speech, I waited for the applause. And I am still waiting.
At the very time when the United States was needed to rally an international coalition to contain the threat posed by the erratic President of Iran, America found herself isolated. Blackwill spoke of how it was “the civilized world against Iran”. Yet sadly, if a vote had been taken in that hall, the nearly unanimous opinion would have been to sit out any future conflict between Iran and the United States. Watching the scene unfold onstage, I had a sick feeling that if it does come to military blows over Iran’s development of a nuclear program, it will be up to American soldiers and taxpayers to shoulder all the burden of assaulting a nation nearly three times the size of Iraq.
Speaking to the delegates from the Persian Gulf and some European nations, it was clear to me that Iran had few friends and that most people in fact considered Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be a force for instability in the region. However there was no confidence in the leadership of the Bush Administration to resolve the Iranian challenge short of another catastrophic war in the region.
I was witnessing a legacy of President George W. Bush. The misleading intelligence reports on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the rush to war without traditional allies and the negligent lack of planning for the post-war occupation of Iraq have all deeply shaken the confidence of world leaders in American leadership. The consequences of this failure of mature leadership may well have a very damaging effect on long term U.S. national security.
