Artículo de R. W. APPLE Jr. en “The New York Times” del 09.04.2003
WASHINGTON,
April 8 — At least for the moment, the political planets seem to be sliding into
alignment for President Bush, and he looked and sounded as if he knew it today
when he appeared in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for a news conference with Prime
Minister Tony Blair of Britain.
Mr. Bush was self-assured, blunt-spoken and aggressive. For once, the English language seemed his ally rather than his worst enemy. He betrayed not the slightest doubt about the decisions he has made on the war in Iraq so far or the ones he faces.
"I hear a lot of talk here about how, you know, we're going to impose this leader or that leader," the president declared, as he and Mr. Blair stood behind a pair of lecterns. "Forget it. From day one we have said the Iraqi people are capable of running their own country. That's what we believe. The position of the United States of America is, the Iraqis are plenty capable of running Iraq, and that's precisely what's going to happen."
The last time the two leaders met, at Camp David on March 27, Mr. Bush seemed almost diffident. He said little, allowing Mr. Blair to make the case for the war, and what he did say was completely eclipsed by the passion and the fluency of the prime minister's presentation.
A lot has changed in the 12 days since then. As Mr. Bush spoke this morning, British troops moved almost unhindered through Basra, and American troops had thrown a noose around Baghdad. Infantrymen from the Third Division held a long stretch of the west bank of the Tigris River in the heart of the capital and several of Saddam Hussein's palaces. The Iraqi Planning and Information Ministries were burning.
"Saddam Hussein clearly now knows I mean what I say," Mr. Bush said, confronting European skeptics with more than a touch of pugnacity. "People in Iraq will know we mean what we say when we talk about freedom."
Military victory begets political strength. Mr. Bush has carried the country with him, and most of the second-guessers among Washington's policy experts are keeping their voices down these days. Many Americans, including many influential in the artistic and academic worlds, continue to denounce the president's policies, and an antiwar demonstration in Oakland, Calif., on Monday turned nasty when the police opened fire with rubber bullets.
But the antiwar forces, who have had to contend from the start with the widespread belief that their position is unpatriotic and unsupportive of American troops engaged in deadly combat, must now bear the additional burden of arguing with success. American losses are relatively small: 96 dead to date, compared with 200 a day at the height of the Vietnam War.
That this should be so despite stubborn Iraqi resistance not only in Baghdad but also elsewhere must rank as one of the major surprises of a surprising war. Those who expected light casualties expected the enemy to collapse.
News of fierce fighting in Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad, and on the eastern and southern sides of the capital belies talk of collapse, though the ability of Iraqi commanders to control their forces is shrinking fast.
Political leaders in several countries, pragmatists all, have begun to reposition themselves for the next phase of the drama in Iraq. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and Presidents Jacques Chirac of France and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are to meet in St. Petersburg this week to search for a common way forward, which will doubtless include a bid for rapprochement with Washington. They, too, have been reading the battlefield dispatches.
Javier Solana, the European Union's secretary general, said the time had come "to turn the page."
But winning a war is one thing; restoring order is another. Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations warned today that his people would never accept governance by foreigners, even for an interim period.
Whether he is right or wrong will depend in considerable measure on how the temporary guarantors of civil peace, mostly American troops, do their work.
An incident today in which an American tank fired on a Baghdad hotel where foreign journalists are staying, killing two cameramen, demonstrated a salient point.
Mr. Bush and the American military command may understand clearly how crucial it is to demonstrate restraint, especially as war begins to shade into postwar reconstruction. But important decisions must often be made quickly, in the field, by junior officers, and they can have far-reaching effects on public attitudes across the world, stretching beyond the purely military context.
Back in Washington, the president must balance many concerns as he seeks to map policy for the coming weeks. One is his own distrust of the United Nations and multilateralism in general. Another is the need to repair alliances, not least because the United States will need all the help that it can get for the huge task of reconstruction. A third is the need to prepare the American people for the prospect of a long and draining commitment in Iraq.
A fourth is to find some way of winning back a modicum of support in the Arab world — perhaps the hardest task of all, given the war, American identification with Israel and Washington's long history of support for governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries whose own populations view them as corrupt.
Clearly, Mr. Bush feels deeply indebted to Mr. Blair. Without the Briton's unflinching support, even the thin military alliance now on the ground would not have come into being; American troops would be fighting alone.
So the president was willing not only to fly the Atlantic to meet the prime minister, he also modified his language in talking about a "vital role" for the United Nations in postwar Iraq, rather than the secondary role he had seemed to envision in his earlier comments on the subject.
But he declined to put much substantive meat on the rhetorical bones of the phrase "vital role," and a great deal remains to be worked out inside the administration.
With other countries, too, much delicate diplomacy awaits the president. Mr. Bush can afford neither to deny the fruits of victory, like oil contracts, to those who fought the war, nor to set off another divisive fight in the United Nations like the one that preceded the war.