For The Byron Echo, April, 2005

Strange how things work out. George Bush was a fearsome fellow till he waged war in Iraq. He commanded great armies, and the nations trembled. Now nobody takes any notice of him. Spain, Thailand, the Netherlands, Hungary, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Portugal, New Zealand, the Philippines, Italy, the Ukraine and now Poland have left, or are leaving, Iraq. Sharon won't do what he's told in the West Bank. Iran and North Korea won't give up their weapons, nor Russia stop dismantling capitalism. Brazil can't be made to sell him oil. He can't even stop two Florida doctors from killing Terri Schiavo.

Any war he wants to wage henceforth -- in Syria, Iran, Zimbabwe -- will not be joined by any ally but Australia. No-one, after the Sgrena shooting, and Guantanamo's illegitimisation, and the Abu Ghraib photos thinks he's intelligent. No-one since oil hit fifty dollars a barrel thinks he can even count on his fingers. Few believe he can without assistance and stern guidance suck his thumb. How has this happened? Not since Nero's last days has a fall from authority, or a loss of imperium, or what the Maoris calls mana, been so precipitate. Not since Richard Nixon said 'I am not a crook' has a President looked such a goose.

It's because of the new rules of power, I think, the rules operating since Hiroshima. These rules decree that if you have power you mustn't actually use it, you must only threaten to use it, or you'll show the limits of it, and consequently by inches lose it.

Reagan beat the Soviet Union by not going to war with it, but only threatening to do so. Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson failed to beat North Korea, Red China, Cuba and Vietnam by going to war with them, and these regimes still exist. George Bush in Iraq likewise showed he could kill a lot of people and capture Saddam alive. But he couldn't guarantee the safety of a single Baghdad street, nor the electricity, nor the water, nor the women's hard-fought new liberties, nor the continuity of Allawi's leadership, nor the political defeat of Moqtada al-Sadr, nor the military defeat of al-Zaqawi. And he couldn't find WMDs anywhere, or bin Laden either.

This meant that on 'Arab Street' it was very soon believed that the Americans were -- not always, not everywhere, but sometimes -- defeatable. They were certainly vulnerable to small, humiliating upsets: car bombs, kidnappings, beheadings. And slowly, then quickly, they lost the respect of the world. Rice and Rumsfeld don't scare anybody -- except American soldiers -- and the number of people outside of America who respect George Bush can be numbered in the tens, not hundreds. And the nine or ten thousand people inside America who really, truly respect him are all like Barney in The Simpsons.

But if he had not gone in at all, but merely rumbled and threatened, and brandished his mighty weapons, and cruised up and down in battleships, he might have got, as Reagan did, the 'regime change' he wanted, by negotiation with the cowed Saddam, or a palace coup that installed, say, the courtly Christian Tariq Aziz as the head of a new parliamentary democracy. And American would still be feared. And Bush a hero, like Lawrence of Arabia. Not, as he is, a kind of Godzilla. He should, in short, have learned what the new rules are. One of them is you don't win hearts and minds by killing ten or twenty thousand children. Another is, you must win hearts and minds.

A further one, and it's not going to change, is that no cause is advanced any more by the killing of tens of thousands of women, children, old men and young conscript soldiers. If there has been a cause so advanced since World War II, advanced by the killing of one hundred and fifty thousand people, half a tsunami, someone would should say what cause that was. Is the Pentagon Method, then, obsolete? Of course it is. Is American power, then, over? You bet.