Bush is in a hot spot. The situation in Iraq is nowhere near being stabilized, the demand for manpower on the ground is not waning, and what little help our Coalition of the Coerced were providing is slowly stripping away.
But when you build a war on lies, can you expect anything better when those lies see the light of truth?
Spain was the first. But the Right could villify to their hearts content, as the pullout was announced by a "socialist" government. Spain is this season's new France.
With Spain's exit, Honduras and Nicaragua announced their own pullouts, leaving El Salvador as the sole Spanish-speaking country left in Iraq. And if the FMLN wins Sunday's elections in my mother country (a real possibility), you can bet those troops will be out in no time.
Then stalwarth ally Poland announced it was cutting its deployment short, citing Bush's lies as the reason for the pullout. (Poland backtracked the next day, but the damage was already done.)
And now South Korea is the latest country to get cold feet over Iraq.
South Korea on Friday became the latest U.S. ally in Iraq to balk at sending troops to an increasingly violent peacekeeping effort, scrapping plans for a mission to the Iraqi hot spot of Kirkuk.
South Korea promised to eventually dispatch the 3,600 troops earmarked for Iraq, but only after it finds a safer location.
The government, already worried about terrorism at home, cited security concerns in Kirkuk and U.S. pressure to participate in "offensive operations.''
The mission, originally scheduled for as early as next month, would make South Korea the largest coalition partner behind the United States and Great Britain.
Deployment will now be delayed, possibly into June.
If South Korea is truly looking for a safer location, then it will never deploy to Iraq.
Bush and his flunkies know they have a problem. Bush spoke to dozens of diplomats yesterday, arguing that past disagreements should be glossed over and they should all send their sons and daughters to Iraq to die for Bush's folly. And the Europeans, for their part, were not persuaded:
But others made clear that the divisions over Iraq continue to hamper international relations. A spokeswoman for the French Embassy said Bush's speech did not dissuade France from the view, expressed by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin in an interview published Friday in the newspaper Le Monde, that the Iraq war made the world "more dangerous and unstable." Terrorism, de Villepin said, "didn't exist in Iraq before. Today, it is one of the world's principal sources of world terrorism."
The minister's view is widespread in Europe and the Middle East, where, according to a poll released this week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, the people mostly believe the war in Iraq has weakened the war on terrorism.
I know it's not the most popular thing to say, but the French are right.
You don't win wars against terrorism on the battlefield. As Terrorism expert Richard Clarke writes in Time:
Unfortunately, the CIA and the FBI have found al-Qaeda a hard target to infiltrate. Worse, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mused in an internal Pentagon memo, radicals who hate America are being turned out faster than we can arrest or kill them. Whatever we do to the original members of al-Qaeda, a new generation of terrorists similar to them is growing. So, in addition to placing more cameras on our subway platforms, maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us. If we do not focus on the reasons for terrorism as well as the terrorists, the body searches we accept at airports may be only the beginning of life in the new fortress America.
The reasons for terrorism? Global poverty. A hypocritical foreign policy (such as the funding of the hideously repressive Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan). Unecessary wars built on lies. "Collateral damage". And so on.
But rather than tackle root causes, we have an administration more intent on fueling the cycle of violence. And as Israel illustrates, you just can't kill terrorists fast enough to replace new recruits. Many of our allies in Iraq, however, aren't so pig headed.