Bush riding the crest of a breaking wave

Following George Bush's speech to a large gathering of Romanians last Saturday during his whistle-stop tour of Eastern Europe, his self-satisfied grin was almost as large as the applause.

The U.S. president has much to be smug about these days. Not only did his Homeland Security Bill pass muster, his Republican party has recently won control of both the House and the Senate. He further succeeded in sidelining the agenda of the Nato summit in Prague to whip up support for a potential war with Iraq.

The president went as far as laying on his Texan charm to gain the goodwill of Lithuanians and Romanians towards his "war-on-terror". In the case of the latter, Nato has gathered into the fold a strategically well-placed ally on the southern flank of Europe, abutting the Black Sea - a conduit which can be used for ease of access to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

After praising the people of Romania for "standing out against tyranny" he assured them that if any nation should aggress Romania "the United States and Nato will be by your side". At the same time he warned darkly of "unprecedented new dangers". Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were the recipients of similar comforting messages.

It is no wonder that the president's speeches punctured with the words "freedom" and "security" were milk and honey to the ears of peoples who recently came to the end of more than half-a-century of isolation under the clenched fist of Communist rule.

Bush's courting of Eastern European countries - many of which are in the queue to join the European Union (EU) - offers the U.S. the benefit of having allies in a growing anti-American Brussels. They further represent a profitable market for American arms manufacturers.

Threat

If the greatly expanded Nato club, soon to be hugging the Russian borders, is a threat to Russia's own safety and security, Russian President Vladamir Putin isn't letting on. Bush has been very careful to mollify his good friend Putin, assuring him in person that Russia is in no danger.

Putin would, indeed, be churlish if he were to object to a few military bases between friends when "Dubya" has given his word as a president and a gentleman - wouldn't he?

After all, the U.S. is already ensconced firmly in Afghan-istan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Yemen, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Djibouti, Kenya, Diego Garcia, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and others, with its aircraft carriers cruising ominously around the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

The tragedy of September 11 provided a raison d'etre for the "Land of the Free" to elongate its military tentacles into areas which were once "no go" so as to ostensibly search for "terrorists" - both real and imagined.

Perhaps the sheer audacity of the U.S. isn't as surprising as the way that nations have toppled like nine-pins, one after the other, throwing open their borders and their airspace to American forces, while risking their sovereign integrity.

Warning

We surely have to admire the way that Bush's "forces for good against evil" are slowly but surely dominating our planet without firing a shot, although, of course, they did have to first sacrifice some costly cluster bombs, 2000lb J-dams and Daisy Cutters in Afghanistan as a warning to the rest of us to leap onto the red, white and blue merry-go-round.

But not every nation is as supportive of the Bush doctrine as he would like. Gerhard Schroeder's stated refusal to join any coalition to attack Iraq has rendered him persona non grata in the Bush clique. Not for the German Chancellor the dubious honour of a bilateral meeting in Prague with the Emperor of this New World Order.

Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chretien isn't flavour of the month in Washington either after complaining when a Syrian-born Canadian engineer was deported by U.S. officials to Damascus, and having the "temerity" to suggest that this current wave of terrorism has been triggered by flawed U.S. foreign policy.

When the Canadian government's chief spokeswoman was reported as having called Bush "a moron", Chretien refused to send the official down the same route as the "wayward" German former justice minister who dared to compare Bush's policies to those of Adolph Hitler and forfeited her job in the process.

And while, the U.S. president may be having some success winning over the hearts and minds of Eastern Europeans by presenting their leaders with basketballs autographed by Michael Jordan, America's popularity has never been at a lower ebb throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Recently, there have been attacks on U.S. military personnel in Kuwait and Afghanistan, while an American missionary was killed in Lebanon, and a U.S. diplomat assassinated in Jordan. In Lebanon, five American fast-food outlets have been rocked by a string of bomb attacks since May, while a McDonalds' branch was torched in Saudi Arabia.

The root causes of the anti-American feeling throughout the Ummah are manifold but topping the list is America's unconditional support for Israel and failure to facilitate peace in the Middle East.

Arabs and Muslims are angry about racial profiling targeted at them at U.S. entry points and the way that Muslim "detainees" at Camp Delta have been denied prisoner of war status and due legal process. Muslims are also outraged at the anti-Islamic rhetoric of American right-wing Evangelical Christians - a group representing Bush's biggest political support base.

Then there is the determination of the Potamac Hawks to wage war on Iraq. Baghdad believes that such a war is inevitable and that the Pentagon waits like a circling vulture for the right moment to pick the bones of its prey - the bones being the second largest deposits of oil in the world. Many in the Arab world fear that America's ambitions will not stop there.

Next target

In July this year, a Rand presentation given to a Pentagon advisory group suggested that Saudi Arabia and Egypt should be next on the list if they should refuse to toe Washington's line. More recently, former CIA Chief R. James Woolsey told Oxford University students that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are both American targets for regime-change.

It is certainly true that relations between Cairo and Washington have rarely been worse, exacerbated by the recent contretemps over the Egyptian-made television series Horseman without a Horse, which the U.S. and Israel have summarily labelled "anti-Semitic".

Congress has begun pointing fingers at Saudi Arabia too, accusing the royal wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. of funding terrorism, an accusation which Saudi Foreign Policy Adviser Adel Al Jubeir has referred to as "absolutely ridiculous" and "a politically-motivated pretext".

Other experts speculate that Iran and its burgeoning nuclear programme could be the real target of U.S. aggression, since in the event Iraq were to fold, Tehran - another "axis of evil" member - would be surrounded by U.S. capabilities.

Long-term fear

There is another school of thought, which believes that America's greatest long-term fear is the economic and military expansion of China. Although China is behaving