Quote of the day: Chimpy the Prez turns out to be the worldwide cham-peen at regime change-- toppling regimes that get too close to him

"President Bush has probably dithered too long to have
any hope of solving the world's most complicated and
persistent rebus ["the Israeli-Palestinian morass"].
His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war."

"Regime change was one of the stated goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. . . .
"And regime change, it turns out, is infectious--a militarily transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have had intimate relations with the Bush Administration's Mesopotamian misadventure."
--Hendrik Hertzberg, in a "Comment" piece, "Follow the Leaders," in the Dec. 10 New Yorker

It started with Spain, Hertzberg recalls, then proceeded to Italy, Hungary, Ukraine, Norway, and Slovakia, and onward to Britain's Tony Blair, and most recently it has sent Australia's John Howard packing.

It's a favorite theme of Howie's when he's traveling: What do people around the world think of the U.S.? And in the Age of Bush, can this be separated from what they think about our government? Hertzberg has some thoughts:

They don't much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia's Lowy Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three per cent) and of George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine per cent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty per cent) and Americans (seventy-six per cent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes's "America Against the World" (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners "found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable." An avalanche of new international polls--from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others--show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. "Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us," Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about "world opinion," wrote recently in the Washington Post. "Count that--along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment--as another cost of the war."

"Those costs keep mounting," Hertzberg concludes, "and they're not likely to abate until there's regime change a little closer to home."

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