US and the World

A New Axis to Grind?

Bush's New Axis

President Bush's speech before the National Endowment for Democracy this past Thursday drew bristling responses from Middle East nations and frank skepticism from analysts across a variety of think tanks.

WASHINGTON - In what the White House billed as a major address, President George W Bush on Thursday announced that the United States has adopted a new policy he calls "a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East".

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But independent analysts warned that Bush's sweeping rhetoric could backfire, both by fueling concerns about his administration's larger regional ambitions and by creating expectations that are unlikely to be met, even in Iraq.

"The rhetoric is meaningless if the reality on the ground gets much worse," said Geoffrey Kemp, a top Middle East adviser to former president Ronald Reagan and currently with the Richard M Nixon Center, a think tank in Washington.

In an interview he also noted that Bush's praise of authoritarian allies in the region could well provoke more cynicism about US intentions among democratic forces there. "This is part of an increasingly desperate attempt by the administration to shore up support for Iraq," said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. "A war that was supposed to be about national security must now be cast as a war for Wilsonian liberalism," he told Inter Press Service.