Son of the New World Order

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Perhaps more important, Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, has thrown in his lot with Washington and London. (When Bush called the Russian President to commiserate on the crash of an airliner over the Black Sea last week, Blair was eating in Putin's quarters. The British leader had a chat with Bush too, signing off with "I'll give you back Vladimir.") Not only has Russia withdrawn its old objections to American military operations from former Soviet lands like Uzbekistan, but Putin has also signaled that he is prepared to reconsider his root-and-branch opposition to the expansion of NATO. For now he wants to be one of us.

But getting Vlad and Tony on board is the easy bit. For the Administration to build a long-term strategy, it needs to engage with parts of the world where a stew of poverty, religious extremism and resentment against Western political and cultural imperialism nourishes support for terrorism. One problem: whatever its tactical skill since Sept. 11, the Bush Administration is not overstocked with strategic thinkers. Bush is new to the job. Give him his due as a quick study, but it remains the case that he has never set foot in a nation where Islam is the predominant religion. Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice are consummate bureaucrats, in the best sense. Secretary of State Colin Powell has knocked the socks off foreign leaders; still, as a senior Republican statesman says, Powell "doesn't have the background always to put things in a historical perspective."

One thing Powell surely knows: if you prick Israel, it will bleed. So the Secretary cannot have been surprised at the reaction to the carefully timed revelation that he had intended to give a speech to the canceled session of the U.N. General Assembly in which he would back the creation of a Palestinian state. (The day the story broke, Bush said, "The idea of a Palestinian state has always been part of a vision...") A furious Prime Minister Ariel Sharon likened the American action to that of Britain in 1938. "Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense," said Sharon. "Israel will not be Czechoslovakia." The next day, Ari Fleischer, Bush's press secretary, publicly denounced Sharon's comments as "unacceptable," and Powell twice dressed down the Prime Minister by phone. By the end of the week, both sides said they were trying to de-escalate the dispute. But in Israel, the sense in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 that the attacks would bring the two countries closer together is long gone. Instead, analysts are remembering that seven months after the Gulf War, the first Bush Administration frog-marched its unwilling Israeli friends to peace talks in Madrid.

Even if some replay of 1991 is in the minds of Bush and Powell, however, it would not amount to a comprehensive strategy against terrorism. Algerian Islamic extremists did not slit the throats of thousands nor did Filipino radicals chop off the heads of their hostages because of anything Israel has done. Something in the religious, demographic, economic and social climate of the Islamic nations nurtures and protects the prosecution of political ends by violent means. It would be a brave new world that saw an end to such violence. If the Bush Administration knows how to get there, it hasn't told the rest of us.

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