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THE OBSERVATORY A Sorry Episode April 15, 2001 |
| The soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again ... |
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All's well that ends well, and
everything in the China contratemps ended fairly well. Except for the Chinese pilot,
who learned a lesson in basic airmanship - when two planes bump, it is bad for both, but
especially for the much smaller one. Alas, he learned this too late to benefit from
it. We can all benefit, however, from what we learned about George W. Bush, and
particularly about how he is regarded, by Washington and by the world. As crises go, this one was a pretty straightforward one. In the short term the Chinese had all the high cards - namely our air crew. Yellow ribbons were already appearing, and Beltway reporters had no trouble finding sources to give them hostage quotes. China, however, is not the Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini twenty years ago - the last thing Khomeini cared about was any prospect of a Tehran Olympics. The Ayatollah's Iran wanted to close itself off from a sinful world; China wants frantically to join it. Thus there was never any chance of this turning into a genuine hostage crisis. Instead, the diplomatic minuet followed its natural course. China blustered for a week or so, then accepted a not-quite-apology for banging into our plane, and sent back the crew. (The plane will come back, if ever, in a crate, after Chinese analysts have learned everything they can from it.) That the outcome was straightforward takes nothing away from the diplomats - I could no more dance that minuet than I could pull a crippled reconnaissance plane out of a dive - but that is what good diplomats and good pilots are trained to do. Nevertheless, official and journalistic Washington has been full of praise for Bush. Yet it has been praise of a peculiar sort. He has been praised, essentially, for staying out of the way, and a deeply patronizing tone lies just barely under the surface. See, he's not a total screw-up after all. Meanwhile, from the rest of the world the silence was thunderous. The combined reactions speak volumes. Inside the Beltway, the fact that Bush is disengaged and rather dim is no longer a matter of dispute (if it ever was). Claims to the contrary have a pro-forma quality, not unlike China's claims that our plane caused the collision. Every air attaché in every embassy in the world knows better, and so does everyone in the Beltway. Dubya is disengaged and dim - and the Beltway is quite happy about it. It means business as usual will go on unhampered by anything as annoying as actual presidential leadership. What the Beltway crowd really hated about Bill Clinton wasn't his Elvis-impersonator streak, but the fact that he was smarter than any of them, and able to go over their heads to the people and the world. They no longer have to worry about either one of these disagreeable facts. To the rest of the world, however, the important thing about George W. Bush isn't that he's stupid, but that he's obnoxious. That and stunningly provincial. Europeans were already outraged that he didn't even bother trying to weasel out of a global-warming accord, but simply didn't give a rat's ass. Middle Eastern moderates were already alarmed that he wanted to just walk away from the Israeli-Palestinian quandary. As for America's rivals in the world, they may be tempted to try their luck, knowing that Dubya's America will soon squander its reserves of goodwill. Even before the recon-plane affair, strategic analysts like Edward Luttwak - hardly some nelly peacenik - were already sounding warnings. It is one thing to antagonize Russia, or China, or North Korea, but it is stupid to antagonize all three at once. The aggressiveness of Chinese fighter pilots shadowing our reconnaissance planes reportedly increased starting last December - just about when five Supreme Court justices decided to pre-emp the election. Coincidence? Probably not - Bush had already showed his ignorance of, and indifference to, the rest of the world. The Chinese decided to act on it, and they won't be the last. This time they got the worst of it, thanks to a clumsy Chinese pilot and a skillful American one. But what of next time, and the time after that? Ignorant and arrogant are not useful qualities in a superpower. Unfortunately, from all early signs, that is what we are going to have for the next four years. It will be up to the next president to clean up the resulting mess.
-- Rick Robinson
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