Schon wieder die TIMES, sorry, aber es lohnt sich. Lesebefehl ergeht hierfür:
Oh George, what will we do when you’re gone?
Our columnist on an easy target for America-bashers
Gerard Baker
[...]
It’s been a great ride for the past six years, hasn’t it? George Bush and Dick Cheney and all those pantomime villains that succour him — the gay-bashing foot soldiers of the religious Right, the forktailed neoconservatives with their devotion to Israel, the dark titans of American corporate boardrooms spewing their carbon emissions above the pristine European skies. Having those guys around for so long provided a comfortable substitute for thinking hard about global challenges, a kind of intellectual escapism.
When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.
[...]
Does anyone really think the election of President Hillary Clinton will be greeted with a sudden surge of German and French troops to Kabul and Helmand, routing al-Qaeda militants in the name of multilateralism?
President Barack Obama will find that when he wants to make good on his promise to win the war in Afghanistan, EU leaders will be much happier explaining how their new constitution will enlighten the world.
President John Edwards will discover, when he seeks a united front to tackle an enemy that would happily incinerate every European city and its inhabitants tomorrow, that the Europeans would much rather take urgent action to address the risk that global warming will produce a possible 18cm increase in sea levels by 2100.
[...]
In the dread modern vernacular of management-speak, the Democrats need to take ownership of American leadership in a turbulent world. Though it can be fairly argued that President Bush’s incompetence has made things worse, the challenge of radical Islamism was not invented by the Bush Administration.
Even as some future Democratic president proclaims his commitment to renewing alliances, he is sure to be greeted with all kinds of explanations as to why the Europeans are just not quite ready to make that a joint ownership. When that moment comes, everyone will be urgently wishing they still had George Bush to blame.