The fattest factor in America's election year hasn't flamed yet, or even singed. But another hot week of orange alerts, white knuckles and scarlet blushes begins to pose the inevitable awful problem. Who exactly will Osama bin Laden be voting for this November? Is he (whisper it) a closet Republican?
Take almost any current terror scenario and put it to public opinion. Suppose that the Sept. 11 commission is right: suppose that the obvious risk of another al-Qaeda attack turns to bloody reality sometime over the next four months.
YUSHA
Who gains? Why, the sitting president, the commander in chief. President George W. Bush declared this "war" and sent his country into battle. It would not desert him if crisis suddenly returned.
Suppose there are significant arrests which net more of Osama's operatives, perhaps even the thin man himself. Who gains? It's a no-brainer.
Or suppose that nothing much happens except the usual blinkings as orange lights return to green, that the dear old Wall Street homeland remains inviolate.
Who gains? The Bush boys are already talking openly about a broken, defeated al-Qaeda, two-thirds of its leadership dead or behind bars. No news for them is the best sort of news. After all, their boss retains most of his approval ratings for handling terrorism. The numbers may be slipping, but they're positive -- better than for the economy, far better than Iraq.
Anything that keeps in the public eye library pictures of masked Muslims training somewhere in the Hindu Kush, and so-called terrorism "experts" peddling their TV wares, must be good politics for Bush.
Come in, Abu al-Hindi, this is your moment. Perhaps there wasn't much of a bounce for Democratic candidate Senator John Kerry after Boston: the race is probably too polarized for that. But the underlying figures in swing states are promising for Kerry, with statistics for trust and recognition improving by 10 points or more.
So US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's amazing discovery of hoary, non-activated plans to blow up some big banks certainly came in useful. Kerry was forced to squirm through his macho saluting act all over again, lantern jaw jutting from here to Vietnam. Not the most fruitful tack.
Like all presidential hopefuls, he wants to talk education, health and jobs -- none of them a Bush success story. The July unemployment figures are desperately disappointing for the administration. Kerry beats the president 53 to 43 there.
But Osama keeps dragging Kerry back and nothing, at root, can be decided until the weeks to election day pass without incident. And the memory of the Madrid train bombings casts a miserable shadow.
Did al-Qaeda, last March, aim to overthrow former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar's government and set Spanish forces scurrying home from Iraq? Subsequent trial evidence doesn't wholly confirm that. The effect of those bombings may never have been precisely calculated, or slotted into any rational scenario. Osama runs a diffuse agglomeration of an organization, not the tight-knit hit squads of US imaginings.
Nevertheless, if al-Qaeda didn't realize that random carnage can equal precise political power before Madrid, it surely realizes it now. Opportunity knocks in America this autumn.
While Bush remains in charge, he has a practical advantage that can't be brushed aside. He is the main man, the flag-waver supreme. Attack my country and you attack me -- which (haplessly, narrowly, deplorably) redounds to my advantage.
Stumping around in the wake of Bush and Kerry last week, I was struck by how strained the president looks, and how thin his message sounds. Does the tale of "a million jobs created" (hardly keeping pace with labor force growth) bring crowds to their feet? No: especially after July, it shuffles into silence. Tax cuts? You've had them. Add in health and education spiels which might have been lifted entire from his 2000 election manifesto and the rest is tired rhetoric. "Four more years, four more years..."
Bush's warm-up act, toxic Texan country-western star Larry Gatlin, sang what he might have called the Ballad of Abu Ghraib -- shout out that chorus: "We are the good guys" -- but the great leader doesn't even try to be as complicated as that.
Between complexity ("flip-flop" in the Bush lexicon) and simple assertion, he picks assertion every time. Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a bad man. The world is safer for his toppling. Other bad men are out there somewhere. Bush will confront them. God bless America, its veterans, honest folk and happy families; God rot trial lawyers, meddling judges and (imagined) weapons of mass destruction. He deals with local difficulties in Najaf by ignoring them completely.
What the president chooses to ignore doesn't exist. Four more years "moving America forward" (as opposed to down the drain). It is not much of a pitch, and he seems to know it. There's an anxiety about his campaign you can cut with a Bowie knife.
But plentiful cash and basic mantras may be enough if terror remains on the front-burner. War cries are potent for George. War brings out the worst in Kerry.
Back, then, to the imponderable Osama. Is he still alive? Is his network quite as ropey as the CIA would have us believe? Can he make his electoral mark, a November surprise? And how many voters salute when Howard Dean hints that the Wall Street scare was all got up by the president?
A slur too far. America's secret services are too demoralized and leaky to launch a neat conspiracy. They'd fracture when the heat came on. But that doesn't mean that assorted agencies from Washington to London aren't working hectically to bring in every suspect or sleeper through the final stages of the election.
More activity, more arrests, more bloodcurdling claims, more headlines. The frenzy called Fox News grows almost of its own volition. Timbers shiver by sheer habit.
Not all of this should be taken at face value, of course. George Tenet, when he was a revered director of the CIA last year (as opposed to this year's departed bum), cheerfully admitted to Bob Woodward that the agency would make a big noise about tiny scraps of information because it made al-Qaeda think that they knew more than they did.
Misinformation was the name of the essential game -- and still is. Feeding four pages of quivering detail to the New York Times last week went far beyond reverence for a free press. Nothing is quite as it seems. The harder the claims, the frailer the handle on truth.
Is al-Qaeda as fearsome an adversary as both Bush and Kerry now paint it? Does it really take four years of supposedly "intense surveillance" to mount a truck bombing in Newark, New Jersey?
The peril for Bush is too much continuing strife in Iraq, too many body bags and too much empty hysteria about terror alerts at home.
He could grossly mishandle it. Ridge, anxious to quit at the end of the year to make some money, is a bumbler. Skepticism and cynicism will stalk him through the coming months. But bin Laden, where is he?
The Clinton Democrats were sourer on Saudi Arabia than Bush, and Kerry makes jibes at the House of Saud which Osama so despises. You can see a malign logic in sitting this one out. But you can also see an empty stage and a curtain rising. It's an almost operatic challenge, and it beggars certainties till the last hanging chads drop.
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
As Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s party won by a landslide in Sunday’s parliamentary election, it is a good time to take another look at recent developments in the Maldivian foreign policy. While Muizzu has been promoting his “Maldives First” policy, the agenda seems to have lost sight of a number of factors. Contemporary Maldivian policy serves as a stark illustration of how a blend of missteps in public posturing, populist agendas and inattentive leadership can lead to diplomatic setbacks and damage a country’s long-term foreign policy priorities. Over the past few months, Maldivian foreign policy has entangled itself in playing
A group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers led by the party’s legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (?) are to visit Beijing for four days this week, but some have questioned the timing and purpose of the visit, which demonstrates the KMT caucus’ increasing arrogance. Fu on Wednesday last week confirmed that following an invitation by Beijing, he would lead a group of lawmakers to China from Thursday to Sunday to discuss tourism and agricultural exports, but he refused to say whether they would meet with Chinese officials. That the visit is taking place during the legislative session and in the aftermath