LAT: U.S. Clout a Missing Ingredient in Mideast

[DeepModem Mom]

U.S. Clout a Missing Ingredient in Mideast
Inexperienced and mistrusted in region, the administration faces a hard road, analysts say.
By Tyler Marshall and Alissa J. Rubin, Times Staff Writers
August 8, 2006

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration seeks to negotiate a diplomatic end to the fighting in the Middle East, it finds it has a strikingly weak hand.

The war in Iraq, a halting U.S. response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now the prolonged fighting in Lebanon and Israel have led to intense anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Alliances with longtime Arab friends are strained. And the U.S. lacks relations with two key regional players: Iran and Syria.

"The Lebanon crisis is the end of the myth that we can tell the world what to do and they'll line up to do it," said Nancy Soderberg, a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration. "They are going to have to do real diplomacy."

Adding to the challenge is, remarkably, inexperience. Despite 5 1/2 years in office, President Bush's foreign policy team has been involved in surprisingly few high-stakes negotiations in the region.

The draft U.N. resolution painstakingly crafted by the United States and France over the weekend was a first effort at negotiating an end to the fighting in Lebanon and Israel. But it took a long week for agreement to be reached, despite U.S. officials' constant assertion that it was just a matter of details. In that week, many Lebanese civilians died, leading many in the region to think the U.S. cares little about their lives....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-power8aug08,0,3948622.story?coll=la-home-world

[cspanlovr]

1. Well, the decider is on Mt. Olympus clearing brush. The world

will just have to wait. For him to decide. To come down.

[izzie]

3. Plus he does not understand the people

No I do not either understand them but I am not making war on them. Bush is really a very little man.

[Oversea Visitor]

2. Region..... the world watching this

People angry with Iraq
People not so happy with Afghanistan

Now Lebanon ..... how many times how long.

Everyday you delay this hate/anger of people increase.

You think goverment has choice when majority of people in country start demanding the goverment to get tough with US.

No goverments like its people to protest. End up they cause more problems. When it get bad they have to listen to the people voice. Move you asre bush before you push US over the edge by forcing all around the world pass tipping point. Move your damn arse or the representatives better move their damn arse.

[rodeodance]

4. "They are going to have to do real diplomacy." vs the end of a gun!

[mom cat]

5. The US is dragging out and sabotaging the negotiations in hopes that they.

can drar Syria and/or Iran into the melee. I hope that they will continue to avoid taking the bait. Of course, there is nothing to prevent some sort of concotted false flag event to justify the bombing of Iran, which is the real goal.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Ah the media is finally starting to notice

this is the dawn of a new era, one where the US is no longer a superpower... and why Lebanon was NOT in the US interest... for it allowed the world to see this reality fully.

It just took the media almost a month to notice what was obvious to anybody paying attention

[IChing]

7. I told you before they need to send in Karen Hughes again

She did such a good thing last year as our State Department Ambassador
in the middle east.



:banghead: They create chaos on purpose

[Spazito]

8. The US has no clout left....

except their veto in the UN and that, too, will mean little soon. The reputation of the US has gone from being in tatters to that of a rogue nation along with Israel, imo. There has been a "sea-change" in how the rest of the world is viewing the self-proclaimed "world's only superpower" given the failure in Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, and now Lebanon.

bush has managed to do what no other president has done, begun the slide to the US becoming a "middle power" while China, Russia, India are climbing up the ladder, imo.