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Restoring America’s image

Historians will surely judge that Bush’s two terms of office have done much more damage to US interests, and indeed to those of the world, than Carter’s blunders a generation ago. A few months ago I heard a British diplomat in Washington bemoan the horrors of the current administration. We must just somehow stagger through to the end, he muttered. I said that it seemed rash to assume the next US president would be perfectly to the taste of Britain, or the world, because few people elected to the White House ever are. He said: ”Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be worse than what we have got now.”

This has become hard to dispute. Whatever happens between now and January 2009, America’s next president will inherit a legacy of global mistrust, alienation and loss of respect unknown in modern times. It is unlikely that President Bush will admit the logic of defeat in Iraq and start withdrawing. It will fall to his successor to face that humiliation, which will dominate the first stage of a new administration.

Who will that successor be? Eight months before the first presidential primary, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are clear frontrunners. One or the other will probably secure their party’s nomination, though it is less certain that a Democrat will inherit the White House.

The Republicans, and explicitly Senator John McCain, are deeply tarnished by Iraq, but it seems rash at this stage to rule them out of the race. If, for instance, there is a major Al Qaeda attack on the US between now and the election in November 2008, this would prompt a sharp political swing to the right. In 2004, Bush was able to convince a majority of the American people that their security demanded the continuance of offensive action, explicitly in Iraq and Afghanistan. It might be supposed that subsequent experience has taught them differently. But if a large number of people died in another domestic terrorist attack, the visceral reaction would be to avenge them abroad. Even after the Bush experience, Republicans are perceived as better at defence than Democrats. Frightened Americans could still turn to a Republican candidate, even one who today we have scarcely heard of, in preference to Clinton or Obama.

In the absence of a terrorist atrocity, however, the Democrats have a lot going for them. It is extraordinary to recall the loathing that the Clintons inspired when they left the White House in January 2001, and now to see the former first lady leading the pack towards the next race.

In the first months of President Bush, a host of Americans continued to rejoice at the departure from the Oval Office of “the adulterer”, as they called Bill Clinton. The squalor of his last years, the inquisitions and lies, the manner in which his priapic obsession forced itself upon the attention of the world filled them with embarrassment and disgust. Hillary Clinton, rather than inspiring pity as the wronged wife, was deemed the president’s partner in shame. This cold, humourless, boundlessly ambitious woman commanded no more regard then her husband. There was much hand- wringing when she gained a New York Senate seat.

But seven years is an eternity in politics. To be sure, out there in the Bible belt they will never come to love Hillary, nor indeed trust any Clinton. The cargo hold of her campaign plane is stuffed with political baggage, which may yet constitute too much over-weight to achieve a flight back to the White House.

Yet those who are not committed foes see a clever, poised, impressive candidate who has worked her passage from 2001. She can claim to be the repository of eight years’ experience of national government. Her husband’s sexual excesses never troubled foreign leaders as they did his own people. Since leaving office, Bill Clinton’s fluency, wit and high intelligence have made him overwhelmingly the most popular and influential American tourist in the world’s capitals.

During his presidential years, Clinton’s caution often irked America’s allies, notably in the context of the Balkans and the Middle East peace process. His style was to try an idea, explore an initiative, and swiftly withdraw in the face of difficulties. Both Major and Blair were dismayed by his reluctance to commit ground troops to Balkan peacekeeping, or to exert real pressure on Israel.

Yet now we have seen what followed - the disastrous cost of ill-judged American boldness — Clinton’s wariness looks to possess more virtue than it did at the time. President Hillary Clinton would be likely to follow her husband’s foreign-policy example, and indeed she has promised to engage him as a roving ambassador.

All those watching Barack Obama on the campaign trail hail his star quality. He possesses much more understanding of, and sensitivity to, the outside world than today’s Bush people. It is too soon to guess how he will stand up to the stresses of the long, long campaign; or whether, at the last ditch, residual racism in American society will tell against him at the ballot box. To make him president would be to take a huge gamble with his inexperience of government. But the world as well as the American people find it increasingly easy to believe that either Obama or Clinton would represent a great leap forward from the apology for leadership in the White House today. Some pessimism persists in high places about how long it will take the US, and thus Britain on its coat-tails, to extricate itself from Iraq after the 2009 inauguration. Yet I am heartened by a memory from the past. Flying out of Saigon on the April day in 1975 when the city fell to the communists, I remember wondering whether it would take the US one decade or two to recover from that ghastly trauma. Yet just 14 months later, when I was in New York to report on America’s bicentennial celebrations, I found it awesome to behold the manner in which the country had shrugged off its Vietnam humiliation. ”For this one day,” the great CBS commentator Walter Kronkite told the nation’s television viewers, “let us be sunshine patriots.”

To be sure, many shadows lingered after Indochina, but America’s deep residual self-confidence reasserted itself. It is the country’s weakness to remember little about the past, but its huge strength to shake off bad history, and get on with the next thing.

The last 20 months of Bush will seem interminable. As my diplomat friend in Washington said, the world must just muddle through them as best it can, noses held and teeth clenched. What follows American withdrawal from Iraq is likely to be horrible. But if a new president acts swiftly, we may be surprised by how soon the US recovers from its self-inflicted wounds. Then, if we are fortunate, it canin to restore its shattered moral authority abroad.