The castrated president: Bush in Asia

It's like no one's even paying attention to him anymore. And -- with North Korea and China to deal with, two very different but two very serious problems, an emerging nuclear state and an emerging superpower with enormous military and economic might -- he's stuck in his own Iraqi quagmire, unable to provide the statesmanship necessary to lead the international community and provide real solutions to these real problems.

Sure, he may say the right things, he may address China's human rights abuses and toss out some high-falutin' and largely meaningless rhetoric about freedom ("once the door to freedom is opened even a crack, it cannot be closed"), but President Bush has essentially sacrificed America's credibility and leadership at the altar of his reckless and stubborn venture in Iraq.

No one doubts America's hard power, even with U.S. forces bogged down in places like Fallujah and Tikrit, but it's the soft power that matters in the long run. For all the current talk about the situation in Iraq, for all the current debate about if and when to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, America's soft power may be the ultimate casualty of President Bush's presidency.

Whatever happens in Iraq, America is weaker now for President Bush. It will take a real statesman, one who understands the nature of power and America's place in the world, to fix that overarching problem, and hence to address the real problems that both America and the international community will face in the years to come.

(Open trackbacks on the right are here, here, here, and here. They should love liberals like me, shouldn't they? Especially this particular post. But I do pay attention to the conservative blogosphere and I do link to the better conservative blogs quite often.)