http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/(November 13, 2003 -- 09:31 PM EDT
We are all alone. There’s no other way to put it. With the attack on the Italian installation in Nasiriyah, the Japanese and the South Koreans are now balking on earlier pledges of troops.
(snip)
The retreat of South Korea and Japan must be added to that of Turkey, which has also pulled back on earlier pledges to supply troops.
(snip)
The winter of 2003-2004 looks to be shaping up as a dark replay of that of the year previous. Only now with a difference. Last year our near total isolation could be floated on tough talk and denigration.
It was, after all, theoretical. We had a nominal need for friends. We needed to get a UN resolution. We wanted the Europeans behind us. We wanted support from countries like Turkey and the Arab states. But our need was predicted and probable, not concrete, not immediate.
Now it’s really concrete.
(snip)
Now we have still more of the backstory: at pretty much the same time the president was pummeling the press for hiding the good news out of Iraq, his own CIA was deciding that things were going from bad to worse. And as I've said in recent days Bremer himself seems to have delivered the same message two weeks ago, and in all probability much earlier.
In this whole unfortunate business, the White House took our preeminence and mistook it for omnipotence or something near to it. And by treating our preeminence as omnipotence they’ve put our preeminence into question.