George Bush in Europe : past and present

The Guardian

George Bush arrives in Europe with two projects uppermost in his mind: nailing down international diplomatic support for his transition strategy in Iraq and getting re-elected back home in November. Of the two, there is no doubt which is the president’s greater priority. With his ratings at their lowest for many months, Mr Bush’s overwhelming political need is to use his European visit - the inaugural swing of an intensive month of diplomatic meetings on economic issues and Nato, as well as this weekend’s D-Day commemorations - to burnish his image as an international statesman with the US electorate. But Iraq matters to him in largely the same terms.

Mr Bush is staking his credibility with American voters on November 2 on being able to tell them "job done" in Iraq. If he can persuade them, he stands a good chance of winning a second term. If he cannot, John Kerry may be president in eight months time. Mr Bush needs to show his supporters that Iraqis are regaining ownership of their own affairs, that the worst is over for US soldiers on the ground, and that the wider diplomatic wounds of March 2003 are now healing. That means that he arrives in Europe pursuing some valuable prizes. In turn, this means that European leaders have some increased leverage over him. They can play a significant part in bestowing or withholding international legitimacy on Mr Bush’s ambitions both in Iraq and domestically. It is an important opportunity, and Europe should neither underplay nor overplay its hand. But we have got something Mr Bush needs, and we should drive a hard bargain for it.

The centrepieces of Mr Bush’s current visit are commemorations of pivotal events from 1944. Today he is in Rome to mark the 60th anniversary of the Italian capital’s liberation. On Sunday he takes part in the 60th anniversary of D-day in Normandy. When he speaks about these events, he should choose his words with greater care and more respect for other nations than he managed in his final speech in the United States before his departure. Like too many American politicians of both parties, Mr Bush has an extremely selective view of what happened in Europe in the years 1939-45. You would never know, from anything he says of the international failure to stand up to Hitler, that the United States opted out of the League of Nations from the start; or that the war with Hitler had been raging for more than two years before the US entered it, to considerable opposition at home; or that Russia bore much of the weight of combat against Germany for three years before D-Day; or that thousands of soldiers of other nations were there on the beaches of Normandy 60 summers ago, including ours. In his speech to the US air force academy this week, for example, Mr Bush said that the second world war began with an attack on the US - news to Poles - before adding that he was going to France to honour a generation of Americans who saved the liberty of the world.

Mr Bush sought in that speech to draw a series of parallels between the war against Hitler in 1944 and the war against terrorism in 2004. Some of the connections he makes have merit and those who dismiss all of them reflexively are mistaken. But the president also needs to be more respectful to history, to other nations and to international cooperation in what he says. He should try hard to strike a more humble note about America’s role in both conflicts if he is to persuade other nations to do what he wants today - aspects of which unquestionably deserve support. But the fight against fascism was the world’s war, not America’s alone. The fight against terrorism is the world’s too, not America’s. Mr Bush needs to get it right this weekend. If we cannot rely on his version of the past, we cannot have much confidence in his vision of the present either.