ninme

Opinion Journal (yesterday) - ‘The Last Helicopter’: Mideast dictators try to “wait Bush out.” They may be miscalculating. BY AMIR TAHERI

Hassan Abbasi has a dream–a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the “fleeing Americans,” forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by “the Army of Muhammad.”…

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of “the last helicopter.” It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein’s generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton’s helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

…Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

So this, is his point:

It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of “waiting Bush out” is played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals, this writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr. Bush’s plan to help democratize the heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

And he lists Pakistan (shelved anti-terrorism plans), Afghanistan (making nice with Iran and playing up the fact that he’s Pushtun), Turkey (democratization going the wrong way), Iraq (the Shiites making nice with Iran and the Sunnis starting to say “screw this”), Saudi Arabia (stopped focusing on political reform), Quatar (plans for a constitutional monarchy abandoned), Bahrain (given up on political reform as well), Tunisia and Morocco, basically everyone stopping any progress they were making because certain morons in this country can’t keep their mouths shut cuz darnit they wanna be president so much! Then he says they could be miscalculating because the American people have changed since 9/11 and yadda yadda, but I’m not buying that at all. I think most people are idiots, and even if they aren’t, most politicians are. And there goes my chance for something really good happening in my lifetime.

Bah.