Bush heads to Europe, hoping to mend relations with allies

By Seattle Times news services

ED ANDRIESKI / AP President Bush and a graduate wave to her family at ceremonies yesterday at the Air Force Academy in Colorado.

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On the ground in Italy and France, the symbolism will all be of World War II. In Rome, he will visit the Ardeatine Caves, scene of a Nazi massacre of Italian civilians 60 years ago this summer. In Normandy, he will join other world leaders — including, for the first time, a German chancellor — to mark the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landing.

But in private meetings with his European counterparts and in his news conferences, the talk will be of the ongoing war in Iraq, which France and Germany bitterly opposed.

The European trip begins a crucial month of international diplomacy. Bush will try to mend relations with U.S. allies that were frayed by the war in Iraq, enlist European help for Iraq after the June 30 handover, and gain support for a push to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.

He intends to call for greater cooperation on Iraq during this weekend's stops in Italy and France, at next week's G-8 summit at Sea Island, Ga., and again later this month at the European Union summit near Shannon, Ireland, and the NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey.

But opinion polls in Europe show that since the Iraq war began, the public there has grown distrustful of the United States, dismissive of Bush and suspicious about U.S. motives in the war on terrorism.

Tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators are expected in Rome during Bush's visit to Italy, his first stop.

Bush will sit down with Pope John Paul II, a stern critic of the war, and the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano. In Paris, he will engage President Jacques Chirac, who had led the opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq.

As he has done before, Bush will try to link World War II themes — the struggles of good and evil, right and wrong, democracy and totalitarianism — to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a speech yesterday to graduating Air Force Academy cadets in Colorado Springs, Bush compared the war on terrorism to the epic struggles of World War II and the Cold War, and warned that victory could take decades.

He said terrorists share a grim ideology with fascists such as Adolf Hitler, one that seeks to crush dissent and personal freedom.

The president read the words of an al-Qaida spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith: "We have the right to kill 4 million Americans — 2 million of them children — and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands."

Bush repeated the words Gen. Dwight Eisenhower crafted June 2, 1944, in his headquarters in the English countryside before the invasion of Normandy. Telling his troops that "the eyes of the world are upon you," Eisenhower referred to the mission as a "great crusade."

Bush, however, deleted the word "crusade" as he read aloud the rest of Eisenhower's message. The president has taken great care to avoid that word since September 2001, when he incensed Muslims around the world by using "crusade" to describe the war on terrorism.

His speech yesterday reiterated themes addressed while visiting Normandy on Memorial Day two years ago, when he said: "Our security is still bound up together in a transatlantic alliance, with soldiers in many uniforms defending the world from terrorists at this very hour."

Parallels with post-WWII era

He contended that peace and democracy in Iraq are emerging at a satisfactory pace, drawing parallels with the course of events in Europe after World War II. During the first four years of the Cold War in the 1940s, Bush said, communists threatened civil wars in Turkey and Greece, Berlin was blockaded, and the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon. Yet ultimately, he said, freedom has prevailed. By comparison, he said, "We are now about three years into the war against terrorism. ... This is no time for impatience and self-defeating pessimism."

But he may have a hard time convincing Europeans of any parallels.

"Bush and his ideologues feel only scorn for what has become of the Europe freed by American troops long ago in 1944," said a recent editorial in the Italian Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana. "The real purpose of his travel is to establish a moral connection between that campaign of liberation and the current occupation of Iraq, which has nothing moral about it."

Since the fall of a Spanish government that had backed the Iraq war, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been Bush's leading ally in continental Europe. But the war is widely unpopular among Italian citizens.

After Italy, Bush will travel to Paris to meet with Chirac on Saturday before heading on Sunday to Normandy, where more than 9,000 American soldiers are buried.

Bush is expected to cite the emotional anniversary as a commemoration of the U.S.-European relationship at its best, and to call for a similar commitment in Iraq.

"If you want a way to turn American public diplomacy around, I can't think of anything better than the backdrop of Normandy," said John Hulsman, a European analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center in Washington.

But in France, Chirac has arranged for another source of displeasure for the White House: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will join Bush and other leaders on the beach at Arromanches for the D-Day commemoration on Sunday. With Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin also on hand, Bush will be surrounded by men who sought to thwart his plans for Iraq by opposing U.N. resolutions that would have backed the war.

In a briefing Tuesday, Bush's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, voiced the hope that the European trip, and Bush's hosting next week of the Group of Eight summit on Sea Island, Ga., would move beyond the disputes.

"Look, we've had our differences," Rice said. "We've had difficulties over Iraq. But I sense in all of the countries of the alliance, all of the countries of the free world, a fundamental understanding that whatever differences we had in the past, that a free and prosperous and stable Iraq is a linchpin and a key to a stable Middle East ... and that people are looking for ways that they can help to get that done."

'A common recognition'

"There is a common recognition that they have to pull together and salvage this mess," said William Drozdiak, the director of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center in Brussels. "But there is also a fine line. They [European allies] don't want to be part of a campaign brochure disputing [Democratic presidential candidate John] Kerry's claims that Bush doesn't reach out to allies.

"Most leaders here see him as a disaster for European-American relations," Drozdiak said. "They don't want to see him re-elected and they don't want to do anything that will be used in a campaign to promote Bush's stature in the world."

Yesterday, Kerry accused the president of misleading Americans by linking the Iraq war to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It was the weapons of mass destruction, which were given to Congress as the primary cause and rationale for our involvement. So I think that's once again misleading America, frankly," Kerry said in Tampa, Fla.

"The main front in the war on terror is in 60 countries around the world," Kerry said at a news conference. "Iraq is only one portion, and the reason it's now linked to the war on terror is because of what has happened there."

While Iraq has become the lightning rod for widespread European hostility toward the United States, most European analysts say the antipathy has nothing to do with anti-Americanism and everything to do with the administration as personified by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"People are, quite literally, frightened by the nature of the coalition that is driving policy in Washington: Christian fundamentalists, neo-conservative ideologues and what you might call the military nationalists," said John Palmer, director of the European Policy Center, a Brussels think tank.

If European leaders seem eager to keep their distance from Bush at the Normandy ceremonies, it is not because they have forgotten the sacrifices of American soldiers; it is because they "now believe the greatest threat to their security is being dragged into a terrible conflict by the United States," Drozdiak said.

From France, Bush will fly home to host the G-8 summit off the coast of Georgia next week. The meeting of leaders from the Group of Eight major industrial democracies — the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia — will focus on Iraq, weapons of mass destruction and Bush's Middle East initiative.

Less than three weeks later, Bush will fly back across the Atlantic for the European Union summit in Ireland, followed by a NATO summit in Turkey.

At both gatherings, he'll work on disputes beyond Iraq, including trade frictions. Ireland will host the June 25-26 EU summit at Dromoland Castle near Shannon.

Bush will then travel to Ankara, Turkey, to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. He will seek to ease Turkish fears that instability in Iraq could prompt Turkish and Iraqi Kurds to join forces in hope of establishing a Kurdish homeland joining parts of both countries. An estimated 12 million Kurds live in Turkey, a country of about 68 million people.

Compiled from The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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