Not That There's Anything Wrong With That...

But Josh Bolten, Bush's new Chief of Staff, just happens to be Jewish.

"Since the beginning of this administration, he has been a senior-level force for making sure the Jewish community had a voice at the very highest levels of the administration," said William Daroff, vice president for public policy at United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of the North American federation system.

"Josh Bolten as chief of staff to the president will open up great opportunities for the Jewish community to make sure we are heard," Daroff added.

Yeah, that's just what the Bush administration needs, isn't it? A more pro-Israeli stance...

Or to put it another way:

Al-Qaida never posed a threat to the US except in terms of the odd terrorist outrage. Making it the central thrust of US foreign policy, in other words, had nothing to do with the al-Qaida threat and everything to do with the Bush administration seeking to mobilise US public opinion behind a neoconservative foreign policy...

Hey, dude! Isn't that your country going to hell in a handbasket?

The overwhelming preoccupation of the Bush administration (and Blair for that matter) with Iraq, the Middle East and Islam, speaks of a failure to understand the deeper forces that are reshaping the world and an overriding obsession with realising and exploiting the US's temporary status as the sole global superpower. Such a myopic view can only hasten the decline of the US as a global power, a process that has already started.

The Bush administration stands guilty of an extraordinary act of imperial overreach which has left the US more internationally isolated than ever before, seriously stretched financially, and guilty of neglect in east Asia and elsewhere. Iraq was supposed to signal the US's new global might: in fact, it may well prove to be a harbinger of its decline. And that decline could be far more precipitous than anyone has previously reckoned.