-Caveat Lector- From http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,248-2001181524,00.html }}>Begin WEDNESDAY MAY 30 2001 America rejects the White Man's burden SIMON JENKINS When is George W. Bush going to declare his position on Oldham? His silence is distressing his European allies and testing confidence in Nato. Surely Washington learnt from Northern Ireland, that to intervene early is better than to intervene late. The ethnic tinderbox that is the United Kingdom is smouldering and the authority of America�s good friend, Tony Blair, is challenged. White House emissaries must fan out across the Mancunian plain, and rolling thunder be heard at Lakenheath and Fairford. This, more or less, is the logic of the stance of the dispossessed peacemakers of the Clinton era as they face Mr Bush�s clear reluctance to keep them employed. Every issue of The New York Times, The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune, not to mention Foreign Affairs and other learned publications, shouts the same message. Stay abroad, America. Your diplomacy, your aid, your bombs, your guns are essential to world peace. >From Ulster to Ukraine, from Bosnia to Macedonia, from the Middle East to Iraq, the world will collapse without American crisis resolution. A think-tank abhors a vacuum. Few sensible people want America to pack its bags and desert the cause of democratic evangelism. But a gulf separates that ancient crusade from the manic fidgeting that passed for foreign policy under Bill Clinton. This weekend Mr Clinton, on a visit to Northern Ireland, called on both sides there �not to give up on the peace process�. These were mere words. The election seems likely to push Northern Ireland�s politics further to the extremes than ever, while the peace process is neither peaceful nor a process. Mr Clinton compared Ulster with the Middle East. There a hapless Washington emissary, William Burns, is also trying to mop up a legacy of Mr Clinton�s diplomacy, again a plan by the former senator George Mitchell to waffle the way to peace. A Mitchell plan is a sort of papal encomium, vague pleas to �end violence� and �put in place confidence-building measures�. Mr Burns was sent in response to Israel�s plea, despite Mr Bush�s reluctance to go near the Middle East morass. The President should have stuck to his guns and told the local leaders to find their own way to peace or war. He was beaten by the interventionists. In a different theatre, a vociferous campaign is being directed at keeping American troops in the Balkans. Having intervened �too late� in Croatia to stop Bosnia, too late in Bosnia to stop Kosovo and too late in Kosovo to stop Macedonia, the cry now is to intervene too late in Macedonia to stop Montenegro. This week, with massive effrontery, The Washington Post chided the West for �failing to adequately address a new engine of destabilisation: Albanian nationalism�. That menace was precisely what Europe warned Mr Clinton he would unleash in financing and arming Croat and Albanian nationalists at the expense of Serbian destabilisation. The Balkans are as dangerous for editorialists as for soldiers. Talks take place in Budapest this week on scaling down Nato�s Balkans operation. The president of a �Brussels-based International Crisis Group�, Gareth Evans, is appalled. He demands in the International Herald Tribune: �Sorry, the Boys Should Darn Well Stay in Bosnia�. The Washington Post�s Jim Hoagland chimes in with an insistence that troops honour their �entirely achievable mission of providing a secure environment for meaningful political change�. Has he been to the Balkans? Another of the lobby, Jackson Diehl, pleads that �Nato may have to expand rather than shrink its forces in the short term, to stop the flow of guerrillas and weapons�. Stop them? Nato�s presence is flooding the region with enough money, weapons, vehicles and high-spending personnel to turn any local grievance into a world war. Round the globe, in Iraq, the new American strategy is in similar flux. After �tough� sanctions against President Saddam Hussein we are told to expect �smart sanctions�. These are sanctions that are supposed to bite, by concentrating on oil and strategic weapons. But since Jordan, Turkey and Syria are supposed to operate these sanctions, perhaps losing billions of dollars in the process, they are also considered inoperative and therefore not smart. The same applies to other policies meant to topple Saddam and bolster his opponents. Was foreign affairs ever so inept? Some time ago, Mr Bush�s new foreign policy adviser, Condoleeza Rice, questioned whether these ramshackle interventions in brush-fire wars were productive. She suggested that American influence and firepower be reserved for the �big issues�. This sensible approach has no appeal to the global intervention lobby � a sceptic might say, because it lacks career appeal. So we must read glib references to America remaining everywhere to �re-establish conditions for peaceful cohabitation� (Middle East) or to �set in place multi-ethnic institutions� (the Balkans) or to �encourage a coherent opposition to seize power� (Iraq). Such political engineering is hugely ambitious. It took the British Empire decades to construct, with scant success. America�s new imperialists have no stomach for such commitment. A British general arriving in Kosovo was recently flabbergasted to be told that the US Army�s �mission priority� was simply its own �force protection�. The proudest boast was the lack of a single combat casualty. Sooner or later these forces will leave, but until they do there can be no settlement of local or regional borders, no responsible local authority and no long-term peace. Nato and the UN are not instituting democracy in the Balkans, only institutionalising corruption. One day they will go, probably after some horrendous explosion. As in Lebanon, there will be a sort of war and then peace. In Washington the Rice doctrine is widely assumed to be unpopular among Europeans as isolationist. Not so. I sense an exasperation at the egotistical diplomacy that has pushed every leader on whom it leans to his or her extreme of intransigence. In the Balkans, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, I suppose even Iraq, intervention glamorises a local leader and removes his scope for manoeuvre and compromise. Under Mr Clinton�s pressure, Ehud Barak was toppled and Yassir Arafat neutered by Hamas. Ulster�s so-called peace process seems likely next week to make Sinn Fein and the hardline Democratic Unionists the two largest parties in the province, a prospect none can welcome. As for Saddam, he laughs in the West�s face. Washington has for ten years devoted vast and futile resources to these conflicts, conflicts which a sensible strategist would leave to burn themselves out. None constitutes a serious threat to �world peace�. More serious by far are the grinding of tectonic plates in Russia and the Caucasus, Africa�s descent into anarchy and the political turmoil in Asia and South America caused by the West�s voracious appetite for drugs. These threats are not susceptible to the niceties of seminars and conferences, or to the casual dispatch of �in-out� military units. If America really wants to be arbiter of peace in all conflicts great and small, it must honour in full Kipling�s plea to the white man. �Go, bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives� need�, and accept in recompense only �the blame of those ye better, /The hate of those ye guard�. While the arrival of Mr Burns in Jerusalem seems certain to presage disaster, Washington�s scepticism towards his mission is encouraging. So too is the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld�s reported eagerness to pull his troops out of the Balkans. If the European community really believes that Serb and Albanian nationalism is a threat to Europe�s security, Europe�s much-vaunted political union should deal with it, and not treat it as a global threat involving America. But of course Europe does not think that. It hypes the Balkans specifically to keep America engaged and give Nato something to do. Washington will not find it easy to be hands-off. Eisenhower said that the military- industrial complex was so strong that it would one day become the enemy of peace. The same is becoming true of a new �complex�, fashioned from liberal imperialism, the UN, big aid and the media. You do not get more potent than that. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. 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