Skipper

Martin Jacques wrote a smart piece in yesterday about how Baker-Hamilton ISG Report(see picture) has ended the dominance of the neo-con 'unilateralism' around George Bush.

'Before our eyes, the neo-conservative position is disintegrating. Its foreign policy tenets have been shown to be false.'

He dates the neo-con rise back to a reaction to the 'defeatism' which followed Vietnam for some years until the demise of the USSR allowed the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney to articulate a theory that USA's sole military superpower status should now be used vigorously to further advance American influence. After the ISG report, Jacques concludes, 'The American era is now over'. He predicts that the US will now have to realise that military power does not go very far, that its 'relative economic power...is in decline' and that progress in the Middle East can now only be sought via cooperation with the likes of Iran and the EU. It could also be that the key alliance between Israel and USA 'will no longer be so pivotal and could be increasingly downgraded.'

He predicts that the US will have to accept that 'an increasingly multipolar world requires an entirely different kind of US foreign policy.' Yes, agreed. But has the penny dropped for Dubya? At his press conference on Thursday he confessed himself 'disappointed by the pace of success', a line which Simon Hoggart compared, hilariously with Emeror Hirohito's admission after Hiroshima that, 'the war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage'. The Lone Ranger Bush appears to have rejected the key ISG recommendation that talks be offered to Syria and Iran while his faithful Tonto, Tony Blair, appears to think- along with Donald Rumsfeld - that victory is still possible. Tony has even embarked on another doomed mission to solve the Israel -Palestine dispute, presumably to unlock the key to such a victory. How much longer, and how many more lost lives, before both are forced to realise the game is now up?