By Hannes Artens

George Bush's gestures of transatlantic reconciliation are not always
appreciated; here with a discontented German in 2006(Source: Der Standard)

George Bush graces Europe with his presence one last time. With the world glued to the race for his succession, no one expected anything substantial to come off the annual EU-US Summit in Slovenia or the lame duck's last tour de capitales. "Bush wants to hear kind words from the European leaders," Jeremy Shapiro from the Brookings Institution told Der Spiegel. "He is eager to show his legacy in Europe is not as bad as many suggest and that his actions have been somehow validated."

Well, the European press isn't doing him the favor and uses the opportunity for a railing reckoning (compiled by Der Standard, my translation except for the Daily Telegraph):

Frankfurter Rundschau/Frankfurt:
"That won't come to any good anymore. George Bush and the Germans: there's no hint of sympathy to detect, hardly any respect nor many political commonalities. We'll remember George Bush as the president who led the world into a fatal war, built his policies on lies, and preached freedom while he practiced Guantanamo. There's no reason for shedding tears of goodbye when Angela Merkel welcomes the guest for his official parting visit today. On the contrary, we're quite relieved to get rid of the man with the simple worldview and the pinched smirk. In November his successor will be elected … no matter whether Obama or McCain, it can only get better."

Süddeutsche Zeitung/Munich:
The White House under George Bush has lost sight of Europe. It was no longer consulted, let alone its opinion considered. 'You're either with us or against us' - Bush's Manichean worldview was not only directed against terror groups and the governments supporting them but also against America's closest allies … - 'the old and the new Europe,' as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it with diabolic cynicism. Behind this politics of discord was more than just differences in opinion with the Europeans. In Washington, a new era had dawned, determined by dreams of imperial hubris and hegemonial aspirations."

Le Figaro/Paris:
"This week Gorge Bush bids farewell to a Europe that has never before felt that estranged from an American president … and never before the United States - or better their president - was that unpopular in Europe."

Daily Telegraph/London:
"Throughout his presidency, Mr. Bush made little effort to persuade America's allies to work with him … As a result, he will not be missed in Europe - where the focus has already switched to the question of who will succeed him in the White House."

This journalistic roundup of the Bush presidency complies with public opinion in Europe. "A poll by the UK's Daily Telegraph website in late May showed that in Britain, France, Germany and Russia, more people regarded the United States as a force for evil than for good. Only in Italy did the US fare better," the BBC reported. No, there's no room for ambiguity, Bush's valedictory visit to Europe won't be something to write home about. Photo-ops with the Texan are as toxic for any politician over here as they are for any Republican running for office across the Atlantic. Consequently, Angela Merkel preferred to meet the president in the seclusion of Schloss Meseberg (the German equivalent to Blair House) instead of rolling out the red carpet for him in Berlin.

Although it would be a gross simplification to exclusively blame one man for the ever wider and deeper transatlantic rift gaping during the Bush presidency - a certain readjustment and reorientation of relationships, alliances and cooperations at the end of the Cold War was inevitable - he and Donald Rumsfeld can't escape their historic responsibility. For roughly forty-five years the US and Europe have fought Communism and for the liberation of the oppressed people of Eastern Europe hand in hand. But when it truly mattered, when the EU set about the Herculean task to integrate the countries of the former Warsaw Pact and have them enjoy the economic benefits of belonging to the European family of nations, Washington sowed the seeds of discord between Paris and Prague, set Warsaw to fight against Berlin, and played divide and conquer with Brussels and Bucharest. In best "who's not with us, is against us"-fashion, the Bush administration forced the young Eastern European democracies, who had sacrificed so much for belonging to what we call "the West", to choose between the EU and the US, to give preferences for one over the other. Worse, with Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and Janez Jansa having been incarcerated for their standing up for individual freedoms, the dynamic duo Bush/Rumsfeld abused their countries for secret detention facilities and their airports for extraordinary CIA renditions - all for maximizing the asinine "coalition of the willing" with a few useful idiots more to fight the "stupid war" (copyright: Barack Obama) in Iraq. This backstabbing of all democratic values "the West" should be about - more than the war in Iraq or cold-shouldering the protection of the environment - Europe will never forget or forgive this man.

Interestingly, even George Bush may have been blessed with the wisdom of age in the late autumn of his presidency. In an exclusive interview with The Times,

"… he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. 'I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric. Phrases such as 'bring them on' or 'dead or alive', he said, 'indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.'"

Now, I don't belong to the school of thought alleging that George Bush has experienced another Damascus epiphany, being born again for the umpteenth time, during his second administration. His conversion from Saul to Paul, from a reckless unilateralist to, as he puts it, a "tough multilateralist" was rather dictated by needs - his crusader ambitions buried in the sands of Iraq, his own party refusing him allegiance, his inability to control his own staff from deserting him in words and deeds en masse - than divine afflatus. I strongly believe that he'd have attacked Iran last September, if not all (NIE, looming recession, runaway oil price, Pakistan on the brink) had been against him.

Ironically, it is Iran now where Europe and America find most common ground. Although as usual all options remain on the table, the NIE has precluded a military attack on Iran in relation to its nuclear program to any logically thinking person. The EU has wisely decided not to use it as a pretext to drop out of the international front, but to employ its influence on George Bush for pushing for a diplomatic solution, thus eviscerating the bellicose clamor of the Cheney faction. The new round of sanctions on the banking sector the EU and the US are contemplating on, if Javier Solana's trip to Tehran next week should yield no results (you bet it won't as Iran's already withdrawing its assets from European banks), thus is to be understood as the EU meeting Bush halfway and trying to prevent him from a panic reaction.

In a remarkable quid pro quo, the American president for the first time, to my knowledge, has put on the record that he intends to pass the Iranian issue to his successor. "I leave behind a multilateral framework to work on this issue," he said in a press conference. One can certainly never rule out a hothead forcing through aerial strikes on a Quds Force training facility in Iran - a nightmarish scenario - but, as I've said ever since January, a large scale military attack on Iran during the remainder of Bush's tenure becomes less likely by the day. And now we may even have something like a presidential hint to that.

And so the EU-US Summit in Castle Brdo and George Bush's farewell visit to the European capitals may even end on the positive note of war with Iran being, if not prevented, postponed till January 2009. George Bush rides into the sunset after calling on the one Western politician with a worse approval rate than his (Gordon Brown can boast a 78 percent on the negative), and Iran as well as repairing the transatlantic - what Chris Patten once called the "indispensable" - partnership will be left to his successor. What Europe can expect from him and the next EU-US Summit in the Czech Republic and whether it can only get better as the Frankfurter Rundschau hopes, we'll have a look at in a future post.

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Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti-Iran-war novel.