NYT polls world leaders on Bush's new Iraq plan

Europe is most dismissive; the Middle East is worried

The New York Times surveyed world leaders to gauge their response to President Bush's new Iraq plan.

“It hasn’t changed anything,” Bernard Bot, the Dutch Foreign Minister, told the Times, which reminded the reader that the Netherlands withdrew its troops from the Iraq coalition in 2005.

The French newspaper Le Monde, which as the Times recalled for the reader, had declared “We are all Americans” after the 9/11 attacks, published a cartoon, as the Times writes, "depicting President Bush as a bulldozer driver shoveling American soldiers into a ditch in the shape of Iraq."

The Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote, “Bush hopes to douse the Iraqi fire with the blood of Americans.”

“Europeans and Germans believe you have to talk to regimes you don’t like,” Eberhard Sandschneider, the director of the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told the Times, which then added, as a parenthetical statement, "(Pointedly, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, declined to discuss Iraq in an interview with correspondents on Thursday.)"

“Only political solutions can solve the crisis which affects stability in the region,” said Spain's foreign minister, according to the Times.

Middle Easterners preferred to be focused on what would happen were the United States to withdraw its forces before Iraq was stabilized.

“Iraq is going to descend into mass chaos — we can see the country splinter,” Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel and now a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University said. “The region will be further radicalized. Iran would become the regional hegemon.”

Asharq Alawsat, the London-based Arabic daily described as being "close to the Saudi royal family" published an editorial stating: “The withdrawal would signify defeat, which would result in strengthening all the enemies’ desire for expansion, such as Iran’s persistence in developing its nuclear weapons, and Al Qaeda would double its activities in Iraq and the whole region.”

Mansoor al-Jamri, editor in chief of the Bahraini newspaper Al Wasat, told the Times he thought some Arab leaders privately supported the increase in U.S. troops, hoping this would effectively counter Iran, but they could never publicly admit to this way of thinking.

An Egypt-based Arab diplomat who wouldn't allow his name to be used, told the Times that "the immediate departure of American troops will leave such a vacuum in power, it will have two results — Iran will fill the vacuum where it can, and the whole country will explode.”

Not surprisingly, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, one of Bush's closest allies, expressed strong support: “If America, the most powerful country in the world, our strongest ally, is defeated in Iraq or retreats in circumstances of defeat in Iraq, that would be the greatest propaganda victory the terrorists could ever win.”

Russia urged dialogue - with the warring Iranian factions and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran.”

A Polish left-leaning politician, representing the Civic Platform party in the Polish legislature said, “President Bush’s arguments should be understood, because leaving Iraq by Americans would be a tragedy."

But Kazimiera Szczuka, a right-leaning literary critic, had a different view: “Americans should find a way to withdraw honorably from Iraq as soon as possible. Polish troops should not stay there any longer.”