Bolsters Iraq bid, enjoys new stature
By
Anne E. Kornblut
BUCHAREST, Romania - A year and a half after George W. Bush made his first awkward visit to Europe as president, he returned from his fourth trip last night claiming a fresh new image on the world stage.
On the five-day, four-country swing, Bush helped to shepherd a historic vote to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by seven members and secured a strong statement by NATO allies on Iraq. Protesters were relatively scarce throughout the trip. And Bush drew sizable, though not overwhelming, crowds in two Baltic capitals yesterday before heading home, giving him the chance to revel in his role as leader of the free world.
His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Europeans ''now know this president in ways that they did not'' when he traveled to the continent before.
Whether or not there has been a full-scale change of heart, European governments have at the very least declined to block Bush's top initiatives, essentially letting him set the agenda. While some of the controversies that roiled US-European relations before Sept. 11, 2001, remain below the radar screen, those disagreements have not translated into major obstacles for Bush in seeking a coalition against terror and Iraq.
While politicians and analysts in Western Europe have been deeply critical of Bush, his policies have been greeted more enthusiastically in the Eastern European nations that will become NATO's newest members.
''The world has suffered enough from fanatics who seek to impose their will through fear and murder,'' Bush told tens of thousands yesterday in Bucharest's Revolution Square. ''The NATO alliance and the civilized world are confronting the new enemies of freedom, and we will prevail.''
What was evident during Bush's latest trip, if not his soaring popularity, was his focus on transforming NATO and the United Nations in the image of his war on terror - a focus, as he likes to say, on ''results.'' Like some of his domestic negotiations, where he has shown a penchant for making deals, Bush has trimmed and tucked his hard-line positions in order to strike a deal with both international bodies.
In particular, the White House acquiesced to world demands that Bush consult his allies on Iraq, leading to the president's speech to the United Nations this past Sept. 12. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the chief architect of Bush's global outreach, followed the speech with intensive UN negotiations that finally led to a unanimous vote in the Security Council in support of a tough resolution requiring that Iraq disarm - a vote the White House regards as momentous as their clean Republican sweep in the midterm elections.
''Everybody was very complimentary, and probably found it remarkable how well the UN coalition was built to get a 15-0 resolution telling Saddam Hussein that it was time to disarm,'' Rice said. ''And everybody understands that that began with the president's Sept. 12 challenge to the United Nations.''
Another senior US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: ''The Sept. 12 speech was a big turning point. There was a huge sigh of relief and a huge sense of gratitude that we were going to go the diplomatic route.
''The president of the United States committed the US to a diplomatic path, when that wasn't always going to necessarily be the inevitable outcome.'' Since the Sept. 12 speech, the official said, there has been a palpable ''change in the way European governments look at us'' in the United States.
There has also been a change in the White House's foreign policy priorities, leading to a rapid thaw in relations with Russia. Despite 10 years of post-Soviet calls for closer ties, Moscow had remained an antagonist on most issues until the Sept. 11 attacks.
''Finally, we have a common enemy with America, and its name is terrorism,'' said Alexei Bogaturov, deputy director of the Institute for the USA and Canada Studies in Moscow. ''Russia and America, for the first time since the victory over the Nazis in 1945, have seen that they can be of practical help for each other.''
Other divisions remain but have so far not hindered the broader US agenda. Bush's decision to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, for example, has not evolved into the arms race that many Europeans once feared. Nor has his vocal support for the death penalty and a national missile defense system thwarted the war on terrorism, despite many European nations' objections to both.
Those disagreements, and those over global warming, had marred his first official overseas visit in June 2001 when he stopped in Madrid and Brussels.
Last week's NATO vote gave Bush a chance to shine. He had begun insisting on broad NATO membership during a trip last spring to Warsaw, telling students there that the question of ''when'' NATO would expand may still be up for debate within NATO but the ''question of `whether' should not be.'' That charge came to fruition Thursday.
Yesterday, Bush celebrated the vote in two speeches. After greeting Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, a former administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency in Chicago, Bush addressed Lithuanian citizens in the historic Rotuse Square, the picturesque 16th-century center of the nation's capital, Vilnius. He is the first US president to visit the country.
''Our alliance has made a solemn pledge of protection,'' Bush said. ''And anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America.'' New member nations will in turn be obliged to support the United States, he said, an alliance that dovetails with his desire to keep together the coalition against global terrorism.
Bush framed the struggle against tyranny as a battle not only for past generations but also the current one. ''We must be willing to stand in the face of evil and to have the courage to always face danger,'' he said, heralding Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia for their fight to end Soviet occupation in the same language he uses to condemn terrorism.
''The people of the Baltic states have shown these qualities to the world,'' he said. ''You have known cruel oppression and withstood it. You were held captive by an empire and you outlived it. And because you have paid its cost, you know the value of human freedom.''
Bush continued, ''Our alliance of freedom is being tested again by new and terrible dangers. Like the Nazis and Communists before them, the terrorists seek to end lives and control all life. And like the Nazis and Communists before them, they will be opposed by free nations, and the terrorists will be defeated.''
The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry counted at least 8,000 in the crowd, and Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, put the figure at 12,000, fewer than half of the 25,000 to 50,000 he had predicted a day earlier.
In Bucharest, Bush spoke in Revolution Square, the symbolic heart of the 1989 struggle between anti-Communists and security forces that led to the downfall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The president received the kind of embrace that Europe rarely offers, from Romanian President Ion Iliescu, who issued a statement declaring that he and Bush ''have identical positions on the way to address the great challenges the international community is facing,'' including terrorism.
Not to be outdone, Bush told Romanian broadcasters in an interview before the speech that it would ''be a powerful moment for me and my wife to see the people and to be in the famous square and to look at the statues of people who represent freedom.''
''It's going to be one of the highlights of my presidency,'' he said.
And when he finally delivered the address, standing in the drizzling rain under a gray sky, Bush took note of an unexpectedly positive sight. ''As we started speaking, a rainbow appeared. God is smiling on us today,'' he said.