Another One Bites The Dust

Blair, Olmert, Abe, and Howard: the world leaders who have most closely associated themselves with Bush, and they all suffered politically at home.
With Blair resigning to a 'good riddance' from the British public, Olmert at 3% in the polls (considering the margin of error, it's technically possible nobody likes him), and Howard facing growing and strident opposition, now Abe calls it quits. Need we mention Musharraf?

Every year more nations withdraw from the Coalition, and Bush shakes his fist at each of them in order to ensure his isolation on the world stage. World opinion is against his hapless non-plan of occupying Iraq, and Bush continues to call on the U.N. (the organisation he and the Republicans have derided for several years now) to clean up the mess he made. With fewer allies than ever, the White House continues with policies cleverly designed to divide the world into "with us" and "against us" nations. Those "with us" are expected to stir up wars and incursions on demand, as well as pour large amounts of money they don't have into their militaries. They must also read from a script that makes it increasingly clear that they are merely pawns to a foreign power. And they also must put up a pretense of unwarranted optimism concerning any negative consequences from any of this.

Bush has gone to great lengths to establish his credentials as an asshole on the world stage. At first demanding that the world follow him into Iraq, he snarled at the world's ingratitude when it largely refused. He denounced the U.N. as ineffective and obsolete, while ignoring human rights crises that didn't fit into his Global War On Terror. He allied the U.S. with dictatorships in brazen contradiction to his stated goals of spreading democracy, and virtually guaranteed that any country that followed him wouldn't have to worry about human rights abuses being criticised by the U.S. When he finally realised that his rosy scenarios weren't going to come about, he then created scapegoats and again screeched to the world to join him in yet another ill-conceived effort in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. And throughout all of this, he continued to depict his domestic opposition as traitors and supporters of terrorism - the very American people that the world respected, while having reservations about the American government.

And now Abe fades away into history. His replacement is the Japanese version of Cheney, so watch as his party surges into irrelevance just as the GOP will here.


full story from Washington Post

Japan's Prime Minister Resigns

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; 4:20 PM

TOKYO, Sept. 12 -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who resigned abruptly on Wednesday after a year in power, has for weeks been a walking political corpse.

His party, which has dominated Japanese politics since World War II, was crushed in a July parliamentary election -- the type of humiliation that had forced previous prime ministers to quit without delay.

But that was just part of Abe's predicament. His judgment in picking a cabinet had proven faulty in the extreme, as scandals and ineptitude had pushed four ministers to resign and one to kill himself.

With poll numbers dipping below 30 percent, he became an object of ridicule, derided as a "spoiled little boy" by cultural critics and broadly criticized for a nationalist agenda that neglected a tightening economic squeeze felt by many Japanese, especially in rural areas. Public faith in his competence collapsed, polls showed, when he failed to respond aggressively last spring to revelations that 50 million pension records had been misfiled.

Yet Abe, the grandson of a prime minister, the son of a foreign minister and, at 52, the youngest prime minister since the war, had clung tenaciously to power until Wednesday afternoon, when he unexpectedly announced what has been obvious to the Japanese people since mid-summer.

"In the present situation, it is difficult to push ahead with effective policies that win the support and trust of the public," Abe said during a nationally televised news conference. "I need to change the situation to break the deadlock."

The deadlock that he referred to concerns a parliamentary fight over the extension of Japan's high-seas refueling operation in the Indian Ocean.

For the past six years, it has been the country's principal contribution to the war in Afghanistan and President Bush, along with many other world leaders, has urged Japan to continue to help out.

As recently as last weekend, Abe had said that he would do everything in his power to extend the anti-terrorism law that authorizes the floating gas station, which has pumped more than 127 million gallons of fuel, free of charge, most of it into U.S. warships.

How does free fuel equate with fighting terrorism?