Chris Patten lets rip in undiplomatic last blast
(AFP)
Updated: 2005-10-04 13:58

Of the Americans themselves, Patten -- who held the EU post from 1999 until last October, and was seen as a key Atlanticist in Brussels -- singles out the neo-conservatives led by Cheney for his most withering criticism.

"Mr. Cheney does not do style. He is two fingers to style," he says, calling the US vice president "aggressively nationalist, conspiratorial, the patron of the Washington branch of the Likud party."

Bush himself comes off relatively lightly, on the personal front at least, although Patten does lament the return to "gunslinging" US policy since he entered the White House.

But he is less reserved about the new US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, saying that "for him there is no United Nations, there is only one nation that counts, America. Cooperation is for sissies.

"Mr. Bolton is the Pavarotti of neoconservatism; his views have taken the roof off chancelleries around the globe," he writes.

While blasting the neocons who took Washington to war in Iraq, the former EU official is no less critical of the chief opponent of the conflict, French President Jacques Chirac.

Specifically he laments France's constant attempts "to turn the clock back almost whimsically to a golden age of French superior distinctiveness" in the EU.

"So long as its politicians led by President Chirac remain trapped in an ignorant and impoverishing hostility to the policies required to... compete successfully in the world, (France) will punch significantly below its weight."

More broadly, he laments France's -- and Germany's -- role in the "wretched saga" of the EU's aborted plans to lift a 16-year-old arms embargo on China, pushed by Paris and Berlin as they also sought to curry trade favour with Beijing, but shelved this year after stiff opposition from Washington.

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