In 1962, President Charles de Gaulle was presented with crucial information about Russia's construction of nuclear missile installations in Cuba. But the report went unread. It was enough for de Gaulle that John F. Kennedy intended to answer by invading Cuba, and he gave his support to President Kennedy without reading line one of the intelligence report.

Whether this unquestioning support of an ally was lazy or naïve, history validates de Gaulle's trust in his American ally. The crisis concluded on a note of high drama but no bloodshed: we stared the enemy in the face and he blinked, goes the one-line summary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But Premier Khrushchev, it later emerged, had not blinked in the least; he had made a secret deal to withdraw the installations in exchange for the U.S.'s removal of missiles from Turkey and Italy. To save face, Kennedy agreed to this only if Khrushchev kept this part of their pact secret, and so he did. Robert Kennedy wrote of this in his memoir "Thirteen Days," but his editor Theodore Sorenson deleted all mention of the secret pact, as he admitted years later.

Goodbye to the days of credible European allies, or perhaps any other kind, for the United States. With the increasing American and British (not to mention Iraqi) casualties in the aftermath of the Iraq War, combined with revelations of the Bush administration's deception about Saddam Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has every reason to feel that he was duped, and every reason to distrust the Bush administration in the future.

Certainly, the British people have felt that way ever since their leader pleaded his case for the war. From the beginning, conservatives opposed the war and must feel particularly vindicated in their opposition. BBC News quoted David Kelly, a British Ministry of Defense weapons expert, as saying that a dossier that Blair's government compiled about Iraq's alleged WMD program was rewritten to make it "sexier." Kelly talked about the addition of a dubious claim that the Iraqis were prepared to launch a WMD strike within 45 minutes. The 45-minute timeframe was apparently manufactured.

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz lent credence to Kelly's claim when he admitted to "Vanity Fair" that the WMD allegation was stressed "for bureaucratic reasons," because "it was the one reason [for waging war on Iraq] everyone could agree on."

After testifying to a parliamentary committee about the sexed-up 45-minute claim, David Kelly apparently committed suicide, sparking even more anger about the role of Blair's government in leaking misinformation to the press. An independent public inquiry into Kelly's death was launched on last Friday.

In a July 30 press conference he gave just one day before President Bush's rare news conference, Prime Minister Blair reacted to his falling approval ratings and the BBC's resistance to the war: "A lot of people, including, frankly, a lot of people in the media, don't really believe there is a threat arising from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. They think it's a convenient construct politically or something. I just tell you absolutely, passionately, that I believe this is the security threat of the 21st century, and if we don't deal with it, then at some point we'll rue the consequences."

The U.S. success in luring Tony Blair into the Iraq War has lost our greatest ally abroad the trust of his people. At first, it seemed Blair was not in immediate trouble because 1) his re-election campaign, like Mr. Bush's, was a year off, and 2) he faced no strong opposition among the Conservative party. But now the Prime Minister faces left-wing members of his own party who are calling for his resignation. That probably won't happen any time soon, but political analysts predict one of his top aides, Alastair Campbell -- along with British Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon -- will resign. If true, these high-profile resignations will not bode well for the Prime Minister.

In seeming lockstep with his counterpart across the Atlantic, President Bush gave his own news conference the next day, July 31. Like Blair, Bush is experiencing declining poll numbers and also like Blair, faces re-election in about a year. In April, 71 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, but that number fell to 62 percent in May, then to 56 percent in July.

Bush's problem doesn't seem to be so much the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- that was more problematic for Mr. Blair than for Mr. Bush. The difficulty re-establishing order in Iraq is probably to blame, along with the economy's poor performance.

Further, though, 16 fateful words the President uttered in his State of the Union address are promising to become as problematic as the lost 18½ minutes of the Watergate tapes, or the aforementioned sexed-up 45 minutes. Those 16 words were: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

For three weeks after the brouhaha broke about Bush's 16 erroneous words in the January speech about Saddam Hussein attempting to buy uranium in Africa, it seemed as though the President was going to let CIA George Tenet take the fall for somehow allowing him to say those words, even though the CIA warned him that the intelligence report about Saddam's African shopping spree might not be true. A CIA report that came out in October 2002 mentioned the allegations but said, "We cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore."

Then in last Wednesday's news conference, questioned whether National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was to blame for the 16 words, Mr. Bush finally said he would take responsibility.

If the American casualties befalling the "peacekeeping" mission in Iraq don't stop, or if employment numbers don't start to turn around, Bush's approval ratings will continue to fall. If the U.S. can't establish order in Iraq by November 2004, or if the economy doesn't improve by then, what was once thought to be unthinkable may happen: Bush may lose his re-election bid. And maybe he should.

Our country needs a president that it can trust, but also one the rest of the world can trust. Let's take a look at part of that world for a minute.

After street fighting left 700 dead in the streets of Liberia in June, people there began begging the U.S. to come re-establish order there. Bush called upon Liberian President Charles Taylor to leave the country, so far without the desired result. History shows that dictators rarely opt to follow a foreign suggestion to leave office, except feet-first.

Dateline Liberia: 11 Liberians, including a pregnant woman, were killed in Monrovia on Friday, August 1. Nigerian peacekeepers said they would deploy in Liberia on Monday. Taylor has accepted Nigeria's offer of asylum but has been vague about when, and has been known to lie (and worse) before.

West African envoys traveled to Monrovia to talk to President Charles Taylor about leaving the country only to learn that he had left the capital. West African countries have said they can send soldiers to Liberia, but Liberians want the force of a superpower (and particularly the one that is considered the fatherland of Liberia) to establish order.

"If just anybody comes, people will not attach importance to it," said Timothy Jones, who escaped from the latest street massacre in Liberia. "But if America comes, the fighters will not even challenge them when they take their guns -- because they will say their fathers have come." (The Washington Post)

Washington is pushing for a U.N. Security Council vote to authorize the West African force to intervene. The U.S. may well become involved militarily. But what Western ally would now support a U.S. invasion of Liberia? Or any future adventure in nation-building? After Liberia, it may well be Korea. North Korea wants the U.S. to sign a pact not to invade, and so far our government has refused to do so. If tensions escalate, will Mr. Blair be there to support the U.S.?

In the strange and complex story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn't just de Gaulle who trusted in the U.S. Nikita Khrushchev. Our Cold War arch-enemy did, too. He had to agree to lose face in the eyes of the world with the trust -- just blind trust -- that President Kennedy would keep his side of their secret bargain, and pull America's already-outdated Jupiter missiles out of Italy and Turkey.

Not surprisingly, President Kennedy fulfilled his side of the bargain. He quietly removed the missiles, and Khrushchev, for his part, kept quiet about this concession.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a frightening time for everyone on earth. The two greatest superpowers came much closer than they ever should have to nuclear holocaust. But in the end, fortunately for the world, it is a story of trust and honor, even between foes.

In contrast, the story of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is a story of the deception of a close, crucial ally. Tony Blair has other allies he can turn to: the rest of the European Economic Union. Now that Great Britain's economy is tied to the rest of Europe, its ties to the U.S. were likely to loosen, anyway. But with the deception about Saddam Hussein, President Bush has made it much easier for Mr. Blair to look eastward rather than all the way across the Atlantic for friendship and support.

With the increasing violence in Iraq, and the worsening situation in Liberia, it's already beginning to feel a little lonely, even frightening, without Great Britain. One can only speculate how President Bush feels. Perhaps, like the boy who cried Weapons of Mass Destruction.

About Alice Jacobson

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