Three Years and Counting

First posted 8-28-05 on the original Whistling Dog.

Three years ago, I wrote my first two posts for a small English editorial analysis website run by my friend, Adam Christie, who is a writer and editor for the BBC in Leeds. That website, AsPerceived.com served as an early training ground for me with HTML coding and web design, and with commentary.

I've spent the past two months saturating myself in blogland and pondering what I wanted to accomplish here with my own postings.

It seemed fitting to take a look back before I started spouting off again. What struck me in reading my first two articles for AsPerceived.com was not that these essays had been prescient (although I was a bit correct here and there), but how little has changed in the intervening 38 months.

I will let you judge for yourself. Here's article #1.

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June 24, 2002

Ten months later
Has the US hit a credibility speed limit in its drive to act unilaterally?

US CREDIBILITY is in free-fall. Is anyone paying attention? Everywhere American attempts to influence other countries are beginning to stall. And the US only has itself to blame.

Although the tragedies of last September may never be forgotten by any person who witnessed them first- or second-hand, the Bush Administration has not been able to forge the sympathy it enjoyed 10 months ago into a viable, sustainable program of alliances, achievements, policies and activities designed to improve life on planet Earth.

The rest of the world is beginning to wonder what part of America's program it can support. The answer is "not much."

Other than dislodging the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces that infested Afghanistan, the US has accomplished little in 10 months other than to cajole, irritate, disappoint and alienate a sizeable portion of this planet's population and its governments.

Bush's recent forked-tongue ultimatum to the Palestinians is just the latest in a series of "our way or the highway" diplomatic gestures. But such tactics are provoking a number of subtle adverse reactions. Let's take just two small but emblematic examples.

The new International Criminal Court and the Tokyo global warming Accords both started in recent weeks without America. Both ideas received petulant receptions in Washington, in spite of years of negotiations with other nations and the UN. In the end, America did not want to be held accountable to its neighbors, and so it walked away. But without a say or a stake in these new institutions, how will Washington defend its actions when, at some point, they find America wanting?

Indeed, if America is not willing to be a good neighbor, then other countries might rightly argue that perhaps it is not America's enemies who can't be trusted, but America itself.

If you were a world leader

Against this backdrop, imagine you are the prime minister of a small turbulent country. The new US president, for whom you suddenly have great sympathy in a time of need, courts your support privately. But publicly, instead of reaching out with a hand of cooperation and reciprocation, he lays down a gauntlet. "Either you are with us or against us," he declares in a major speech, like an echo of the old slogan: "America: Love it or Leave it!"

What would you think? How would you react?

Since September 11, 2001, this has been the dilemma of every world leader.

Even more disastrous for the Bush Administration, the President's offensive words now appear to have been nothing more than theatre -- bluster designed for the US domestic audience, to "rally the troops," as it were.

Many world leaders may not have been surprised by this time-dishonored ploy, but I would wager at first they did not take it literally. By declaring a "never-ending war on terrorism," a folly no sane, experienced statesman would venture into -- for no liberal democracy could sustain such a war for very long without sacrificing the very democracy and freedoms its peoples value -- George Bush and his Administration signaled the rest of the world that it was in fact, not serious. Only totalitarian megalomaniacs like Hitler and Stalin believed such idiocies when they said such things.

So if George Bush actually meant what he said, that placed him on a pedastal amidst a very disagreeable and dangerous pantheon of predecessors.

Besides, everyone knows that if the US actually attempted to strong-arm the rest of the world into joining its eternal war, it could not possibly retain broad support. After all, the Bush Administration has been reluctant to involve itself in solving the world's most glaring problems or joining constructively in well-intentioned and essential efforts to help third world countries feed, clothe and house their burgeoning populations, to curb industrial excesses, to balance economic and civil rights inequalities, and to find mechanisms to share the wealth without stripping the world of its resources or people of what little freedoms they enjoy.

These are the real challenges facing the world today. And Bush's America has already opted out of all of it.

Besides, Europeans and Asians are relativists today, familiar with facing terrorists both foreign and domestic for generations. And they are very sick of war. They've had centuries of it. Hey, President Bush, wasn't it your hero, Ronald Reagan, who once pointed out in Nicaragua, "One man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters?"

War on terrorism is a folly. It cannot succeed and it is not credible. You might as well say, "We will rid the world's beaches of sand!" Or, "We will drain every swamp in the world to kill every last mosquito!"

Unfortunately, on some level, the Bush Administration does take this charade very seriously. Like a lamenting soldier bent on falling on his sword, George Bush has built his entire program around the quixotic goal of ridding the world of terrorists.

And the rest of the world is suffering the consequences.

The damage abroad

The world's problems have dramatically worsened in a very short time under this President's watch.

• In the Middle East, the Palestinian Intifada has stiffened into a bloody spear that repeatedly wounds the body politic of Israeli citizens. Israel responds with ever more desperate boot-grinding, while the Bush Administration wrings its hands, helpless to stop the slaughter because its loyalties are divided. As columnist Tom Friedman points out once again in today's New York Times, Israel, the Palestinians and the Bush Administration may have just reached a point of no return, where there is no longer hope for a two-state solution, and none of the parties retains a viable option from its own point of view that will lead to peace.

• For weeks, President Bush has attempted to deflect criticism of his strategies by sputtering tough talk aimed at the mother of all Teflon despots, Saddam Hussein, the Bush family's closet skeleton. Never mind that the rest of the world tells Washington, "hands off Iraq." The Bushies keep making threats -- like their feint that President Bush has authorized the CIA to take out Saddam, or their half-hearted public wrangling in the US media about the meaning of America's historic "no first strike" and "no assassinations" policies. Saddam's hidden weapons labs may indeed harbor weapons of mass destruction, but Saddam is one wiley coyote. The Administration's clumsy efforts to draw him out have so far only convinced the rest of the world that the US still does not know how to handle him. In fact, it is the US that the rest of the world may need to handle if the Bush Administration gets carried away on this lark.

• Now Bush is joining Israel in blaming Yasser Arafat for the stalemate in Palestine. But as everyone knows, this mutual entanglement of hatreds and vendettas goes back better than 2000 years, and blaming one party or another helps no one end the ever-escalating cycles of violence.

• Not far away, in Iraq's backyard, the standoff between Pakistan and India, two genuine brandishers of nuclear bombs who are both supposedly US allies simmers atop a bubbling political caldera.

• And right next door, in Allied-occupied Afghanistan, the fabled Loya Jurga dissolved this week amidst cries of betrayal, as the US-picked President Hamid Karzai selects a cabinet of corrupt warlords, and Afghanistan's ancient king is rudely shoved aside. If this is the best that Bush's "war on terrorism" can produce, what's next on the bill?

• Well, how about Africa, where nation after nation has been swept up in a roiling, restless chaos that has turned great swathes of that continent into a lawless, borderless frontier. Granted, this catastrophe has been worsening for years. AIDS, allowed to rampage uncontrolled since the 1970s, has orphaned thousands of children, who roam the streets of West Africa's cities like locust hoards. Famine, war and meaningless bloodshed have marooned civilizations as old as mankind on the beaches of history. Africans are gasping for breath, like fish flopping in the sun on the white sands of their once-beautiful coastlines.

It took a rock star to shepherd the US Secretary of the Treasury to Africa to witness the devastation two weeks ago. Secretary O'Neill returned home a convert, but the Bush Administration's response to AIDS remains not only too little and too late, but it is also mired in the same old tired Republican clichés of "save the children" but "let's not deal with s-e-x."

After more than 20 years, such blindness could not appear more pathetic.

A comedy of errors

Even at home in the US, the Bush Administration stumbles week after week to fashion a credible security infrastructure to protect American citizens against terrorists.

The White House attempts to dismiss the endless revelations of failures at the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and at US airports.

In its duplicitous dealings with the US Congress, the Bushies sound more shrill and autocratic as time goes on. They spout an ever-increasing tirade of ineffectual fear-mongering and dismayed asides about "leaks."

Maureen Dowd points out in today's New YorkTimes that the Administration has now resorted to a Machivellian approach to blunting Congress' investigations: it has called in the FBI to investigate the Congressional leaks related to Congress' investigation of the FBI. Round and round it goes.

This is a ploy that only makes sense if you have something to hide, or someone to confuse.

Last week's scandale was the news that President Bush's commencement speech at Ohio State was to be protested by a number of students who planned to stand and turn away from the President as he spoke. The University -- fearing what? we don't know -- called in the police and threatened the students with the loss of their diplomas if they undertook their Constitutional obligation to express their dissatisfaction with a President who more and more resembles Richard Nixon in his paranoia.

Ohio carries lots of echoes of Richard Nixon's follies.

Hysteria makes fools of the hysterical

US history is replete with examples of fear-mongering that boomerangs.

In the '60s anti-war years, political discourse often played like some inane Greek tragic-comedy of masked, flawed gods, of heroines and heroes, overblown and ridiculous.

Army recruiters and police routinely faced off with acid-tripping hippies. Fun-house conspiracy lessons from the movies, such as Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove, reflected the underlying absurdity of the propaganda of that time.

Kubrick revisited these themes in Full Metal Jacket, when the General tells the peace sign-wearing soldier to "get with the program."

Earlier in the 20th century, a paranoid, cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover spied on beleaguered public officials and extorted a kind of power from them. In the years after the Second World War, the boozy red-baiting tribunals of Joe McCarthy ruined hundreds of American lives before they finally ruined McCarthy himself.

The damage done to peoples' lives by the hyped-up bellicose "religion of the state" is no less poignant or tragic when it is seen as absurd. But when we recognize these follies of hysteria and call them what they are, later generations can more easily recognize the markers when they appear again.

We have already begun to see signs of a similar skulking foolishness in the Bush Administration.

Does anyone remember the brouhaha in March about Bush's secret "shadow government," lurking somewhere beneath the streets of Washington? How about Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge and his red light, green light terror threat warning system? Or the recent dirty bomber scare orchestrated by US Attorney General John Ashcroft in a witless and uncoordinated TV warning, issued from Moscow, of all places?

This latter incident has rightly caused editorial writers, legal experts and civil libertarians to stand up and cry foul. Embarrassed by the inept way this episode was handled, the Bush Administration has made matters worse by attempting to foil judicial and journalistic examination of the evidence in this case. They have locked the suspect -- a petty Chicago thug, but an American citizen -- in a military jail, without access to even his lawyer. In doing so, the Administration has abrogated a right guaranteed to every citizen in America's fabled ten commandments of civil liberties, the Bill of Rights.

And now in the face of mounting corporate scandals, we learn the FBI has secretly alerted police departments around the US that there are "serious" threats of terrorist incidents over the Fourth of July holidays. What will the Administration do when the 5th of July dawns, and nothing has happened? And if something does happen, what will it do about the real problems facing America: lack of health care, poverty, a failing economy? Issue more threats?

If the US Attorney General, in particular, worried less about prayer meetings and making the statue of Lady Justice in his lobby safe for the eyes of children, and more about his sworn Constitutional duties, he might appear more credible. But already he has become an absurd figure, and the Administration by association.

All the while, people's lives are being hurt.

Hundreds of "disappeared" terror suspects still remain in jail. Middle Eastern and Asian people all over the US face increased discrimination. Alleged Al-Qaeda "combatants" are still kept in pens like zoo animals at Guantánamo, while the Administration continues to argue with its allies over the status of prisoners of war, and their rights under the Geneva Convention, and bickers with law enforcement agencies on the advisability of racially-motivated security screening.

The US has made a mockery of its own principles, principles it enshrined in its Constitution to be an example for the rest of the world. By nit-picking and hair-splitting the letters of some laws, the US appears ungenerous to those it has already defeated, and adolescent to those who would be its supporters.

Now is the time for magnanimity, not churlishness. But such advice falls on deaf ears at the White House.

In its zeal to fashion a new external enemy to replace the old Soviet boogeyman, the Bush Administration has begun to over-reach its authority with a characteristic Republican humorlessness.

It may soon learn that ironic cartoon lesson that all Foggy Bottom scalawags eventually face: "The enemy, he is us."

And then the curtain will come down.

And we will still face the same problems, only from a weaker position.

Copyright © 2002 AsPerceived.com