[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Fireworks in Washington, Despair Around the World

Sun Jan 23 00:29:24 PST 2005

>
>
>Guardian (UK)
>January 21, 2005
>
>Fireworks in Washington, despair around the world
>
>The Bush administration is in denial about its
>disastrous failure in Iraq
>
>By Robin Cook
>
>Inauguration does not do justice to the exuberant
>celebrations of this week. Coronation would
>come closer. Washington ended yesterday with nine
>official balls. The night before George Bush gave a new
>spin to the phrase moveable feast by fitting in three
>separate banquets. He then expended as much ordnance in
>peppering the sky over the Capitol with fireworks as
>would get his occupation forces in Iraq through a whole
>24 hours.
>
>The contrasts between this uninhibited triumphalism and
>the real world are as wide as the American continent.
>One visible contrast was provided by the demonstrators
>camping out on the streets to protest at such
>extravagant waste by an administration waging its own
>jihad on programmes against poverty on the grounds that
>the federal budget cannot afford welfare. Yesterday,
>Bush gave a new spin on welfare cuts by presenting them
>as progress to an ownership society. The thousands of
>wealthy donors to the campaign to re-elect the
>president who turned up at those dinners adore this
>concept of an ownership society in which they get hefty
>tax cuts paid for by the poor who get their budgets
>cuts.
>
>Then there is the sharp contrast between the self-
>indulgent hubris of the festivity and the fragile
>political victory which it celebrated. Bush was re-
>elected by the smallest margin in 100 years of those
>presidents who won a second term. His approval ratings
>this week are the lowest ever plumbed by any president
>at the date of his inauguration. But among the balls,
>banquets and bangs there was not a hint of the humility
>that would be the essential starting point for a
>process of healing the deep political division of his
>nation. The message of the jubilations could not be
>clearer. He won another four years and was going to
>enjoy them, while the other side lost and was going to
>have to put up with it.
>
>Lastly there is the biggest contrast of all between the
>smug complacency of the administration over its
>electoral victory and the disastrous military failure
>of its adventure in Iraq. Since George Bush was re-
>elected over 200 more US soldiers have been killed in
>Iraq. Each new day brings another 70 attacks on the
>occupation forces as the territory dominated by the
>insurgents expands and the area which the occupiers can
>safely patrol shrinks. This week a senior Kurdish
>leader, although a supporter of the occupation,
>admitted that for a lot of its citizens, "the Iraqi
>government exists only on television".
>
>The lawless background to the forthcoming elections has
>imposed whole new dimensions to the concept of a secret
>ballot. Most of the candidates will remain a secret
>lest they are assassinated. Polling stations are kept
>secret by the authorities lest they are blown up before
>election day in a week's time.
>
>Iraq was the flagship project of the Bush
>administration and has turned into its greatest
>disaster. Yesterday's jollities cannot conceal the
>brutal truth that they neither know how to make the
>occupation succeed nor how to end it without leaving an
>even worse position behind. And, God help us, thanks to
>the unshakeable loyalty of our prime minister, we are
>left trapped in Basra shamed by the latest pictures of
>prisoner abuse and dependent for any shift of strategy
>on decisions taken in Washington by an administration
>that has repeatedly ignored British advice since its
>first monumental blunder of disbanding the Iraqi army.
>
>A successful search for a new strategy can only start
>with a recognition that the present strategy has
>comprehensively failed. But the Bush administration II
>that took office yesterday is stuffed with people who
>are in denial about the dire situation of their forces
>occupying Iraq. In the couple of months since election
>day, George Bush has promoted the very people who
>thought conquering Iraq was a good idea and eased out
>anyone with a record of worrying about the
>consequences. Thus Condoleezza Rice, who was author of
>the alarmist claim that Saddam could produce a mushroom
>cloud, replaces Colin Powell, who warned the president
>that if he broke Iraq he would own the process of
>putting it back together again.
>
>Perhaps wisely, those who crafted yesterday's
>inauguration speech hit the erase button any time the
>word Iraq crept into the text. Sinai and the Temple
>Mount got walk-on parts to provide biblical flavouring,
>but no location of contemporary controversy in the
>region got a mention. The only hint in the speech that
>there might be a war going on was a reverential
>reference to the sacrifice and service of US troops.
>Piquantly, at this point the television cameras cut
>away to a shot of Dick Cheney looking suitably solemn,
>neatly reminding the informed viewer of the humbug of a
>president and vice-president thanking US troops for
>facing dangers in Iraq which they took care to avoid
>for themselves in Vietnam.
>
>Not that Iraq was unusual in being left out of the
>script. There were no specifics about anything else,
>either. Instead, we were invited to drift along with a
>stream of generalities, untroubled by hard problems or
>real-world solutions. Freedom and liberty are universal
>values. The founding fathers of the US constitution,
>admirable though they may have been, do not hold patent
>rights over those concepts. They are embedded in the
>roots of the separate tradition of European social
>democracy and we must not let George Bush appropriate
>them to provide an ideological cover for his new
>imperialism.
>
>Nor should we accept the implicit assumption of Bush's
>muscular foreign policy that freedom can be delivered
>from 38,000ft through the bomb doors. One of the rare
>passages of the speech when Bush appeared animated by
>his own text, rather than engaged in formal recitation,
>was when he saluted the declaration of independence and
>the sounding of the liberty bell. But those were
>celebrations of freedom from foreign dominance - not to
>put too fine a point on it, independence from the
>British. He needs to grasp that other nations are just
>as attached to freedom from foreign intervention,
>including domination by America.
>
>The president and his speechwriters have yet to
>confront the tension between their rhetoric about
>freedom, which is universally popular, and their
>practice of projecting US firepower, which is resented
>in equal measure. That explains why, on the very day
>when the president set forward his mission to bring
>liberty to the world, a poll revealed that a large
>majority of its inhabitants believe that he will
>actually make it more dangerous. The first indication
>of whether they are right to worry will be whether the
>Bush administration mediate their differences with Iran
>through the state department or through the US air
>force.
>
>r.cook at guardian.co.uk Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian
>Newspapers Limited 2005
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1395462,00.html
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand