World Rejects Smirking Chimp Morality

In spite of all the bad policies, the lies and evasiveness, the corruption and willful negligence, it's that bloody smirk that really, really irritates you. As if to say, in the most childish way: "I know exactly what I am doing, fooling all these people, and you can't stop me, nyah nyah nyah!" It's very Dr Evil.

Following General Zinni's criticisms yesterday, the Whore House has issued a denial of his allegations of incompetence and corruption. The Whore House denial basically says, "He's entitled to an opinion, but he's wrong." As usual, they do not make any effort to actually address the substance of his ten point allegations. It's just, "We're right, you're wrong." We are the supreme arbiters of morality, do not questions us (we certainly do not ever question ourselves).

It's an attitude that might play well in the backwaters of the USA, but the world at large has rejected it conclusively. A new article today in the SMH looks at how the Iraq War may come to be seen as the high water mark of Western moral presumptiveness:

"After the collapse of communism, the victorious US increasingly came to see itself as the saviour of the world, and the arbiter of each and every nation's future. If this proposition was less explicit during the Clinton era, it became the organising principle of the Bush regime. Where nations were not prepared to bend to US will, they were classified as 'rogue states' and threatened with force. The world found itself returning to a century earlier and the exercise of naked imperialism - all in the name, as a century earlier, of Western moral virtue.

Such was the shift in the ideological climate that the new imperialism gained a band of adherents from the liberal wing of politics, as it had in the late 19th century. They not only regarded the US as the only game in town; more importantly, they saw it as the embodiment of virtue in a failed or failing world.

But Iraq has proved a rude awakening...

The invasion of Iraq may well come to be seen as the apogee of the idea of the "moral virtue of the West". One year of occupation has profoundly eroded that claim. If September 11 and its aftermath suggest we have entered a simple world of US power and moral virtue, a more balanced view of global development suggests we stand on the eve of a very different world, in which Western values will be contested far more vigorously than at any time since the rise of Europe five centuries ago. It is true, of course, that communism, especially in its heyday, represented a profound challenge to Western values, but the nature of this threat was always political rather than cultural, and culture is far more powerful than politics."

Read more: West's monopoly on modernity challenged by Asia's waking giants.