World Rejects Bush's War Vision

When are people in the USA going to finally realise how badly off-track their country has become?

In case the awarding of the Nobel Price For Peace to the head of the International Atomic Energy Association (consistently at loggerheads with the Bush administration) were not enough to make Bush supporters think twice, here is some international press reaction to Bush's latest utterances...

From an editorial in Saudi Arabia's Al-Jazirah:

The fallacy of Bush's ideology lies in the fact that Bush thinks it is America's right to decide people's fate.

Editorial in Egypt's Al-Ahram:

US President Bush has warned of "a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia"... This is simply a preposterous statement... It is illogical to rely on the views of small radical groups that have neither weight nor influence to create such a phantom called "radical Islamic empire".

The Toronto Star has this reasoned analysis:

Bush sought in his speech to recreate the bipolar world that defined the Cold War. Instead of the West vs. communism, it's now the world vs. radical Islam. "We are facing a radical ideology with an unalterable objective, to enslave whole nations and intimidate the whole world," he said.

In the president's construction, Iraq is at the centre in this global war against radical Islam. Although only a third of Americans still support the war, Bush said there could be no retreat, no withdrawal because that would create a vacuum the radicals would use to take over Iraq and make it a base for expanding their war against the world. He rejected the argument that the U.S. presence created and continues to fuel the Iraqi insurgency and brings increased strength to Islamo-fascist terrorism worldwide. "The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue," he said, "and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse."

Hatred from people like Osama bin Laden certainly existed before Iraq. But unwise actions can cause hatred to grow. Iraq is the war bin Laden wanted, and the United States gave it to him.

Bush's Cold War construction overflows with faulty logic; it tries to make Islamic radicalism fit a familiar — and therefore comforting war-justifying — mould that doesn't work.

Military might and its projection were central to the Cold War. It had important political, diplomatic and economic elements — especially economic — but military prowess was at its centre. The struggle with radical Islam is the reverse: It is primarily diplomatic, economic and political, though on occasion it will have military aspects.

Iraq shouldn't have been one of those occasions. Now the United States finds itself in a real bind, with all its hopes pinned on a flawed constitution that very well may be rejected in the Oct. 15 referendum. Attempting to fold Iraq into a flawed concept of a new Cold War won't make the American invasion less mistaken, nor the prospect of failure less bitter.

Of course, there are voices of reason even in the USA. Sadly, most media outlets just parrot the President's gotta-keep-fighting words. But in his Washington Post blog, William M. Arkin has a very well-reasoned article about the Shared Fantasies of Bush and al Qaeda:

To me though, it just conveys how stuck the Bush administration is in a go-nowhere-fight-forever-kill-the-terrorists-one-at-a-time strategy...

The White House and much of Washington continues to be stuck in a post 9/11 nightmare where I believe the groupthink imagines a monumental threat to the United States and western society that just doesn't exist.

Yes, President Bush, extremism will exist after Iraq. It is made all the more potent and rewarding as we bumble about labeling it "evil" and ignoring what it feeds on.

We may fantasize about a great crusade we are embarked upon, but our greatest danger in the future is a tin ear we also have to Islam's and al Qaeda's equal fantasies. Their fantasies, and our actions, like it or not, drive the violence all around us.

Arkin picks up on a key point in Bush's speech, one which has been widely broadcast but seldom questioned:

I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 -- and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

As Arkin points out, the USA actually WAS in Iraq before 9/11, setting up failed CIA coups, dropping bombs on a daily basis, enforcing the UN's misguided sanctions... And what's more, the USA was messing around in a whole lot of OTHER Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the homeland of most of those involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Somehow it has become fashionable in US right-wing circles to criticize repressive Middle Eastern governments without ever properly acknowledging the USA's own role in fomenting and supporting them. Saddam Hussein is only the most obvious example of this hypocrisy. But what is even more ironic is that today's US greivances against repressive Middle Eastern rulers, articulated by people as high as Condoleeza Rice and even Bush himself (we gotta tell them Saudis/Egyptians/Pakistanis to start cleaning up their act, etc), are so closely in line with the grievances which led Bin Laden to attack the USA in the first place! Yet the USA rejects Bin Laden's old complaints (you can't reason with these people) even while recycling them as new US government policy!

Of course, the kind of "democracy" Bush & Co want to "export" to the Middle East is not the kind that most idealistic Arabs might imagine...

Since 9/11, I have often thought that the USA is going through a sort of communal post-traumatic social convulsion, the stages of which can be compared to an individual's response. First there is shock, then a whole heap of emotions including anger and denial, till finally one reaches a stage of acceptance.

I think most pro-Bush GOP voters are still in the anger/anxiety phase, while Democrats have moved on to the depression/self-doubt phase. Ominously, there is another dangerous phase in there called "recurrence" before you get to the all-important "acceptance" and "recovery".