COVER -> DAY ONE
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A summary of my Log for the last days of March 2001 simply provides an exemplar for the acts of the US Administration:
- Unilateral withdrawal from Kyoto Climate Change Protocol
- Unilateral withdrawal from Internet privacy treaty with European Union
- Israel and the PLO condemned for failure to observe international agreements
- Yugoslavia threatened with aid cut-off if Milosevic not arrested and sent to International War Crimes Tribunal.
It is easy to become hysterical, as many media channels have, over these acts of an administration clearly in the grip of revivalist fervour but we must at the very least keep matters in perspective. And the perspective is this:
The Pentagon has already proposed NMD whilst simultaneously accusing Russia of blatantly breaking nuclear weapons treaties and it has quite deliberately alienated China by refusing to rule out major new arms supply deals with Taiwan. By my reckoning that only leaves Japan unsnubbed but even in that case the beleaguered Government has suffered malign indifference.
As for the supposed "rogue" states which are supposed to justify NMD, North Korea has been told where to stuff its peace negotiations with the South; it might have been the most inveterately cruel and incompetent regime that ever existed (which is not true) but its proposals of food aid for disarmament were as near to penitence as a dictatorship ever gets.
Splits at the most recent Arab summit show how easy it would be to neutralise Saddam Hussein without too much military muscle and the conclusion of proceedings in the case of the alleged Lockerbie bombers offered an opportunity for a rapprochement with Libya.
Is there a pattern in all of this? I think there is.
First, the only beneficiary of a deliberate policy to manufacture and then aspic "rogue" states is what President Eisenhower referred to as the "Military-industrial complex."
Secondly, President Bush has been quite open about the beneficiaries of treaty renunciation; he has cited US business. So we have to conclude that this is not a series of coincidences but is a series of coherent acts.
I would not elevate these acts to the status of "policies" because, reverting to my earlier descriptions of puerile revivalism, a child deliberately setting fire to an apartment block is not, in the strict sense of the term, carrying out a policy; nor is a person who says that only his sect is right making a policy, he is simply asserting a prejudice against the evidence.
So Mr. Bush does not stand charged with being wicked or incompetent (though he may indeed be both) but with being wanton and irrational. He genuinely believes that what he is doing is good for America which, in the short term it might be, and he genuinely believes that all that counts is doing what is perceived to be good for America. If the world's only superpower adopts that posture, then what are the rest of us to do?
The rational answer is that we, particularly in Europe, should try to bring Mr. Bush to his senses. We might, for instance, risking a charge of impertinence, remind him of the narrowness of his mandate if he had one at all. More to the point, we must remind him of the political law of the balance of power. Europe might be forced, as I noted before last November's American elections, to lead a coalition of interests against the United States comprising Russia, China, India and Japan. This would not be easy to bring off but with each day that Mr. Bush tears up a treaty it will become easier.
I have not forgotten the second two items in my Log.
If any country flouts international law its strictures on the matter are not likely to be taken seriously. If the US can unilaterally tear up an Internet agreement on privacy how is it supposed to secure an international treaty on Internet pornography?? And who will want to send Milosevic and his ilk to the International War Crimes Tribunal when Washington has plainly stated that its military will not be subject to it but will be tried by American courts?
So, here is the rub. How is a superpower to react if its commands are ignored and if it insists on having armed forces that are not allowed to fight?
The answer is surely twofold, a trade war and the increased use of remote bombing.
How long will "the rest of the world" tolerate unilateral acts which give American business short-term, immediate advantage in world markets? Not long.
Any right wing analyst, and George W Bush has a barrel load, will tell you or him that we might all be rather reticent when it comes to standing up for human rights but we won't have other countries messing with our economic prosperity. As for remote bombing, it will only produce more anti-American action and yet higher profits for the defence industry, which is precisely what Bush wants.
But, as we have seen, Bush is not America, he is at best half of a divided 2/3 of it. To that extent the Democrats must immediately make every effort to block everything he proposes. This is no time for bipartisan smooching and, in any case, if the Democrats do not stop Bush he will swallow them forever. They are too weak to withstand a tidal wave of chauvinism backed by the very same people who make the major contributions to both political parties.
The deepest cause for concern and the root of my pessimism is that Mr. Bush is not an oddity but is, rather, an icon of the American condition. Official disregard for the poor, judicial murder, the distortion of the Constitution to justify the private ownership of guns are but three egregious symptoms of a much deeper malaise which has combined rampant individualism with brutality.
Finally, let me return to my Log for the end of March to produce a contrast between two court rulings handed down on the same day. The San Francisco Appeals Court held up the right of anti-abortion campaigners to publish material inciting violence on the Internet. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the central issue, and even the question of whether there is a connection between incitement and a violent act, what possible justification was there for permitting such websites to publish the names of relatives of doctors carrying out abortions? Where is the balance between free speech and privacy? The European Commission on Human Rights handed down a judgment against the right of the Orange Order in Ulster to march where and when it likes because its rights must be balanced against those of the people through whose streets it proposes to march.
If such imbalance continues it will push the United States into the political equivalent of a jumbo jet superstall. Captain Bush sits in his cockpit pushing all the wrong buttons, ignoring the warning hooter. Those of us who care for the United States hope that he will correct the fault before it is too late but many more will simply hope that the crash takes place as far away from them as possible. We are caught, like the Liliputians, in a crucial dilemma: should we try to tie Gulliver down or just keep out of the way?
