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Boy president in a failed
world?
By Tom Engelhardt
07/11/05 "Asia Times" - - On Thursday morning, with the London bombings monopolizing the TV
set, I watched our president take that long, outdoor, photo-op
walk from the Group of Eight (G8) summit meeting to the
microphones to make a statement to reporters. Exploding subways, a
blistered bus, the dead, wounded, dazed and distraught just then
staggering through our on-screen morning, and there he was. He had
his normal, slightly bowlegged walk, his arms held just out from
his side in a fashion that brings the otherwise unusable word
"akimbo" to mind. It's a walk - the walk to the podium
at the White House press conference, to the presidential
helicopter, to the Rose Garden microphone - that is now his
well-practiced signature move. For some people, a tone of voice or
a facial expression can tell you everything you need to know;
that's how the president's walk acts for him. And nothing puts
spine in that walk the way the "war on terror" does.
Each horror is like a shot of adrenalin.
As he approached the microphones on Thursday, while ambulances and
police cars rushed through the streets of London, everything about
him radiated a single word: resolve. It was a word that came to
mind even before he used it making his brief statement, and then
turned, no less resolutely, to walk away just as the word
"Iraq" came out of the mouth of some reporter as part of
an unfinished question. This was definitely our war (on terror)
president back in the saddle.
He said nothing to surprise. He offered "heartfelt
condolences to the people of London, people who lost lives";
he spoke of defending Americans against heightened dangers
("I have been in contact with our Homeland Security folks. I
instructed them to be in touch with local and state officials
about the facts of what took place here and in London, and to be
extra vigilant, as our folks start heading to work."); he
extolled the strength of resolve of the other G8 leaders by
comparing it to his own ("I was most impressed by the resolve
of all the leaders in the room. Their resolve is as strong as my
resolve."); and he presented for the umpteenth time his
Manichaean vision of a world of good and evil in which he and his
administration are unhesitatingly the representatives of all
goodness. ("The contrast couldn't be clearer between the
intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about
human rights and human liberty, and those who kill - those who
have got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of
innocent folks.")
There's something so confoundedly dream-like about all this, so
fantastic, even absurd, especially set against the background of
the murder of random people taking public transportation in one of
the globe's great cities. As reality grows ever darker, our
president never ventures far from his scripted version of a
fictional world that is nowhere to be seen. Let's keep in mind
that this was the same president who, only the day before in
Denmark, had launched a vigorous, completely ludicrous defense of
his Guantanamo prison complex. Just two weeks earlier, his Vice
President Dick Cheney had pointed out - as if he were making one
of those Caribbean tourist ads - that the prisoners there were
lucky to be housed and fed so admirably in the balmy
"tropics". Now, the president was practically proffering
tickets to those tropics for Europeans who wanted to check the
situation out for themselves. ("The prisoners are well
treated in Guantanamo. There's total transparency. The
International Red Cross can inspect any time, any day. And you're
welcome to go. The press, of course, is welcome to go down to
Guantanamo ... There's very few prison systems around the world
that have seen such scrutiny as this one. And for those of you
here on the continent of Europe who have doubt, I'd suggest buying
an airplane ticket and going down and look - take a look for
yourself.")
It was certainly a unique vacation package he was offering. As it
happens, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker magazine took one of those
tickets and, even getting a military dog-and-pony show at the
prison, was struck by "the utter lack of due process" in
the one trial-like proceeding she saw. ("It looked like a
court hearing, but there were no lawyers.") The place -
despite having its own Starbucks for the Americans - struck her as
a giant dystopian experiment in mind manipulation.
A number of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents took
these tickets a while ago and sent back harrowing tales of
mistreatment and torture ("The documents showed that FBI
agents were particularly upset with what they saw as physical and
mental abuse of the detainees, including the sticking of lighted
cigarettes in their ears, choking, beatings, temperature changes,
hooding, the use of dogs and other forms of harassment."); or
simply consider what the elder president Bush's White House
physician, a former doctor in the Army Medical Corps, had to say
recently on this Bush administration's treatment of prisoners:
Today, however, it seems as though our government and the
military have slipped into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
The widespread reports of torture and ill treatment - frequently
based on military and government documents - defy the claim that
this abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned
officers at Abu Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay.
When it comes to torture, the military's traditional leadership
and discipline have been severely compromised up and down the
chain of command. Why? I fear it is because the military has
bowed to errant civilian leadership.
Of course, that's just reality and means nothing to our president,
who assures the world that he's the defender of "human
rights" against the forces of evil. Guantanamo is but the tip
of the offshore archipelago of injustice sponsored with enthusiasm
by him, his top officials, his lawyers, et al. In fact, the
"human rights and human liberties" of the president and
his men have created such an ungodly mess at home and in the world
that trying to tackle any of his tightly held fantasies point by
point is a nearly impossible task, the equivalent of cleaning out
the Augean stables. But put that aside for a moment. Whatever he
may be - and it's worth saying this exactly at such a moment -
George W Bush is simply not the representative of good. While
holding up the banner of democracy, he and his men, experts in
vote suppression and gerrymandering on their home turf, have
created an ever-less democratic, more intolerant, more
police-ridden, more liberties-impaired America. That's simply
their record on the ground. But after a while, as you watch the
carnage from London to Baghdad, you say these things - or write
them - and then you just throw up your hands in despair. Why write
more?
The 'war on terror' goes on
Now, we know of course that Bush's people read the opinion polls
and check their focus groups and that, amid his increasingly poor
polling figures (including a recent Zogby poll, hardly covered in
the mainstream press, that showed 42% of Americans willing to
consider his possible impeachment for lying about going to war
with Iraq), he hangs onto one thing: the "war on
terror". It's his. Americans still believe, though in smaller
numbers than before, that he's handling it well. Before the
attacks of September 11, before he proclaimed his "war on
terror" - though that period now seems almost beyond memory -
his presidency looked dead in the water. After a brief,
embarrassing moment of fear and flight on Air Force One that long
ago day, he clambered aboard the September 11 jet and flew it for
all he was worth. That day made the man and his advisors
undoubtedly believe that, in the end, it is likely to make or
break his presidency.
Before the war in Iraq, and again before the recent election, he,
his handlers and his top officials played the "war on
terror" card domestically with impressive effectiveness. All
of this is well known. So why wouldn't they return to it as the
early months of his second term begin to look much like those
in-the-doldrums early months of his first one? As London
demonstrated all too painfully - as his policies in Iraq and
elsewhere help to ensure - we now live in a Kamikaze world. After
all, as he always says with a strange pride, he made Iraq into
"the central theater in the 'war on terror'." Remember,
whatever else Iraq was, before the invasion it was a country that
had never experienced a suicide car-bombing (though Baghdad was
evidently car-bombed by the Central Intelligence Agency in the
1990s via the Iraqi National Accord, the exile organization of the
future prime minister of occupied Iraq, Iyad Allawi) or sent a
suicide car bomber anywhere else on Earth; and don't forget our
now seemingly endless and bloody occupation of unreconstructed
Afghanistan, and so many grim policies elsewhere, most of which
impact heavily on the largely Arab oil heartlands of the planet.
All of this has so far been, speaking purely practically, as
London may demonstrate once again, useful to the president
domestically, even if his policies are helping produce it, even if
those of us who live in the large cities of the world are never
again likely to get on a subway or a bus without suppressing that
second or two of doubt about what might happen next.
In Superpower Syndrome, an insightful paperback published
in 2003, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote of how, in the wake
of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration
"responded apocalyptically to an apocalyptic challenge";
of how, facing Islamist fanaticism, it offered its own version of
a fundamentalist "world war without end"; of how it
perversely partnered up with al-Qaeda in a strange global dance of
animosity. Once again, the London bombs may bolster Bush's waning
support domestically, just as his acts globally reinforce the
evidently growing support for various al-Qaeda-linked or
identified groups. All of this activity - from those color-coded
alerts at electorally appropriate moments to the president's
speeches - can seem quite cynical and manipulative, and yet there
was a moment, a line, in the president's statement at the G8 meet
in Scotland which spoke of something quite different. Near the
end, he said, quite simply, "The 'war on terror' goes
on." It was one of those moments filled with resolve, but
with something else as well.
"The 'war on terror' goes on ..." You might imagine that
such a sentence, especially at that moment, would have been the
most mournful, the saddest of statements. But in the president's
mouth it had none of that quality. Though far more subdued, what
it hinted at was one of the president's most childish comments,
now almost forgotten. Back in July 2003, when the Iraq war that
should have ended was just turning into an insurgency that
wouldn't end, he taunted the Iraqi insurgents, saying,
"Anybody who wants to harm American troops will be found and
brought to justice ... There are some who feel like the conditions
are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em
on."
"Bring 'em on." As then, so in Scotland, you could feel
the way George Bush had absorbed his own 'war on terror' into his
political and personal bloodstream. It was indeed, to use Boston
Globe columnist James Carroll's word for it, his personal crusade.
In that context, each terror attack is, for him, strangely like a
shot of adrenaline (as it is, piety aside and for quite different
reasons, for the TV news channels which ride such attacks for all
they're worth). Each attack somehow bucks him up, sets him walking
more resolutely. I have no doubt that, serially, they give meaning
to his life. This, after all, was the man who, according to the
Washington Post's Bob Woodward, kept in his Oval Office desk
drawer "his own personal scorecard for the war" in the
form of photographs with brief biographies and personality
sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous
terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by the president as his
forces took them down. This is the Osama bin Laden (or now Abu
Musab Zarqawi)"dead or alive" president.
Playing at war
More than anything else, as I watched him that morning in
Scotland, I was filled with a sense of sadness that we had reached
such a perilous moment with such a man, or really - for here is my
deepest suspicion - such a man-child in power. Yes, he genuinely
believes in his "war on terror", even as he and his
advisors use it to his own advantage. And yes, he's good at being,
or rather enacting with all his being, the role of the "war
on terror" president. And yet there's something so painfully
childlike in the spectacle of him. Here, after all, is a
59-year-old who loves to appear in front of massed troops, saying
gloriously encouraging and pugnacious things while being hoo-ah-ed
- and almost invariably he makes such appearances dressed in some
custom-made military jacket with "commander in chief"
specially stitched across his heart, just as he landed on the deck
of the USS Abraham Lincoln back in May 2003 in a navy pilot's
outfit. Who could imagine Abraham Lincoln himself, that most
civilian of wartime presidents, or Franklin D Roosevelt, or Dwight
D Eisenhower, a real general, wearing such GI Joe-style play
outfits?
Let's face it. Bush likes dress up. What a video game is to a
teenager, the presidency seems to be to this man. It's a free pass
to the movies, with him playing that brave warrior part.
All-in-all, I'm afraid to say, it must be fun. When he so
cavalierly said, "Bring 'em on," he was surely simply
carried away by the spirit of the game. What it wasn't, of course,
was the statement of a mature human being, an adult.
I don't usually say such things, but there's something
unbelievably stunted about all this. He and his top officials seem
almost completely divorced from any sense of the actual
consequences of their various acts and decisions. They live in
some kind of dream world offshore of reality, which would perhaps
not be so disturbing if they didn't also control the levers of
power in what, not so long ago, was regularly referred to as the
"lone" or "last superpower" or the globe's
only "hyperpower". (Even in their own terms, it's a sign
of their failed stewardship that almost no one uses such phrases
anymore or, say, Pax Americana, another commonplace term of 2002
and 2003.)
It may be that nations deserve the leaders they get and perhaps
it's no mistake that Bush ended up as our leader - twice no less -
in a period that otherwise seemed to cry out for having your basic
set of grown-ups in power, or that his secretary of defense likes
to play stand-up comic at his news conferences, or that his first
attorney general just loved to sing songs of his own creation to
his staff, or that none of them can get it through their heads
that it's not just the terrorists who, in our world, have been
taking "the lives of the innocent".
I keep thinking: who let these children out in the world on their
own? Obviously the American people, in some state of global
denial, did. It's strange, but I can't get out of my mind an image
that Bush administration officials, from the president on down,
were using regularly back in 2003-2004. They often quite publicly
compared the Iraqis to a child taking his first wobbly bike ride
(assumedly on a democratic path) under the administration's
tutelage. There was Washington, the kindly adult, stooped over,
helping balance that ungainly kid, or trying to decide whether
this was the moment to take off those training wheels and let the
child take an initial spin on his own, chancing of course a spill.
In May of 2004, for instance, the president, according to a CBS
News report, "Sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his
Iraq plan... saying Iraqis are ready to 'take the training wheels
off' by assuming some political power." Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld spoke similarly in March of that year:
"Getting Iraq straightened out," he said, "was like
teaching a kid to ride a bike: they're learning, and you're
running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You
know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a
finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just
barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the
street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know
that, but we're off to a good start." And from former under
secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz to L Paul Bremer, head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, others chimed in
similarly.
Of course, all of this was a lie of an image and not just because
it was classically patronizing and colonial. After all, if you
wanted to extend the image, you would have to say that the
American parent helping that sweet child learn how to bike was
also plundering the child's future college fund, looting his
future patrimony, and turning his life into a swirl of deadly
chaos. Take off those wheels and let him wobble around that first
corner and he was likely to be knocked off his bike by an rocket
and find himself in a hospital without supplies run by doctors who
were either being assassinated or fleeing the country.
Perhaps this image, now retired by the administration, came back
to me as the president spoke because, only the day before, on a
wet and slippery Scottish road, riding his own special sports
bike, Bush had crashed into a policeman guarding him, scraping his
hands and arms, and sending that policeman briefly to the
hospital.
Now, anyone can fall off a bike, but I had to wonder who had taken
those training wheels off the Bush administration bike - al-Qaeda
by its September 11 attacks, would assumedly be the answer - and
let its officials careen off on their first wild rides, all of
which have left them skidding off the road and someone else in the
hospital. I wondered what the inhabitants of Baghdad, the capital
of our failed state of Iraq, might have been thinking about the
president's statement on the London bombings or all the media
attention that was given over to them. After all, seven to eight
car bombings a week now take place in Baghdad alone - and this
figure is held up proudly by the American military as an
accomplishment of the moment (being down from 14 to 21 before a
recent offensive in that city). And yet in our press there are
never stories about how Baghdadis keep stiff upper lips or
carrying on with life amid the carnage, though somehow they
evidently do.
If you'll excuse another image, it was as if our child leaders had
taken off, ridden directly into someone else's neighborhood, seen
a wasp's nest, promptly stomped on it, and then stood around
praising themselves and waiting to be stung. If you judge a war by
its results, then our president's "war on terror" has
led only to ever more terror and ever more war. Just the other
day, the Bush administration did some new figuring and reported
that terrorist incidents globally in 2004 had increased five-fold
over the previous figures it had released to the public. For that
year, the National Counterterrorism Center now counts up 3,192
attacks worldwide, with 28,433 people killed, wounded, or
kidnapped - and Iraq led the list by a mile, even though attacks
on the US military were not counted in the tally.
In the meantime, as Dilip Hiro points out, bombing attacks - Bali,
Turkey, Madrid, London - are moving ever closer to the heartland
of our particular world, of Bush's imperium. Once it was a trope
of American presidents to claim that we were fighting
"there", wherever "there" might be - in the
case of Johnson Vietnam, in the case of Ronald Reagan Central
America - so that we might not fight on the beaches of San Diego
or in the fields of Texas. When a president said such a thing, it
sounded fierce and threatening - and it was inconceivable. Armed
Nicaraguans were never going to punch through Texas, nor were
Vietnamese guerrillas going to slip ashore in southern California,
nor Panamanians in Atlanta; nor Grenadians in Key West; nor, for
that matter, Iraqis of the First Gulf War-era in Boston.
Bush now uses the same punch lines as those former presidents,
just as he did recently in his national television address to the
nation on Iraq. But for the first time, they have an actual
meaning. They have perhaps even more meaning over
"there". Riverbend, the eloquent, young Baghdad Blogger,
recently put the matter this way from the perspective of a
resident of the Iraqi capital:
Bush said: "Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war ...
The commander in charge of coalition operations in Iraq, who is
also senior commander at this base, General John Vines, put it
well the other day. He said, 'We either deal with terrorism and
this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to
us'." He speaks of "abroad" as if it is a vague
desert-land filled with heavily-bearded men and possibly camels.
"Abroad" in his speech seems to indicate a land of
inferior people - less deserving of peace, prosperity and even
life. Don't Americans know that this vast wasteland of terror
and terrorists otherwise known as "abroad" was home to
the first civilizations and is home now to some of the most
sophisticated, educated people in the region? Don't Americans
realize that "abroad" is a country full of people -
men, women and children who are dying hourly? "Abroad"
is home for millions of us. It's the place we were raised and
the place we hope to raise our children - your field of war and
terror.
Failed-state world
"The war on terror goes on ..." What a thing to say. We
are now in a destabilizing world, and it will undoubtedly only get
worse as Bush's "war" to stop terror goes on and on and
on. The Bush administration will never cease to lend a hand - no
matter what it thinks it's doing - to those evil ones who will
take innocent lives without a blink. It is ever ready to
destabilize the oil heartlands of our planet, what not so long ago
was regularly called "the arc of instability" (before
any of our pundits really knew what instability was all about).
The two countries the Bush administration has occupied are both
dismally failed states effectively ruled by no one. One is now
proudly held up by the president as the central theater in the
"war on terror", the other is the prime narco-state on
the planet. And it's clear that only the revealed weakness of a
military giant that turned out to be incapable of imposing its
will on two of the weaker states on Earth has prevented further
radical acts of "decapitation", armed "regime
change" and thoroughgoing destabilization.
Remember when neo-conservative authors were writing about a world
of "failed states", that jungle out there just beyond
our civilization? Where are they now that we need them? The
bombings in London signal that, in such a failed-state world,
failure - and the carnage that goes with it - only spreads like so
many ripples in a pond into which someone is catapulting boulders.
Nor will our leaders hesitate to destabilize our own country,
turning it from the ultimate hyperpower into the ultimate failed
state in a failed world.
There is a similar piece, I have no doubt, to be written about the
maniacs - and yes, they have their strategies and their reasons
and their grievances, including Bush's Iraq war - who are willing
to climb into a car in Iraq, or take an underground ride in London
with a backpack filled with explosives, or smash a plane into a
tall building, or blow up a synagogue, or ... They believe no less
than our president in their fictional version of reality and are
no less eager to impose it on the rest of us. They, too, given
half a chance, would create their own failed states in a
failed-state world.
It is perhaps an insult to children to compare the Bush
administration to them, but I'm at a loss for images. I'm a deeply
civil person. If I had my choice, like so many people in this
world of ours, I would simply wash my hands of their apocalypts
and ours. Unfortunately, that's not possible. Theirs, at least,
are someone else's responsibility, but Bush and his malign
fictional worlds are, it seems, mine.
The sad thing is that the truth is relatively simple. What people
using terror in the fashion of London are quite capable of doing
is killing and maiming randomly and in large numbers – and
perhaps in the process revealing to us both how fragile and how
strong our world actually is. What they are completely incapable
of doing, no matter what Bush says, is taking our liberties and
freedoms away. They can't take anything away. Only we can do that.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's
Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream
media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and
the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of
American triumphalism in the Cold War.
(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt Tomdispatch)
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