Posted on 04/11/2004 5:12:43 PM PDT by Eurotwit
If we had William Butler Yeats to plonk in front of CNN today, what would he write? Second Coming was his response to a Russian Revolution he knew only intellectually. The reality of its terror was unavailable for viewing even when he died in 1939. What might he have created after actually seeing bodies swinging from the bridge in Fallujah, their mutilations politely blurred by technology so as not to offend. Or hostages threatened with death by fire, paraded in front of cameras, knives at their throats. Would "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" and the "blood-dimmed tide" have been sufficient?
The arts generally give us shortcuts to understanding, a way of getting to the heart of the matter with no need for rational calculation. I'd say the appropriate artistic response to those in the civilized world who blame this new Inferno on President George Bush ought to be a requiem to be played while terrorism sets the world ablaze, and nations and the UN fiddle.
Many mainstream commentators now watching Islamic fundamentalists and their militias in Iraq are saying that the butchery is the fault of Bush. His War on Terror is a failure, they claim, bogged down in a misguided adventure into the wrong country.
A failure for whom? On September 11, 2001, war was declared on America. Bush promised he would fight terrorism and any state that supported or harboured it. Iraq supported terrorism, rewarded families of suicide bombers, had attempted to assassinate the former American president, used chemical weapons and was, to boot, one of the world's nastiest regimes run by a man in massive violation of UN resolutions. Today, that regime is gone. The remnants of its soul, lest anyone doubt its evil, are the mobs in Fallujah.
At a very low cost in lives, Bush got rid of both Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. Exit two regimes training and exporting terrorism. Libya gave up its nuclear weapons. The Arab world fears being next on the Bush list. Many of its countries have been aiding the terrorists creating havoc in India, Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe. In 1995, for example, a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II and bomb 11 airliners over the Pacific Ocean was thwarted by a raid on an Islamic terrorist hideout in Manila.
Al-Qa'eda's connections to terrorist groups in the Philippines are known. In 1994, Ramzi Ahmed Youssef (the original World Trade Centre bomber), tried what may have been a dress rehearsal for 9/11 with the bombing of Philippines flight 434 to Tokyo. Terrorist activity is mushrooming in the world but America has had nearly three years without a successful terrorist attack on its own soil.
Bush appears to be making the correct economic decisions as well. A turn of the economic cycle at the end of Bill Clinton's administration and the aftermath of the 9/11 attack threatened America with recession. Bush cut taxes, raised public sector spending, devalued the dollar and produced an economic growth rate of five to seven times that of western Europe. Conventional wisdom is that Bush is a dumb American. European economies should be so lucky. They've got erudite finance ministers and stumbling economies.
But little of this resonates. Policies associated with Bush are automatically suspect. When the US leaves quickly after regime change, it is accused of not carrying out its duty to establish schools and good motorways. If the US stays, it is an "occupying power", unless and until it undoes many decades of damage — which it is expected to do within an absurdly short time.
Afghanistan is viewed as a disaster in the making, due to America's lack of follow-through. It can only be seen as a failure if you continuously move the goalposts for success, setting them down at a point where the country must have a thriving democracy only two years after the medieval Taliban were routed. And wasn't it Europe's role to come in with aid and nation-building after the Americans excised the Taliban?
It is possible that the Taliban could return one day from the caves where its remnants now hide - if the central government fails. So? Communism may come back to the former Soviet Union, tyranny to South Africa. Does that mean it was not worth removing those regimes in the first place? Those commentators criticising American policy all evince horror of the Taliban, Saddam and terrorism. But follow their arguments to their logical conclusion and most are really saying that the world would be better off if the Taliban still ran Afghanistan and Saddam ran Iraq. They would deny this, but the consequences of what they argue for, or against, lead to nothing else.
Much hostility towards America seems fuelled by an unusually venomous response to this particular president. Possibly, that's because Bush is so quintessentially American that his personality acts like a magnifying glass, focusing the sun on the very spot that burns European skin. From his body language to his somewhat aphasic utterances, he personifies a sort of American-ess that for the British in particular (and some American elites as well) is a mixture of ridiculous and low class. If you are a person of certain standards, it is exceptionally irritating to play second fiddle to a world power led by a man who walks like a bit actor in a cowboy movie and talks about God more than one ought to in select circles.
In the eyes of such people, America - a country that has assumed an air of superiority since rescuing Europe in the Second World War - is turning out a dud this time. Watching the mobs in Iraq, the feeling grows that not only is Pax America no better than Pax Britannica, but that the US is, if anything, more bungling and disliked in the Middle East than the old colonial powers. There is a Schadenfreude at play here as the Old World, shunted aside from its role as the centre of western civilisation, watches the New World encounter difficulties. Some Bush administration ideas do seem naïve. American-style democracy, no matter how attenuated, is not a commodity that can be distributed at will — let alone in societies as distant from it as the Muslim countries of the Middle East. It is, as George Faludy wrote, difficult to build democracy without democrats.
In any event, it is difficult to build in a year in the East what took centuries to develop in the West. The humorist and travel writer George Mikes once wrote that to get the right impression of a country a visitor should either spend three days in it or 30 years. The same may also apply to an occupying power that wants to make the right impression on a country. A failure to understand this may be America's real mistake.
Welcome to FR. Did you sign-up just to post to this thread?
Who funds you?
I might ask the same question of you.
Nah, it's job is to smugly sit and blow raspberries at America.
This is a great article; a slap in the face to all those who wanted 'overnight success', and will accept nothing less, though they know that is impossible. They only want it because they know President Bush said we were in for the long haul, and they want desperately to make him look bad.
Solly, Cholly. FR is a member-funded site, unlike your normal homes over at DU and moveOn. Unlike you stinking little disciples of Karl Marx, mot of us have jobs and don't live in our parents' basements.
Well said. Perfect examples of the Dem criticizms of Bush.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.