SAVANNAH, Georgia - Cool, calm, collected in its preserved neoclassical and
colonial leafy charm, refusing to be reduced to an Old South theme park,
Savannah is regarded in elite circles in Europe as the most beautiful city in
North America. Here, in the first settlement in Georgia, the 13th and final
American colony, General William Tecumseh Sherman, at the end of the Civil War,
offered his "40 acres and a mule" to all liberated black slaves. Flannery
O'Connor penned literary masterpieces. Forrest Gump sat down in a movie prop -
a bus bench at Chippewa Square - musing that "life is like a box of chocolates,
you never know what you're gonna get" (tell that to Washington neo-cons). And
in two weeks, the big circus of the Group of Eight (G8) summit of
industrialized nations will land in Savannah with all its might.
Savannah is terribly worried. The summit itself will be 120 kilometers away, on
pristine and isolated Sea Island, but the bulk of the army of sherpas,
diplomats, journalists and security will be posted among Savannah's magnificent
mansions and manicured squares. Dan Flynn, the chief of police, does not want
the quaint city of 130,000 turned into a "war zone": there will be protests -
in Forsyth Park, modeled after the Place de la Concorde in Paris and close to
the historic center. Fearful local merchants are "overreacting", according to
Flynn, and want to shut downtown businesses. Some want an Iraqi shutdown as
well. At Mrs Wilkes' Boarding House, a milestone of Southern cooking, this
opinion is offered with no irony: "On June 30, we should declare victory, bring
the soldiers home, maybe retire some people at the Pentagon and let Fox News
spread the word that we prevailed."
Late at night, in the rolling back roads of Georgia on the way to Dublin, the
only thing open for business is church business. "We support our troops" signs
are not uncommon. President George W Bush's "evildoers" rhetoric finds ample
echo among churchgoers. Only one of them, late at night on Highway 80, sees a
problem with Bush placing a large part of the world on a morally lower plane
than the United States, thus transposing "our rightful actions" against
al-Qaeda into a crusade against the Islamic world.
Savannah is intimately related to its US Army base, Fort Stewart. This is where
Sergeant Camilo Mejia was recently court-martialed and sentenced as a deserter
- a verdict most of Savannah agrees with. Mejia was a green-card (work permit
for foreigners) holder from Nicaragua who joined the army to learn more about
US society. The war in Iraq horrified him. He offered to testify before
Congress about torture of prisoners he saw at Al Assad last May, months before
the Abu Ghraib scandal. Todd Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier, an anti-war
group supporting military personnel, is furious: "They tried Camilo for
refusing to go back, he doesn't want to torture people. Yet they are trying
Private Jeremy Sivits because he did torture people."
Super-Rangers in the house
Georgia is very much in George W Bush's mind - and this is not the sound of Ray
Charles singing. Last month, at the deluxe Ritz-Carlton Lodge, Reynolds
Plantation, 75 minutes south of Atlanta, Bush was the superstar in front of 300
guests, some of the most powerful individuals in the United States, including
the landowning and developing Reynolds family of Georgia. The guests all but
snubbed 81 holes of golf, an imperial spa and plenty of fishing, boating and
skiing on placid lake Oconee to sit in a conference room and listen to Bush.
They are the people who finance the bulk of his multimillion-dollar re-election
campaign (US$200 million so far, and counting): they are known as the Pioneers
(those who collect up to $100,000), the Rangers (up to $200,000) and now the
Super-Rangers (who have up to August 15 to collect $250,000 or more).
Pioneers, Rangers and Super-Rangers are no less than the people who virtually
own the US if Bush is re-elected: the embodiment of a totally mercantilized
electoral process. Many are rewarded with prominent roles inside the federal
government. Their companies or multinationals are awarded fat federal contracts
worth billions of dollars, and of course benefit from ultra-friendly
legislation - especially concerning energy and air pollution.
According to Texans for Public Justice, a monitoring group, there are, for now,
630 Bush super-donors. Almost 20 percent hail from financial circles, and 18
percent are lawyers and lobbyists. Almost 25 percent got a job in the Bush
administration (this includes 24 ambassadors and two members of the cabinet).
In 2002, according to the group's research, more than $3.5 billion in federal
contracts were awarded to 101 companies: among them there were 123 Pioneers or
Rangers. A total of 146 Bush super-donors have been involved in corporate
scandals, or have lent a helping hand to companies involved in scandals - be it
in Texas (the Enron debacle), on Wall Street, or regarding air-pollution and
health issues. The Super-Rangers were launched only at the Ritz-Carlton
meeting, but there are already 25 of them.
Bush was again back in Georgia more than a week ago, along with Republican
Machiavelli Karl Rove. They stayed for only four hours, first in a deluxe gated
community in Atlanta where Bush hosted a garden reception at the house of
Robert Nardelli, the chief executive officer of Home Depot; then Bush was the
guest of honor at a packed $25,000-per-person dinner (menu: steak, potatoes and
vegetables).
Savannah was holding its breath, waiting for Bush to outline his "clear
strategy" on Iraq. World leaders, including such allies as Britain's Tony Blair
and Japan's Junichiro Koizumi, and very reluctant allies such as France's
Jacques Chirac, Germany's Gerhard Schroeder and Russia's Vladimir Putin, who
will meet with him in Georgia for the June 8-10 G8 summit, are holding their
breath as well: they are not exactly convinced by a "clear strategy" in which
the Bush administration keeps claiming it is fighting for democracy in Iraq
while it keeps 130,000 entrenched troops virtually running the place against
the will of the absolute majority of "the Iraqi people".
What is Bush to tell his peers about Muqtada al-Sadr? Shi'ite sources in holy
Najaf tell Asia Times Online that recently disgraced Ahmed Chalabi will soon
try to go to Najaf to install himself as mediator between the Sadrist movement
and the Americans. With an Iraqi street credibility of less than zero, it's
hard to see how any Shi'ite would trust him. But Chalabi is a wily operator,
confident that his Iraqi National Congress (INC) has plenty of solid Shi'ite
and Kurdish alliances.
The sources in Najaf emphasize that no Shi'ite at the moment can possibly be
seen as an ally of Washington against Muqtada. So the whole game is not for the
Shi'ites to choose between Muqtada and moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The real issue is to choose between Muqtada and proconsul Paul Bremer.
Bush and the Pentagon simply cannot admit that the Sadrists have already
achieved a victory of sorts. Whether he becomes a martyr or not - the Americans
still want him "dead or alive" - Muqtada's forces will fight until the de facto
end of the occupation. The war of resistance against the Americans, after the
"handover" of June 30, will be followed by some sort of civil war to bombard
whomever UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi installs as the new proconsul in
disguise. After that, in the long run, say the Najaf sources, an Iraqi Shi'ite
theocracy - not following the Khomeini model - is extremely possible.
This is not exactly what deputy defense secretary and longtime architect of the
war Paul Wolfowitz had in mind. And on top of it "their" (neo-con) man,
Chalabi, may become a Frankenstein. If he does not land in jail, Chalabi will
certainly run in the election next January as an Iraqi nationalist, with a
platform of virulently opposing the US occupation.
It always gets worse
The other members of the G8 will ask Bush: Can it get worse in Iraq? Yes, it
can. Abu Ghraib can be studied as one more perverse effect of the US obsession
with sex and pornography - a $10-billion-plus-a-year industry - mixed with the
proliferation of reality shows, where every idiot has his own Andy Warhol-style
15 minutes of fame, including amateur torturers.
It can get much worse. British, French, Russian, Japanese intelligence
services, they all know that security in Iraq is a disaster. The reconstruction
process has virtually stopped. The Halliburton overcharging scandal won't go
away. And in a fascinating crossover of cinema and politics, Michael Moore's
scathingly anti-Bush Fahrenheit 9/11 has just become the first
documentary for almost half a century to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film
Festival.
"Can you think of any mistakes you have made as president?" This question was
posed to Bush at his last press conference in April. At the time, miraculously
no mistake came to mind. In Georgia, Chirac, Schroeder or Putin may dare to
pose the same question again, in private. It's unlikely they will get an
answer.
This leaves us with Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of
Michigan and one of the leading US experts on Iraq: "I said the other day I
thought Bush was pushing Europe to the left with his policies. I think he is at
the same time pushing the Shi'ite world to the radical right, and I fear my
grandchildren will still be reaping the whirlwind that George W Bush is sowing
in the city of Imam Hussein [a reference to F-16s bombing Karbala]. I concluded
in early April that Bush had lost Iraq. He has by now lost the entire Muslim
world."
Two weeks from now, Bush may have lost the rest of the world as well. Maybe
Forrest Gump could help.
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Georgia
on his mind
