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COMMENTARY
Boy president in a
failed world?
By Tom Engelhardt
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)
(Used by permission of Tomdispatch) |
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