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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The world and
Virginia Tech By John Brown
killed 30 people in cold blood; in
the president's case, what followed, of course,
was the invasion of Iraq, where the casualty
figures, high as they are, are not yet fully in.
The Bush propaganda campaign of 2002-03 to
convince the American people that the Butcher of
Baghdad was a WMD (weapons of mass destruction)
demon reached its apotheosis in a made-for Fox
News "shock and awe" spectacular over Baghdad
(which was, to say the least,
not well received abroad). This brutal
sound-and-light show - meant to give Americans the
sense of getting back at those who "hated" the US
by hitting them hard and mercilessly - seems, when
I put on my overseas eyeglasses, eerily
reminiscent of Cho's videos of himself as a mean
21st-century gunslinger, ready to shoot all those
who he dreamed did him wrong.
As someone
who lived and served outside my own beloved
country for so many years, a second link between
Cho's actions and George W Bush's policies
appeared quite evident to me. The Blacksburg
murders caused enormous grief and sadness
throughout a community Cho felt had never accepted
him. Distraught students have been offered
counseling by the university, so shaken are some
by what they experienced. The results of Bush's
preemptive military strikes have been no less
disruptive and unnerving, but of course on a
regional, if not global, stage. Tens or hundreds
of thousands of innocent people have lost their
lives because of his rash wars - and his
administration has shown little pity for refugees
from this destruction seeking shelter as best they
could elsewhere. (Iraqi refugees have been all but
barred from the United States.)
As Cho
disrupted a small, defenseless university town in
Virginia that had welcomed him, Bush has
dislocated a whole society that was not
threatening the United States. Seen from an
overseas perspective, there is, as with Cho and
his "enemy", something megalomaniacal as well as
delusional about the president's identification of
a vast Soviet-style Islamo-fascist foe that the US
armed forces are supposed to face down in the
"global war on terror".
Consider as well a
third disturbing analogy that may not come
immediately to most American minds. Like Virginia
Tech, Iraq could be considered a repository of
culture and knowledge. Indeed, Saddam Hussein may
have been a cruel despot, but Mesopotamia, as
every American high-school student should know, is
widely considered by historians "the cradle of
civilization", the first "university" of
humankind, if you will.
George W Bush,
reflecting an attitude not unlike Cho's toward a
center of learning, showed not the slightest
concern or respect for the traditions of a country
whose achievements have so enriched the history of
humankind. Indeed, when the Baghdad National
Museum was pillaged (along with the National
Library and the Library of Korans) soon after the
US troops took the capital, the American
"liberators" simply stood by; Donald Rumsfeld,
then secretary of defense, reflecting on the
catastrophe, offered the now-infamous comment,
"Stuff happens."
Finally, Cho's suicidal
assault on a university community might bring to
mind the thought that Bush's assault on Iraq has
been no less suicidal - not for himself personally
but for the United States as a whole. Bush's
militarism and "bring 'em on" mentality helped
create an atmosphere conducive to violence that
Americans inflict not only on others, but also
upon themselves, leading to what might be seen
abroad as a kind of perpetual national suicidal
condition, examples of which appear all too
frequently, including in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Bluntly put, overseas the US government
(and, by association, the country as well) -
thanks in large part to Bush and his foreign
policy - is now widely considered the Cho of our
world, despite the often risible efforts of Karen
Hughes, the administration's Image Czarina, to
improve America's international standing through
what she calls the diplomacy of deeds. The fact of
the matter is that the president's deeds have led
other countries to see our government, in its
aggressive unilateralism, as unreliable, if not
deranged; obsessed beyond all reason with putative
enemies and globe-spanning organizations of
terrorists that despise us; ready to respond with
unjustified violence to any perceived slight;
unwilling to listen to, or accept, advice; and
unconcerned with the consequences of what it does,
even when this results in widespread death and
destruction in one of the birthplaces of
civilization, where Bush and his top officials now
pride themselves on their latest accomplishment, a
military "surge" that only seems to encourage
further mass murder.
Regrettably, I fear
that, after more than six years of George W Bush,
Baghdad and Blacksburg are, to many on our planet,
not that far apart. Woe to the diplomat who has to
explain us to the world today.
John
Brown, a former US foreign service officer,
served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade
and Moscow. He left the foreign service in March
2003 to express his opposition to President George
W Bush's war plans for Iraq. He now compiles the
"Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review",
available free by requesting it at
johnhbrown30@ hotmail.com.
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