'From the day of our founding'
Bush revises history in Inaugural Address; latest example of delusion
Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate
01.25.05 - AUSTIN, Texas -- A substantial nit to pick with President Bush's
second Inaugural Address and some questions about his theme.
"From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman
on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they
bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations we
have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to
be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."
Oh dear. It took us almost 100 years to get rid of slavery right here in
the Land of the Free, it took us another 100 years to get rid of legal
discrimination based on race and gender, and how long it will take us to
achieve equal opportunity for all in this country no one can say. At least
we're working at it. Or we were.
The Bush theme of what someone else christened "evangelical democracy" is
rather like the "From the day of our founding ..." passage -- actually,
it's more complicated than that. I, too, am happy to proselytize for
freedom and democracy, but I don't think we can export it by force and I
don't think we can expect the world to accept our noble intentions.
Nor is democracy necessarily the cure for terrorism. As a British
journalist pointed out, if Britain had been following the Bush plan, it
would have nuked us years ago for being the largest single source of money
for the Irish Republican Army. Reality is so often much more complicated
than George W. Bush thinks it is.
Saddam Hussein was about as nasty a dictator as you can find. So why didn't
the Iraqis welcome us with flowers? Because we invaded their country and
are now occupying it. It is extremely difficult to convince people that you
are killing them (and torturing them) for their own good. How would you
feel? The British medical magazine Lancet estimates Americans have now
killed about 20,000 Iraqis. We don't know for sure, because America has
several policies that prevent anyone from keeping an accurate count.
Unfortunately, because of the violence in Iraq, we have achieved very
little in the way of reconstruction there, so many Iraqis are actually
worse off today, in terms of basic services like water and electricity,
than they were under Saddam Hussein. We can still hope that the elections
work out well in most of the country, but it's silly to say things are
going well in Iraq, as some of my more delusional colleagues claim.
Actually, we have already tried foreign policy based on idealism: In one
case, it didn't work worth a damn, and in the second, it produced pretty
handsome results based on a pragmatic application of principle.
The first great foreign policy idealist in the presidency was Woodrow
Wilson, everyone else having pretty much stuck to the Monroe Doctrine (pace
our unfortunate venture into the Philippines, a sort of early Vietnam).
Wilson got us into the insanely named "War to End War." (As A.J. Muste, the
great pacifist, observed, "The way to peace is through peace.")
After that hideous slaughter, Wilson signed a treaty that set up the same
war to happen all over again 20 years later. He was famously unable to get
his own Senate to join the doomed League of Nations.
A rather better effort was made by Jimmy Carter, who based much of his
foreign policy on human rights, the equivalent of Bush's "freedom." This
consistent emphasis, applied over time, resulted in every country in Latin
America (though not Central America) becoming a democracy.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world is skeptical of Bush's benign intent,
mostly because he invaded a country that not only hadn't done anything to
us, but also was no threat to us. (There is a new line on the right that
goes, "But everybody in the whole world was saying Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction." Actually, everybody wasn't. Hans Blix and the
U.N. inspectors had been unable to find any, even though we claimed we knew
exactly where they were and had pictures of them. Quite a few people were
beginning to doubt the existence of WMD, and what "everybody in the world"
was saying at the time we went to war was, "Give the inspectors more time."
In retrospect, it was quite good advice, wasn't it?)
At other points in the speech, one was left wondering, as one so often is,
about Bush's grip on reality. Talking about his "ownership society," he
said, "By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will
give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our
society more prosperous and just and equal."
He's delusional: He cannot possibly believe his tax cuts are making this
country more just and equal -- they are making it more unjust and unequal
every day, not to mention getting us ever deeper into debt. One does not
provide "freedom from want and fear" by privatizing Social Security. We've
been there, we've done this -- we tried unregulated capitalism at the end
of the 19th century, and it was awful.
(c) 2004 Creators Syndicate
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18429
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