Bush's Desolate Imperium
counterpunch.com
Ah, the ease with which George W. Bush attracts superlatives! Helen Thomas calls him "the worst president ever." A kinder, gentler Jonathan Chait ranks him "among the worst presidents in US history." No such restraint from Paul Berman, who brands him "the worst president the US has ever had." Nobel Laureate George Akerlof rates his government as the "worst ever." Even Bushie du jour, Christopher Hitchens, calls the man "unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things." Only Fidel Castro, it would appear, has had kind words for our 43rd President. "Hopefully, he is not as stupid as he seems, nor as Mafia-like as his predecessors were."
Abroad, the image of the United States has never been worse. Ever. While the horrors of 9/11 prompted an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy for the US worldwide, Bush squandered it all away and morphed "America the Benevolent Giant" into "America the Shrill Bully." Bush's vision of a dog-eat-dog Hobbesian universe in which the US plays by its own rules is repellent to most nations. For all its shortcomings, the rule of international law has vital resonance to many: For Europeans it signifies the historical end of warfare as the preferred means of resolving disputes; for their former colonies it is a shield against the White Man's insufferable itch to force his wisdom down their throats. For weak nations it offers a deterrent against stronger neighbors. For all it promises the dignity of being heard and treated as equals on a global stage. International law might well be the worst form of utopia except, that is, for all others that have been tried.
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Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and author of The Discrepancy Method: Randomness and Complexity. |
