| Bush Junior and the Bushites believe they have been blessed with the opportunity to make their mark on U.S. history. They have been given an enemy and a challenge to overcome. If they succeed, he becomes a great president.
How they plan to overcome the challenge and write Junior’s ticket to Mount Rushmore remains a mystery 15 months later. Making America safe for Americans is hardly a vision for a post-terrorist world – or, as is more likely, the terrorist stalemate world. But apparently, it is all Junior needs.
Questions about strategic direction are for doubters and liberals. A plan is not as important as maintaining the country’s resolve to do as it pleases. Junior’s clumsy efforts to sustain America’s patriotic fervour have the potential to unleash the strongest social forces America has seen in decades. It will not be pretty, but it might be Junior’s most lasting legacy.
In the meantime, Bush and the Bushites are doing little more than reinstating a hodge-podge of anachronistic policies from post-Second World War administrations, all of which are consistent only in their unilateral and confrontational nature.
While U.S. foreign policy gets all the airplay in Canada, it is domestic policy that elects presidents. Deeply aware of the results of the autopsy on his father’s 1992 election defeat, Junior will do all in his power to avoid a recession. As a result, when his economic team blinked at implementing another round of deficit-stimulating tax cuts, he fired them. The new folks will be sure to bring in another $100 billion-plus in personal and corporate tax cuts.
It is Reaganomics born again – tax cuts, ballooning deficits and Pentagon budgets, and belt-tightening everywhere else. The result will be an enormous jump in the U.S. deficit to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) from .5 per cent to an almost Canada-like 3.1 per cent. U.S. officials have promised to make up some of the lost tax revenue by streamlining social programs such as Medicare. It makes a person feel warm and fuzzy all over.
Junior is also borrowing from Reagan’s efforts to win Christian conservative votes by beating up the rest of the world on issues too thorny to tackle at home. At a United Nations family-planning conference in Bangkok, the U.S. revived its unilateral efforts to impose an anti-abortion policy. The Bushites already withheld of $34 million U.S. in funding to the UN family-planning program, and now they want to renegotiate a 1994 UN agreement to remove any language that might be tied to abortion.
In a doomed effort by the Republicans to placate U.S. anti-abortionists, the U.S. is delaying the UN’s work on HIV and AIDS even further. It makes a person feel warm and fuzzy all over.
Junior and his disciples turn to another golden age for guidance on their foreign policy. Before the agonizing downward spiral of the Vietnam era, post-Second World War U.S. foreign policy was built on a belief it had an almost free hand to right the world’s wrongs with unilateral military or covert action if necessary.
CIA-sponsored assassinations, unilateral military action, and using bags of cash to incite insurrection in other countries were trademarks of U.S. foreign policy in the late ’40s and ’50s. Bush administrators have not been shy in comparing their situation with the immediate post-war period, although they fail to point out that the U.S. policy-makers of the post-war period had a much clearer idea of the world they were trying to create.
There is another parallel between today and the early Cold War – the Bushites’ pandering to the causes of conservative groups, organized veterans, patriotic groups and other 100 per cent American societies in exchange for their support of the confrontational and interventionist foreign policy. It might be central to the Bushites’ war effort, but the cynical use of these forces to maintain support of the war effort will be left to historians to document.
For now, Junior simply calls it patriotism – Samuel Johnson’s last refuge of a scoundrel. In the ’50s, it was called anti-communism. The Truman administration fostered its growth as a conservative social movement because it created grassroots support for the administration’s geo-political goals. In the end, the movement consumed the politics of the time and became the nasty upheaval known as McCarthyism.
The events of September 11 created all the support Junior and the Bushites need for their geo-political goals. To maintain that support, the Bushites have gone further than the Truman administration in explicit support of exposing-the-enemy-within programs. If the 2004 presidential election is at all competitive, the Bushites will fan the flames as high as they can.
The only question is where will the conservative social upheaval end this time?
ONLINE RESOURCES
· www.globalsecurity.org – Loads of factual information on U.S. military policy.
· www.covenantnews.com – Current Christian conservative news and thought. Not for the faint of heart.
· www.etherzone.com – Go right, young man – no, further right. |
