| It’s a funny old world….
President George W. Bush seeks $87 billion from Congress to help rebuild Iraq. Fair enough, I suppose. After all, that’s roughly the amount the U.S. spent on bombing the country in the first place, so I guess that just about evens things up.
But wait a minute – $87 billion? That’s an awful lot of money. That’s roughly one per cent of the United States’ entire gross domestic product. More than 10 per cent of all the wealth generated in Canada each year. Or, perhaps more to the point, almost eight times the annual economic output of Iraq itself.
Eighty-seven billion dollars. More than $13 for every man, woman and child on the planet. Or, and again more pertinently, that’s equal to 20 per cent of the total debt currently owed by the world’s 47 poorest countries – countries with no hope of ever getting out of the red (see www.worldwatch.org/press/news/2001/04/26/). The moral? Don’t go begging to the International Monetary Fund for money – just start a war with the U.S. instead.
Most of this $87 billion, of course, will end up back in the pockets of U.S.-based commercial companies that, even as the war with Iraq was being waged, were lining up to secure reconstruction contracts. And after all, Iraq does have access to plenty of oil to help meet any bills it’s presented by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. So it’s really a shell game as far as the money goes, with Bush giving Congress the old "nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say-no-more" routine.
Such cynical thoughts occurred to me last week, as I watched the inevitable public mourning of the second anniversary of 9-11. The sadness, the grief, the anger, the resolve – all were on display again, much as they were last year. But this time around, I got the sense that such emotions were being trotted out more as a matter of duty than out of true passion, as if it were the final third of a Dr. Phil show, perhaps, with everyone knowing their part – when to gasp, when to laugh, when to clap and so on, all on cue. When individuals who’d lost relatives in the attack appeared on TV, parroting a desire to "achieve closure," it was as if a lifetime of exposure to such banal phrases had robbed them of the ability to express any real feelings. As if it were possible that, not this year, perhaps, but maybe next, the horrors of that day could fade away and cease to provoke tears of sorrow and rage.
But that’s the American way. No tragedy is too great to be turned into a melodrama. No event is too complex to render into a two-hour made-for-TV-movie. Thank God for Jessica Lynch, producers and politicians sang out in unison: now we’ll be able to run a proper Touchstone version of the war – we were beginning to worry for a moment.
The prospect of "Saving Private Lynch," of course, is a poor substitute for the movie that Bush no doubt had in mind when the war began. His post-9-11 evocation of Saturday mornings spent watching old westerns, where all ambiguities and moral relativities were boiled down to a simple "Wanted: Dead or Alive" poster, was a reflection of how he saw the world. Round up a posse – Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz – and go git ’em. Trouble is, of course, that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein misread the script and failed to leave much of a trail (at least, not one that the multi-billion dollar U.S. surveillance industry has managed to follow).
Indeed, it even looks like the posse is getting a little tired. Maybe it’s time to call in the cavalry. You know, the one run by those law-abiding, old-world types – the French, the Germans and all the other United Nations sticklers for due process. After all, if they were opposed to the U.S.-led assault on Iraq, then surely they must welcome any plan to help repair all the damage and restore that country to its pre-war status. Just don’t expect too much of a say in the way things are going to be run from now on. Business as usual, in other words.
Except things have changed. Even if the French and Germans do – willingly or otherwise – agree to a renewed UN effort to stabilize Iraq, the damage has been done. Open U.S. disregard – no, disdain – for the UN and what it stands for will not be easy to forget. We now know well what it’s like to live in a world dominated by a single superpower. Armed with a fistful of dollars and guided only by a "hang-’em-high" spaghetti-western brand of morality, the U.S. is strutting off down main street, seeing enemies lurking behind all the shuttered windows.
Run for the hills…. |
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