Re: [Leica] Real War

[Johnny Deadman <lists@johnbrownlow.com>]

On Monday, January 20, 2003, at 10:02  PM, Sam Krneta wrote:

> And you are from where John? Do you pay attention to your politics or 
> just
> dabble in ours?

As a Brit living in Canada and watching US network and cable TV every 
day I think I have quite a rounded perspective.

I am still amazed at the extraordinary disparity between the way the 
'war' (as it is always called on CNN) is reported in US media and 
around the world. Americans who only consume domestic US media 
certainly cannot be blamed for knowing the extraordinarily bad effect 
current US foreign policy is having on the reputation of the US 
worldwide. I have seen vehement anti-American administration (as 
opposed to anti-American) editorials in both Canadian and British 
newspapers recently, and one hardly dare suggest looking at the 
comments that are coming out of Germany at the moment.

John le Carre's recent London Times article was approvingly syndicated 
worldwide and will give you the flavour. It sounds quite extreme 
("America has gone mad"), until you start reading around it and realize 
he is actually quite measured by comparison with other European 
commentators (Bush is openly compared with Hitler in Germany, for 
example).

The opening paragraph gives you the flavor. "America has entered one of 
its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can 
remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the 
long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War."

Here is the full article.

	http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-543296,00.html

Please note I am not making a value judgement here. I am just pointing 
out how different the domestic and international viewpoints of this 
situation are. I do believe that Americans need to confront this 
disparity.  I do not believe that CNN or Fox news are helping them to 
do this.

The corollary of this is that the so-called coalition is nothing of the 
sort. The US has essentially no allies in its current tub-thumping 
campaign. Blair's support is now worthless because his government is 
split and there is no desire whatsoever among ordinary Britons for war. 
In Canada it is the same. France and Germany even more so. And from 
there it just gets worse.

The double standard that is used to judge N Korea and Iraq is blazingly 
obvious to those on the outside. The equation is devastatingly simple. 
Iraq: lots of oil, no smoking gun. N Korea: no oil, lots of smoking 
guns.

You can dismiss me as a liberal, a left-winger, anti-American and you 
would be wrong on all counts. I just happen to believe that we are 
seeing a failure of US foreign policy of Titanic proportions, which may 
end in a war whose consequences are unimaginably bad for the US, as 
well as the rest of the world. It is one thing for the US to pursue a 
policy of isolationism. That has a certain logic to it. Acting as the 
UN's enforcer also has a certain logic to it. But acting as a enforcer 
AND being simultaneously isolationist is terrifyingly dangerous and the 
fact that many intelligent Americans do not understand why it is 
perceived as expansionist and imperialist shows a massive twin failure 
of imagination and indigenous journalism.

One aspect of all of this that has hardly been touched upon is the 
extraordinary convenience of the fact that the so-called 'war on 
terrorism' has allowed Bush to spend the vast amounts of money he needs 
to prevent deflation without a whisper of complaint. I commend him 
thoroughly for doing this because with its current debt load, deflation 
in the US would bring about a global economic catastrophe. The only 
comfort I can wring out of all this is that, in terms of spending 
money, preparations for war are just as good as war, so maybe it will 
stop there.

Of course if the US were to devote 1% of its military budget to 
developing fuel cell and photovoltaic technology, it could probably 
reduce its reliance on middle eastern fossil fuels dramatically in the 
next 15-20 years. But again, that failure of imagination.

Feel free to shoot the messenger.

JB

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