Opinion: Arrogant, Tone-Deaf and Out of Touch

[hollister]

In light of recent discussions... I offer the following opinion piece -

Opinion: Arrogant, Tone-Deaf and Out of Touch

Tom Halsted

Feb 25, 2006


After the story broke of Vice President Cheney’s accidental shooting of fellow hunter Harry Whittington in Texas, a friend of mine sent me an e-mail he had received from a soldier in Iraq. I quote from it here:
“ ‘The image of him falling is something I will never be able to get out of my mind,’ Cheney said. ‘I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life.’
“OK, I can admit that it is traumatic watching someone get shot (we don't have much time to dwell on it here though, as we have to help the shot soldier while we duck for cover ourselves and return fire)….As the Vice President of the United States, though, a man who was one of the top players in getting us into this war, he has asked a half million soldiers over the past three years to experience that exact incident. In some cases … multiple times. Lately it has been every other day.
“I have not seen any horror, self remorse, or concern in any interviews showing Cheney talking about soldiers killed in his war. I find it sad that he admits the worst day of his life is a day of hunting birds at a game club in rural Texas and someone ends up with superficial gunshot wounds. It does not compare very well to the medic who responded to an injured soldier’s call for help only to find it was one of his best friends, shot by a sniper. There was nothing the medic could do, the bullet was obviously fatal, and the medic held his friend in his arms while he died and bled onto the medic and a dusty garbage-strewn street in Iraq, 8,000 miles from his family.
“There are hundreds of other bad days like that here in Iraq. I can't even quantify a worst day anymore. There are 2,300 families who had soldiers in dress greens come to their front doors over the past few years to give the worst news one can get. Has Cheney ever had to deliver that news? Maybe we could work at giving Cheney a few days that might make the results of his hunting excursion seem a little less horrible. He and Mr. Bush are responsible for all the situations anyway. What better way to take ownership!……
“ Mr. Cheney's worst day in his wealthy life was a day of quail hunting gone bad. His worst day is better than many … soldiers’ best days ... here in Iraq.”
There may have been overreactions to the Vice President’s inexcusable behavior—not simply his misjudgment when he pulled the trigger, but also the long delay between the accident and his appearance before a friendly television commentator four days later. Comedians and cartoonists had (and are still having) a field day with the incident.
But that poignant, angry reaction from an American soldier in Iraq pointed a finger squarely at the central reason many Americans have deep misgivings about the leadership of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who just don’t see the disconnect between their personal behavior and their public actions. Washington Post commentator David Ignatius called it an arrogance of power -- “a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most righteous politicians and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment.”
That same tone-deafness arose again this week as the President announced that Dubai Ports World, a state-owned company in the United Arab Emirates, was to take over the management of six major American seaports (New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia)—facilities that the 9/11 Commission had pointed to as highly vulnerable to terrorist attack. The United Arab Emirates (although home to two of the 9/11 terrorists and to bankers that financed the 9/11 attacks) is unlikely to orchestrate or facilitate an Al Qaeda-like attack on New York or Baltimore; furthermore, many American port facilities have been operated by foreign companies for years. But the President’s announcement caught congressmen and senators totally by surprise, wondering whether it is appropriate for any foreign-owned company to control a vital part of the U. S. infrastructure, and how Bush, of all people could be ignoring a potential terrorist threat, a sure-fire red-hot political wedge issue he has owned for the past five years. Predictably, Democratic and Republican congressmen and Senators rushed to pass legislation requiring that all American seaports be managed and secured by U. S. firms. Amazingly, President Bush has vowed to veto any such legislation—the first veto he has ever threatened, let alone actually applied, in more than five years.
Naturally, the President’s adamant insistence on going ahead with such a politically volatile idea, including his veto threat, immediately raised new questions about why this particular transaction is so important to him, and about what hidden commitments the Bush-Cheney administration may have made to other players in the world of petro-politics—and what other surprises they may have in store.
The President and Vice-President resent any questioning of their authority to do whatever they want. We have been asked to accept it as the natural right of our commander-in-chief to wage pre-emptive wars justified by falsehoods, to imprison innocent persons without charges; to sanction torture even as he signs a bill prohibiting it; to conduct warrantless wiretaps because the existing statutory requirement to obtain legal authority, even after the fact, appears too cumbersome.
The Vice President’s clumsy behavior over the shooting incident and the President’s stubborn insistence on the port deal seem like small potatoes when compared to issues of war-making and the violations of national and international legal statutes and norms, but they are all of a piece: this administration’s leaders do not believe that the Constitution, or laws and standards of simple human decency apply to them when they find it inconvenient to follow them. This is the arrogance of power at work. It has blinded the President and Vice President. Let it not blind the rest of us.
www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=6712

[sciwriter]

IMO since all nations are interdependent, one "superpower" can't rule the world. Carl:

www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05walker.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

NY TIMES

March 5, 2006
'The Case for Goliath,' by Michael Mandelbaum
American World Order
Review by MARTIN WALKER
MICHAEL MANDELBAUM has taken all the fun out of an ostensibly flippant but
fundamentally serious diplomatic parlor game. Usually played late at night when
the Americans have gone home to prepare for their puritanically early start to
the day, the Europeans, Latin Americans and Asians take a second glass of Cognac
and imagine how awful the world could be if someone else were to take the place
of the United States as the global hegemon.
Eastern Europeans tell sad anecdotes about living under Russian dominance.
Western Europeans shudder at the thought of Germans running the benign and
virtual empire that the United States has maintained and expanded for the past
60 years. (And they murmur that within the European Union the French are already
being difficult enough.) The Latin Americans have their hands full with the
arrogance of next-door neighbors like Brazil without wanting to see it become
even more dominant. The idea of a Chinese hegemony sends shivers down the backs
of all, particularly the Japanese and Indians; somebody usually mentions the
mournful example of Tibet. The Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis react
equally unhappily to the idea of India as superpower. As the diplomats prattle
on, meanwhile, the British smile wryly and say they have been there, done that
and are extremely glad to have lost the T-shirt.
Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter professor of American foreign policy at the
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, pulls aside
the curtain of diplomatic civility to expose the crude and obvious reality that
everyone prefers to ignore, at least in public. He explains coolly and clearly
the various ways in which the United States now functions as a global
government, offering the planet the services of physical security, commercial
regulation, financial stability and legal recourse that are normally provided by
national governments to their citizens. Non-Americans naturally do not like to
admit this, even as they enjoy the results, and American leaders do not like to
spell it out, least of all to the voters who pay for it. But the evidence is
clear. The network of military alliances (like NATO) and trade pacts (like the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and international organizations (like
the United Nations and World Bank and Group of 8) that the United States was
mainly responsible for bringing to life has become an American-led global
management system. It is familiar, inclusive and fairly unobtrusive. Its
institutions provide a reasonable role for lesser powers, which is why the NATO
alliance of consent survived and expanded while the wretched conscripts of the
Warsaw Pact rebelled.
Above all, this system has been a remarkable and seductive economic success.
Having built the tripartite trading structure of the modern world (North
America, Western Europe and Japan) to enrich its citizens and allies and sustain
the cold war, the generous Americans have expanded it to include the Asian
tigers and Eastern Europeans. Now 1.3 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians
are clambering up the food chain to prosperity. They deal in dollars, raise
money in the New York and London financial markets, generate big trade surpluses
with the United States and then send their brighter and most ambitious children
to American graduate and business schools, where they are exposed to the
creeping osmosis of the Western value system. This is a magnificently benign
loop, and will continue to be so once those American-trained graduates figure
out how the biosphere is going to handle tens of millions of Asians living the
American lifestyle, with their own cars and air conditioning and fast food.
This international system, an improved and democratized version of the clunky
British model that brought us the 19th-century wave of globalization, is
designed to operate to American comfort and profit, while securing compliance by
sharing security and prosperity with others. But it is no longer doing so quite
as reliably as it once did. Trade imbalances and the Bush administration's
fiscal policies are putting it in jeopardy. Mandelbaum says the American pattern
of energy consumption is "the worst 21st-century international offense of the
United States." He adds that "the greatest threat to the American role as the
world's government comes not from the discontent it generates in other
countries, or from the assaults of terrorists, but from the huge bill for social
spending that the American public will have to pay in the 21st century, a
responsibility that has the potential to transform American politics in other
ways unfavorable to the continuation of that role."
Moreover, traditional beneficiaries of the American system increasingly complain
that the United States is no longer running it well. The first sign of the
British system's global utility was its suppression of piracy in the 18th
century and of the slave trade in the 19th. Even with the world's largest and
most technologically advanced navy, the United States is no longer effectively
policing the world's seas. Piracy is rife in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and
around the Strait of Malacca, and America's stewardship is failing in important
areas like climate change and drug trafficking. The global governor has some
fairly basic global responsibilities, which include enforcing the rules that
everyone has to obey, Americans included. That is why the rest of the world is
angry at the Bush administration's rejection of the International Criminal
Court, and its use of the aid weapon to punish small countries that refuse to
grant Americans a waiver from the court's provisions.
Mandelbaum does not dwell overlong on the grisly intervention in Iraq, but he is
confident that while the world grumbles, it will tolerate Goliath's occasional
misadventures, so long as it retains a broader respect for the United States as
the indispensable stabilizing power. America survived the ignominy of the
1960's, when Vietnam and Selma and Watts combined to discredit its international
image and it became fashionable to talk of a moral equivalence between the
United States and the Soviet Union. The country is undergoing a similar travail
today, made the more offensive and glaring in foreign eyes by the Bush
administration's clumsy abuse of power. The White House has crudely dispensed
with the founding fathers' "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" to tell
the inhabitants of the rest of the world that they are either with Washington or
against it.
Nonetheless, as Mandelbaum argues, there is no credible alternative to the
American role as linchpin and guarantor of the global system. Nobody else has
the political will, the military and economic clout and the ability to generate
sufficient international consent. Rising regional powers like China, Brazil and
the European Union may be jostling to win some more room to maneuver, and the
global crowd may be grousing more fiercely about the performance of the American
Goliath, but as Mandelbaum shows, the most serious threats are being generated
at home. This is what worries the players of the late-night parlor games,
because however long the American-led system may last, they would most fervently
agree with Mandelbaum's three closing predictions: "They will not pay for it;
they will continue to criticize it; and they will miss it when it is gone."
Martin Walker is the editor of United Press International and a senior fellow of
the World Policy Institute at the New School.

[Jaga]

Carl,

interesting posts. When I saw the title without even seeing the body of the first message - it reminded me of Cheney,,,

[sciwriter]

Jaga, good point! Carl

[nancy]

I can read only one long post at a time, so I read the one that Chris (Hollister) started with. Very good post, Chris! I think there have been powerful people throughout history who acted the same way - playing while sending other men into danger - human nature has not changed one bit. This is one reason I do not like ANY politician, because any one who wants that power surely should not have it.

[bescheid]

Nancy

Boy, my self at first, only read the enital posting of Carl, then after reading your post, I was so compeled to dig through the second reading.

Well, either one or both, propaganda and the world of misinformation is very apparant in both readings. In this instance, it is not the intelectual content, it is the emotional bend of the writers to use and lead the reader into thier net of thought.

I think perhaps all those years of proofing out my own little short stories called reports and pre-briefing, may be becoming an asset after all. Or, perhaps maybe, those loused years of questionable living, experience and training placed a perminant warp upon my brain waves.

Charles

[bescheid]

Carl

Please not to be offended by my warped and disgusting remarks in concerns of your presentation. It is not to you that my thoughts and remarks are aimed at, it is toward the writers.

You must keep to your presentations, ok?

As the bringer of the sound, only the bell is at fault if the notes are sour.

Charles