[If you haven’t done so already, read this post first.]
“If you want to buy me a t-shirt, get me that ‘I Still Hate George Bush’ one,” Adi told me last night, while I was buying a late birthday gift for my sister (Happy Birthday, Sue! I love you!).
My wife, in case any of you are new this site, is a furiner. She grew up in one of those old commie countries — Hungary, to be precise. So she brings a different perspective to our domestic politics. Don’t get me wrong, she cried her eyes out on September 11, but she’s never bought into the whole rah-rah America thing, before or since. And I can hardly blame her. I grew up with old-school lefty parents, and five years of living in Hungary gave me some perspective on how the rest of the world sees our country (I accidentally first typed “company”).
To her credit, she never once suggested we “had it coming” and reviled those who did. But she has always been disgusted by America’s arrogance in the world, which Bush embodies (for her, anyway) to a T. My own feelings on this pending war and the general screwed up state of the world are so muddled, I try to avoid blogging much about politics so I don’t sound like just another helpless whiner. I keep working over in my mind some statement of my stance on all of it, but I can’t make up my mind what I believe, so I keep it to myself. Blogging about her opinion, however, is a different matter.
In particular, she wanted me to point out here that she is outraged over this story in the Times about Bush’s new doctrine on the balance of world power, specifically the point that says “The strategy document will also state, for the first time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be challenged the way it was during the cold war.”
It’s a strange discussion that entails. So, the better alternative would be to allow another military power to create the kind of polar tensions we lived through during the Cold War? The world would be better served by another country or set of allies having the military might to challenge the U.S.? Which ones?
No, that’s not what she’s saying, but where does the U.S. get off telling China or other sovereign countries that they do not have the right to build up their military to credibly defend themselves?
Even on the subject of Iraq, her biggest opposition to the planned invasion is that the sanctity of Iraq’s sovereignty makes it wrong in principal for the U.S. to insist on regime change. For me, that argument doesn’t hold a lot of weight, considering Saddam’s record invading and massacring his neighbors and own citizens.
I’m reminded of a neighbor when I was a kid, I’ll call him Mr. T. He was a stock broker and a drunk who regularly beat up his wife and at least one of his three sons, all my little pals. He also liked guns. More than once, he held the entire neighborhood hostage. On one occasion, the mother fled with the sons, and Mr. T. went on a binge for several days, walking around on the front lawn waving a pistol and shooting squirrels off the electric wires. Incredibly, the police wouldn’t come out for several days. This was in the early ’70s. They said that unless he actually shot at someone, they didn’t want to get involved. I remember driving with my dad and having to duck down in the car as we sped passed the T. house. Eventually, the cops came out in full SWAT gear and talked him out. The family moved back in and life went on as normal until a few years later she finally divorced him and, incredibly, the kids went and lived with him. I wish the police had intervened sooner, frankly, before the nut shot at me, for example, or another neighbor. The guy was a menace and not entitled to the same good-neighbor policies as the rest of us.
Adrienne, however, may have a different point of view on sovereignty owing perhaps in part to Hungary’s history, 1,000 years spent mostly under the knuckles of one or another unwanted oppressor.
The U.S. hawks see taking Saddam out as necessary prudence facing a mad ruler in a perilous technological age. Others around the world see it as humiliating paternalism, hypocrisy and a betrayal of the rule of law. Why, after all, is it okay for the U.S. to have been making chemical and biological weapons all these years, as we now know to be the case, but it’s not okay for other countries like Iraq to do so? That’s a tricky one. Because…we’re good and their evil? That’s about how Bush would sum it up, I suppose.
I still can’t make up my mind whether I think the war with Iraq is a good idea or not, all things considered. It’s a Sophie’s Choice. Regardless of whether it’s the right thing to do, I believe it’s inevitable. Bush has gone too far with it at this point to back down and, idiot-asshole that he is, he’s our idiot-asshole, and I’d still have to go with him in a fight against Saddam. I just wish the Europeans and the other allies would hurry up and get on board at this point, because it’s going down with or without them, and we’re all going to be much worse off if they don’t come along. That’s just the pragmatist in me.
What I will, say, though, is that I believe Bush is squandering whatever moral authority America still had with the world a year ago. America is supposed to represent a country based on the rule of law, not of men. But from Enron to Carlyle to Big Oil to Poindexter to Skull & Bones and the Bush family history and on and on, there are way too many special exceptions to the rules and legitimate, let’s say “conflicts of interest” going on in this administration for it to be an example to the world of anything but empire building in the name of…of what, exactly?
Did you listen to Andrei Codrescu’s poem “9/11″? It’s brutal.
So yes, Honey, I’m with you on this much: I Still Hate George Bush, too.
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