[Peace-discuss] Inauguration (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Comment from the former UK Foreign Secretary (roughly = Sec'y of State).
--CGE]

	Fireworks in Washington, despair around the world
	The Bush administration is in denial 
	about its disastrous failure in Iraq
	Robin Cook
	Friday January 21, 2005
	Guardian

Inauguration does not do justice to the exuberant celebrations of this
week. Coronation would come closer. Washington ended yesterday with nine
official balls. The night before George Bush gave a new spin to the phrase
moveable feast by fitting in three separate banquets. He then expended as
much ordnance in peppering the sky over the Capitol with fireworks as
would get his occupation forces in Iraq through a whole 24 hours.

The contrasts between this uninhibited triumphalism and the real world are
as wide as the American continent. One visible contrast was provided by
the demonstrators camping out on the streets to protest at such
extravagant waste by an administration waging its own jihad on programmes
against poverty on the grounds that the federal budget cannot afford
welfare. Yesterday, Bush gave a new spin on welfare cuts by presenting
them as progress to an ownership society. The thousands of wealthy donors
to the campaign to re-elect the president who turned up at those dinners
adore this concept of an ownership society in which they get hefty tax
cuts paid for by the poor who get their budgets cuts.

Then there is the sharp contrast between the self-indulgent hubris of the
festivity and the fragile political victory which it celebrated. Bush was
re-elected by the smallest margin in 100 years of those presidents who won
a second term. His approval ratings this week are the lowest ever plumbed
by any president at the date of his inauguration. But among the balls,
banquets and bangs there was not a hint of the humility that would be the
essential starting point for a process of healing the deep political
division of his nation. The message of the jubilations could not be
clearer. He won another four years and was going to enjoy them, while the
other side lost and was going to have to put up with it.

Lastly there is the biggest contrast of all between the smug complacency
of the administration over its electoral victory and the disastrous
military failure of its adventure in Iraq. Since George Bush was
re-elected over 200 more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Each new
day brings another 70 attacks on the occupation forces as the territory
dominated by the insurgents expands and the area which the occupiers can
safely patrol shrinks. This week a senior Kurdish leader, although a
supporter of the occupation, admitted that for a lot of its citizens, "the
Iraqi government exists only on television".

The lawless background to the forthcoming elections has imposed whole new
dimensions to the concept of a secret ballot. Most of the candidates will
remain a secret lest they are assassinated. Polling stations are kept
secret by the authorities lest they are blown up before election day in a
week's time.

Iraq was the flagship project of the Bush administration and has turned
into its greatest disaster. Yesterday's jollities cannot conceal the
brutal truth that they neither know how to make the occupation succeed nor
how to end it without leaving an even worse position behind. And, God help
us, thanks to the unshakeable loyalty of our prime minister, we are left
trapped in Basra shamed by the latest pictures of prisoner abuse and
dependent for any shift of strategy on decisions taken in Washington by an
administration that has repeatedly ignored British advice since its first
monumental blunder of disbanding the Iraqi army.

A successful search for a new strategy can only start with a recognition
that the present strategy has comprehensively failed. But the Bush
administration II that took office yesterday is stuffed with people who
are in denial about the dire situation of their forces occupying Iraq. In
the couple of months since election day, George Bush has promoted the very
people who thought conquering Iraq was a good idea and eased out anyone
with a record of worrying about the consequences. Thus Condoleezza Rice,
who was author of the alarmist claim that Saddam could produce a mushroom
cloud, replaces Colin Powell, who warned the president that if he broke
Iraq he would own the process of putting it back together again.

Perhaps wisely, those who crafted yesterday's inauguration speech hit the
erase button any time the word Iraq crept into the text. Sinai and the
Temple Mount got walk-on parts to provide biblical flavouring, but no
location of contemporary controversy in the region got a mention. The only
hint in the speech that there might be a war going on was a reverential
reference to the sacrifice and service of US troops. Piquantly, at this
point the television cameras cut away to a shot of Dick Cheney looking
suitably solemn, neatly reminding the informed viewer of the humbug of a
president and vice-president thanking US troops for facing dangers in Iraq
which they took care to avoid for themselves in Vietnam.

Not that Iraq was unusual in being left out of the script. There were no
specifics about anything else, either. Instead, we were invited to drift
along with a stream of generalities, untroubled by hard problems or
real-world solutions. Freedom and liberty are universal values. The
founding fathers of the US constitution, admirable though they may have
been, do not hold patent rights over those concepts. They are embedded in
the roots of the separate tradition of European social democracy and we
must not let George Bush appropriate them to provide an ideological cover
for his new imperialism.

Nor should we accept the implicit assumption of Bush's muscular foreign
policy that freedom can be delivered from 38,000ft through the bomb doors.
One of the rare passages of the speech when Bush appeared animated by his
own text, rather than engaged in formal recitation, was when he saluted
the declaration of independence and the sounding of the liberty bell. But
those were celebrations of freedom from foreign dominance - not to put too
fine a point on it, independence from the British. He needs to grasp that
other nations are just as attached to freedom from foreign intervention,
including domination by America.

The president and his speechwriters have yet to confront the tension
between their rhetoric about freedom, which is universally popular, and
their practice of projecting US firepower, which is resented in equal
measure. That explains why, on the very day when the president set forward
his mission to bring liberty to the world, a poll revealed that a large
majority of its inhabitants believe that he will actually make it more
dangerous. The first indication of whether they are right to worry will be
whether the Bush administration mediate their differences with Iran
through the state department or through the US air force.

r.cook at guardian.co.uk
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005