Before I get emails to give grief over this post, let me make myself clear. I am not and never have been anything other than pro US, pro British and anything else other than ready to go and do my bit. I say that now as I did then….because I know my thoughts. However, I dont brainwash people and therefore post articles that I find interesting. I am giving you the chance to read these, cos you might not normally. Up those that judge without comment.

In Ulysses, James Joyce disparagingly describes Americans as “the scrapings” of the world. Nearly 100 years after Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus navigated Dublin’s streets, George Bush, of all people, has exacted revenge. In his view, as set out in a definitive new document, US National Security Strategy, just about everybody now wants to be American.
The whole world, Mr Bush argues, is “increasingly united by common values” and “common interests”- and these values and interests, it transpires, are America’s own. He recasts humanity’s entire history as a struggle between an absolute, Founding Father-style concept of freedom and “war, terror, poverty… and the evil designs of tyrants”. Mr Bush (and advisers such as Condoleezza Rice) find, unsurprisingly, that America is uniquely equipped to fight and finally win this battle. After the defeat of communism and fascism, the US represents the “single sustainable model for national success”, declares this philosopher-president. He deems it “our common calling” and a proud “mission”. And like it or not, we are all putative, co-opted Americans now, or else non-persons, to be sustained by a US-tilted “balance of power that favours freedom” and protected by America’s “unparalleled military strength”.

The strategy paper collates Mr Bush’s earlier treatises on weapons of mass destruction, the fate awaiting terrorists and their “rogue state” sponsors, the self- given right to launch pre-emptive attacks, and the determination of the US to defend itself unilaterally if allies or multilateral organisations such as the UN cannot or will not furnish “coalitions of the willing”. It is a document of sweeping scope, untroubled by self-consciousness or nuance. It champions global free trade and environmental protection, unabashed by the contradictions of current US policies. It trumpets alliances such as Nato while unintentionally demonstrating that their importance derives from the degree to which they further US interests. It promotes the creation of global standards and rights yet pointedly rejects the International Criminal Court.

This Bush doctrine is by turns arrogant, patronising, complacent, amazingly presumptuous - but above all, aggressive. It brooks no opposition. It will tolerate no perceived threat. In the world according to George Bush, an irresistible America, convinced of its rightness and its altruism, always decides. Fatally, but in the true, naive American tradition, this doctrine is deaf to history, oblivious to consequences, and wondrously lacking in self-knowledge. But those who ask what, in the shorter term, is in store (and not just in Iraq) should read this document. It marks the moment when the US, shifting up from superpower to hyperpower, unveiled the new age of the have-a-nice-day totalitarians. It’s official: the US rules the world.

Leader
Tuesday September 24, 2002