AN IRISH REFLECTION ON BUSH VISIT
It's so refreshing to read the foreign press in regards to their perceptions of the Bush Administration . Not only is the writing clear and unfiltered but it offers a valuable and needed perspective of ourselves.
An excellent example is Tom McGurk's , The Irish Post , brilliant reflection on Bush's visit to Ireland last weekend.
Allen L Roland
A tale of two visits
JUNE 27, 2004
By Tom McGurk
http://www.thepost.ie/
Kennedy came in glory, Bush came in guilt. Has anyone spotted the ironic significance of yesterday's date, June 26?
On June 26, 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy arrived at Dublin airport aboard Air Force One for a triumphant Irish visit. Yesterday, June 26, 2004, President George W Bush left Shannon Airport on Air Force One having spent 19 hours in an armed camp.
41 years ago, thousands upon thousands of Irish people lined the streets to give Kennedy an ecstatic welcome. Yesterday, the Irish public had to be kept away with barbed wire as tanks and ground-to-air missiles provided protection for President Bush.
Could the comparison be more vivid, could two presidents have come to us amid scenes and emotions of greater contrast?
Even allowing for the sentiment involved in the Kennedy visit, and for the entirely different place Ireland was 41 years ago, the political and social contrasts are still compelling.
Whereas Kennedy was celebrating our rich historical and cultural link with the Irish American diaspora, Bush was reduced to a single press conference and a few sound bites.
As Air Force One climbed out of Shannon yesterday afternoon, I wonder did George W, just for a moment, dwell on the impact his foreign policy has had on one of America's oldest friends.
How can it be that a country, out of whose roots close to 40 million of its own citizens have come, despises him so widely? Has any visiting head of state ever been made as unwelcome here by such a vast cross-section of Irish political, church, trade union, legal and citizens groups?
One wonders would Pol Pot have been as unwelcome.
Perhaps the view from Texas or even Washington is something we cannot contemplate, perhaps without the horror of a 9/11 blasted into the national psyche, we are essentially only onlookers.
But it's hard not to form the strong impression that our opposition to Bush's foreign policy has gone beyond politics and is now a moral position. Indeed, I think one has to look back before World War II to find a western government acting with such belief in the notion that might is right.
In the post Cold War world, as the threat of nuclear obliteration receded, there was sunlight and expectation.There was the growing belief that we had reached a point in civilization where across the world order, major military conflicts could now be avoided. Truly astonishing and unimaginable things had begun to happen.
As we crossed into the 21st century, the world map was changing in unimaginable ways.
Democracy spread across the old eastern Soviet empire, the menace of totalitarianism shrivelled to a few states and as communism disappeared, so too did all its ideological crisis points across the globe. Even the Kremlin hoisted the flag of democracy as Russia began to move towards freedom and individual liberty.
Not in centuries had the global perspective looked less threatening. Not in centuries had the prospects for the ending of conflict and the arms race seemed greater.
But, of course, there was always the Third World. There was always the possibility that out of that part of the globe where the economic and political enrichment of the past century had not penetrated, there might emerge a new threat.
And emerge it did. It came in the version of Muslim fundamentalism, that created 9/11, but in political terms, it was the product of the geo-political crisis, created by the west's energy needs.
At one level, Osama bin Laden was a revolutionary figure for the vast, dispossessed Muslim hordes of the world, while at another, he was essentially a rich Saudi playboy, playacting with some 14th century version of newageism.
Given his capacity to murder infidel civilians without compunction, and given that he had created the post-Cold War's ultimate weapon, the airborne suicide bomber, he certainly represented an authentic threat to all our lives.
Of course, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has displayed its ability to bring mass murder to the soft underbelly of western society, but short of that, what else was their threat?
Of course it was ugly, but was it not containable, provided their armoury could be restricted to conventional weapons?
Of course, what has been infinitely more destabilising and potentially catastrophic has the been the wider impact of the `war on terror' in response.
If in global terms, al-Qaeda's attacks have been pinpricks of violence, the US response, by contrast, has sent tidal waves of resentment across Islam.
Are all empires, all imperial mentalities doomed to make the same mistakes? In recent times, one might have wondered, given American excesses in Iraq, if Osama himself was writing the script.
Muslims being fed the Great Satan propaganda line, cannot be blamed for swallowing it when the US appears to adopt the role with such relish.
Even at this point, as all the calculations - even those of the Americans themselves - show the war on terror is failing, the Bush presidency seems still incapable of accurately comprehending the nature of the threat.
Even now, the world's greatest military superpower seems unable to acknowledge the impossibility of dealing with an ideological threat by military means. A year into the Iraq invasion, the dimensions of the quagmire are unmistakable.
Effectively, Iraq has ceased to be a country and has become a free-fire zone, with any element of central authority removed.
The invading liberation forces are now reduced to fire-fights, the civilian population is at the mercy of total anarchy. Later this week, America will go ahead with the charade of handing over sovereignty to an appointed Iraqi government that has neither the police force nor the army to exercise that sovereignty.
The cynicism of the whole manoeuvre leaves one breathless.
Far from being liberated, the reality is that, since invasion, Iraq has simply ceased to exist as either a political or civil society and instead has now broken down into constituent armed tribal and religious groupings.
This is precisely the situation that allowed the Taliban to seize power in Afghanistan, and there is every possibility that Iraq could descend into the same morass.
And nowhere, ironically, have the shockwaves of America's war on terror had more significant impact than in Saudi Arabia.
Remarkably, given that the subtext to the Iraqi invasion was to strengthen the regime in Saudi, the effect has been the very opposite.
There is now clear evidence of the extent of al-Qaeda cells within Saudi Arabia, and growing evidence that significant sections of Saudi society support it.
There is even growing concern that bin Laden has important and influential sympathisers within the Saudi intelligence and security communities.
Far from spectacular and murderous bombings, al-Qaeda's new tactic to target the foreign workers in Saudi, the lynchpin of the oil economy, has exposed a critical Achilles' heel in the whole Saudi economic model.
Two and a half years into the war on terrorism, the capacity of the current American strategy is out to question as never before. The most depressing scenario is that, irrespective of Bush's survival in November, the significance of the damage inflicted on the Muslim world will last long after he has left.
To the millions of dispossessed and discontented Muslims across the world, the cause of their generation may now be to make war on the West.
Ironically, by characterising this struggle as one between good and evil, and reducing it to a competition between militarism and terrorism, the Bush approach has almost certainly guaranteed the very response we didn't want.
The only currency fundamentalist Muslims have is the pathological relationship between their religious conviction and its association with violence, the precise narrow ground that this American administration chose to meet them on.
This presidency has sown seeds, the fruit of which future generations, both east and west, will harvest.
Could one ever have imagined feeling nostalgic for the relative security of the Cold War, for all its nuclear threat, very real when John F Kennedy arrived in Dublin this very weekend all those years ago.
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