/ 8 February 2003

A crippling blow to world order

They became an international pastime that was universally understood — “Bushisms”, the statements and behavioural oddities of the man who was bidding to become president of the United States. E-mail queues around the world were clogged with George W Bush jokes and anecdotes passed enthusiastically from Harare to Helsinki, from São Paulo to Perth.

In the man’s defence, it was suggested that most Bushisms were developed and disseminated by Democrat spin doctors intent on destabilising his presidential campaign. But whether they were true became irrelevant: the inescapable truth was that Bush was intellectually deficient, and putting the stewardship of the world’s superpower in his hands was like lending a credit card to Imelda Marcos.

What Bush has done since coming to office has proved all the world’s fears were well founded. And it is no longer a laughing matter. The US president is a dangerous man whose low-IQ antics threaten us all.

He may not be in the league of the true political criminals, such as North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, Israel’s Ariel Sharon and, yes, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. But because of the power he wields, the enormous destructive force at his disposal, the damage he is doing to the global political infrastructure far outstrips anything these despots could dream of.

By taking unilateral positions on contentious issues that concern all humanity, and behaving petulantly in crucial international conferences, the Bush government has kept the spectre of war hanging permanently over humankind.

After barely two years in office, he is about to plunge the world into a major war that will undo all the painstaking work that has gone into building institutions of global government since 1945.

Most of the world understood American anger in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The overwhelming sense was that terror was the enemy of all civilised people and had to be defeated through unanimous action. Unilateral measures were futile, the rational world said in unison.  

The US-led military campaign in Afghanistan proved the point correct. All it achieved was to rout the Taliban from power and allow men to remove their beards and women their burkas. But the warlords and bandits who have controlled the Afghan interior for so long continue to terrorise the nation’s citizenry. Osama bin Laden, the pretext for the entire US war effort, is still at large and the al-Qaeda networks the war was supposed to smash are still intact.

The world’s head prefect is now on the verge of opening another front — and again it is an almost unilateral undertaking. The only unequivocal support for US warmongering comes from Britain, which to all intents and purposes is an American outpost.

The bellicose rhetoric that has been emanating from the White House and the Pentagon over the past six months should be of grave concern to all who hoped that the end of the Cold War would herald a unified approach to the building of a just world order.

Last week, in his State of the Union address, Bush made it clear that if the US could not build an alliance behind its pre-emptive war, it would go it alone. And this week Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as one of the more sane heads in Washington, echoed his master’s voice, saying it was up to the US — not the inspectors, not the United Nations — to decide whether Iraq had wronged the world and when it should be punished.

“Iraq is now in further material breach of its material obligations.

I believe this conclusion is irrefutable and undeniable,” Powell told the UN Security Council. “The issue before us is not how much time we are willing to give the inspectors to be frustrated by Iraqi obstruction, but how much longer we are willing to put up with Iraq’s non-compliance before we, as the United Nations, say enough is enough.”

After his clarion call to the world body, Powell wasted no time in repeating to his colleagues the US view that the UN would be rendered “irrelevant” if it failed to follow the American lead.

International regulation of sovereign states serves exactly the same purpose as the rule of law at national level — to prevent the tyrannical domination of the weak by the strong. World conventions and regulatory institutions were developed to prevent despots like Hitler, Milosevic, Botha, Mugabe, Sharon and Saddam from being able to abuse their citizens and bully their neighbours.

Surely Bush, who claims to be the world’s principal upholder of the values of freedom and human rights, should be the last to reverse the gains of the past 50 years and hand the baton to the enemies of democracy and civilised order.

If Bush and his colleagues want to create the just and free world they claim is their objective, they must act only under the mandate of the UN.