What is striking about the exhibition of presidential portraits currently on display at the Carter Centre in Atlanta is not the uneven quality of the paintings themselves, but the surprisingly candid blurbs that accompany each one.
Bill Clinton’s is typical: ‘Among the most noteworthy aspects of Clinton’s presidency was the stream of revelations, legal suits and investigations related to his extramarital affairs — both alleged and admitted — and to his possible involvement in deceptive real estate schemes in Arkansas.”
This is how the mini-biography begins; whoever sub-edited it was determined not to ‘bury the story”. Short of saying that Clinton deposited semen on the dress of an intern it could hardly be more direct. The exhibition is on loan from the Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, so Jimmy Carter’s disdain for Clinton’s moral fallibility is not behind the surprisingly candid assessment.
Many of the others also focus on shortcomings. Lyndon Johnson was a great liberal who blew it on Vietnam (I paraphrase). Richard Nixon converted his obsessive anti-communism to a successfully pragmatic policy of détente with China and the Soviet Union, but threw it all away with his conduct during Watergate.
George Bush Snr is relatively benign, noting simply that ‘In the 1960s George Bush presided over a thriving oil business in Texas — had he continued with that enterprise his then modest fortune might have grown immeasurably.” Will his son’s be so bland? I think not. Most of the analysis of the current conflict is focusing on post-war Iraq, but the question of what post-war America will look like is equally important.
American values are at stake. Really, what values? That is the response of many; contempt for the United States has never been higher. Asked, as I was last week, by a group of Americans how the world sees their country, one is forced to reply: you are detested.
This is a cause for sadness, not rejoicing. It is feeble-minded to contemplate only the worst aspects of the US, whether it is its destructive foreign policies since 1945 or its hypocrisy in relation to international, multilateral initiatives. Blaming France for the failure to get anything remotely close to a majority in the United Nations Security Council is the latest act of distasteful disingenuousness.
The US also refuses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, as is well known, but less well known is that it has never ratified the UN Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, negotiated by then president Carter back in the late-1970s. American democracy, with its extraordinarily refined system of institutional checks and balances, has begun to look both frayed at the edges — the fiasco of George W Bush’s stolen election — and generally anachronistic.
Given the fact that not even one half of US congressmen and women have a passport, let alone have actually traveled beyond the US, it is hardly surprising that US attitudes to the rest of the world are out of kilter.
There are, however, positive American values that should not be lost in the red mist of our current anger. Innovation, especially in the sphere of technology, has served the world well. Whether we care for the ruthless brand of capitalism that underpins it, American enterprise has delivered Microsoft. Who can deny the value of its products, upon which most of us are so dependent?
And, of course, there are many decent Americans who have not lost sight of the core value of human dignity. Stephen Wrage, for example, an associate professor at the Naval College in Washington DC. He is raising concerns about American use of force in the treatment of suspects. He learned that in December two detainees in Afghanistan died while in American custody.
In both cases, the US military pathologist, Dr Elizabeth Rouse, given the four options for cause of death of accidental, natural, suicide and homicide, ticked the last box. Her reports conclude that death was caused by a ‘blunt force injury”, which to Wrage is code for excessive beatings. Wrage fears that this may be the tip of the iceberg, as it was and maybe still is in the case of the US’s ally, Israel.
Several years ago Wrage was in Israel with some midshipmen who were being exposed to Israeli military experience from the occupied territories. They learned of the technique of tiltulin — a Hebrew word meaning shaking — used to break down the resistance of Palestinian suspects. It had led to a public debate and a court case in which the famous Judge Landau had ruled that moderate physical force should be used only in ‘ticking bomb” cases.
Soon after in 1997 a suicide bomber killed five people in Israel. At a press conference afterwards, the head of Shin Beit (the Israeli secret security service) apologised because he said that he’d had the suicide bomber in his custody just days before but had been unable to interrogate him forcibly enough, which, dramatically pointing at the attorney general, was ‘his fault”.
In the course of defending the use of tiltulin, he then let slip that it had caused death only once in 8 000 cases. A subsequent inquiry showed that it had been used in 20 000 cases.
Twenty-thousand ticking bomb cases? Tiltulin, according to Wrage, has the effect of changing the personality of the victim, rendering him anti-social and incapable of creating trusting relationships.
It is clear to Wrage that the Israeli policy was, in fact, to prevent these individuals from becoming resistance leaders — but, he adds pointedly, the technique was likely to render them prime candidates for suicide bombings.
Wrage’s motive is simple enough: if and when young pilots that he has trained come into enemy hands in Iraq or wherever else he wants them to be treated humanely.
What is concerning Wrage even more now, is that the American media appear unwilling to take up the matter of the deaths in Afghanistan. His 1 000 word essay to The Washington Post has not been used. If the US is to use torture, Wrage wants a public debate such as there was in Israel at the very least.
On the very night that Bush announced the start of the onslaught and the first bombs fell on Baghdad, Carter was attending a special concert in Atlanta to commemorate his Nobel Peace Prize. He is painfully aggrieved by Bush’s decision to prosecute an ‘unnecessary war that could and should have been avoided”.
The blurb next to Carter’s own portrait is interesting: speaking of the Iran hostage crisis that came to dominate his presidency, it says that ‘Carter committed himself to the safe return of the hostages while protecting America’s interests and prestige. He pursued a policy of restraint that put a higher value on the lives of the hostages than on American relationships and power or probably his own political future.”
What will they say about Bush? Perhaps: ‘Despite opposition from a recalcitrant UN Security Council, Bush’s bold new policy of pre-emptive intervention forged a true New World Order where his father had failed, using America’s unprecedented military might to depose -dictators such as Saddam Hussein and persuading the Arab world to embrace American liberal democracy.” Perhaps not.
Or this then: ‘Bush’s arrogant disregard for the UN and world opinion generally threw America into a Vietnam-like abyss of sustained conflict in the Middle East. As the economy crumbled at home, the first great empire of the 21st century reached what historian Paul Kennedy predicted as ‘imperial over-reach’. Just one year into his second term of office, Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, were compelled to resign, whereupon General Colin Powell took office as America’s first black president.”
A final option: ‘In the 1990s George W Bush presided over a thriving oil business in Texas — had he continued with that enterprise —”
In which way will history repeat itself? When will the US ever learn?
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland