The Emperor has no clothes
Two quick citations of note...
John Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic, and references to his new book, The Folly of Empire have been making the rounds on the Internet, particularly via this NPR interview. I first noticed it on Professor Juan Cole's blog, and then Professor Livia Gilstrap excerpted a particularly trenchant bit. Here's my pick (all of it's good, and thus, so long):
At noon, October 18, 2003, President George W. Bush landed in Manila as part of a six-nation Asian tour. Because officials were concerned about a terrorist attack on the embattled islands, the presidential airplane, Air Force One, was shepherded into Philippine air space by F-15s. Bush's speech to the Philippine Congress was delayed by what one reporter described as "undulating throngs of demonstrators who lined his motorcade route past rows of shacks." Outside the Philippine House of Representatives, several thousand more demonstrators greeted Bush, and several Philippine legislators staged a walkout during his twenty-minute speech.
In his speech, Bush took credit for America transforming the Philippines into "the first democratic nation in Asia." Said Bush, "America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule. Together we rescued the islands from invasion and occupation." And he drew an analogy between America's attempt to create democracy in the Philippines and its attempt to create a democratic Middle East through invading and occupying Iraq in the spring of 2003: "Democracy always has skeptics. Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia."
After a state dinner, Bush and his party were bundled back onto Air Force One and shunted off to the president's next stop, Thailand. The Secret Service had warned Bush that it was not safe for him to remain overnight in the "first Democratic nation in Asia."
As many Philippine commentators remarked afterward, Bush's rendition of Philippine-American history bore very little relation to fact. True, the United States Navy under Admiral George Dewey had ousted Spain from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But instead of creating a Philippine democracy, President William McKinley annexed the country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then fought a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it had encouraged to fight Spain. The war dragged on for fourteen years. Before it was over, about 120,000 American troops were deployed and more than 4,000 died; more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. And the resentment against American policy was still evident a century later during George W. Bush's visit.
[...]
As for the Philippines' democracy, the United States can take little credit for what exists, and some blame for what doesn't. The Philippines were not the first Asian country to hold elections. And the electoral machinery the U.S. designed in 1946 provided a veneer of democratic process beneath which a handful of families, allied to American investors and addicted to payoffs and kickbacks, controlled Philippine land, economy, and society. The tenuous system broke down in 1973 when Ferdinand Marcos had himself declared president for life. Marcos was finally overthrown in 1986, but even today Philippine democracy is more dream than reality. Three months before Bush's visit, beleaguered Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had survived a military coup; and with Islamic radicals and communists roaming the countryside, the Philippines are perhaps the least stable of Asian nations. If the analogy between America's "liberation" of the Philippines and of Iraq were to hold true, the United States can look forward to four decades of occupation, culminating in an outcome that is still far from satisfactory. Such an outcome would not redound to the credit of the Bush administration, but instead to the "skeptics" who charged that the Bush administration had undertaken the invasion of Baghdad with its eyes wide shut.
Politicians often rewrite history to their own purposes, but, as Bush's analogy to Iraq suggested, there was more than passing significance to his revision of the history of the Spanish-American War. It reflected not just a distorted picture of a critical episode in American foreign policy but a seeming ignorance of the important lessons that Americans drew from this brief and unhappy experiment in creating an overseas empire. If Bush had applied these lessons to the American plans for invading Iraq and transforming the Middle East, he might have proceeded far more cautiously. But as his rendition of history showed, he was either unaware of them or had chosen to ignore them.
I'm behind, as usual, on my New Yorker reading, but while waiting in line at 850 Bryant (yes, again!) yesterday I managed to get through last week's Philip Gourevitch article on Bushie's vernacular style:
In style and substance, his discourse is saturated in churchiness: he touts the rights of the unborn, pooh-poohs same-sex marriage, speaks of marshalling the "armies of compassion" and transforming America into a "culture of responsibility" and an "ownership society" by changing "one heart and soul, one conscience at a time." But, for all his God talk, he is remarkably lacking in humility. No fault, no blame, no regret, no room for shame attends him as he goes about changing the world. Nor does he appear to entertain the possibility that the changes he is imposing could be anything but improvements. To hear him tell it, the economy is terrific, public education is thriving, health care is better than ever, terrorists are on the run, democracy is spreading throughout the Middle East, and everywhere America is living up to what he describes as its "calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom." Because Bush does not appear able to recognize his own errors, much less admit them, he is incapable of self-correction. Indeed, he boasts tirelessly of his resolve and steadfastness, making a virtue of rigidity. Like it or lump it.
Ahhh... imperial hubris anyone?
posted by claudine |Added at
1:02 PM| |
politics, bush, arrogant hubris
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