Friday, September 26, 2003
Malfeeance
The indispensable Media Whores Online cites an AP story today on the disturbing waning of European support for the US. One line in particular stood out:
"In concert with Bush's fading stature, 81 percent of Germans - up from 55 percent in 2002 - now say the European Union is more important to their vital interests than America..."That's a 26 point swing in less than a year.
In other words, a year after 9/11, slightly less than half of Germans saw the US as more important to them than the European Union. That's staggering. The US does a huge amount of business with Germany; that nearly half of Germans see us as more important than the burgeoning European Union is a tremendous opportunity.
There's no way to sugar-coat this: a president with real vision could have--should have--acted to move German popular opinion the measly five percentage points in our favor. Solidifying the German people behind America rather than the European Union would have been a brilliant stroke of leadership. It would have paid dividends for American business, and aided in the war on terrorism--and it would have been easy in the wake of 9/11.
When faced with similar opportunities previous presidents have recognized and seized them. JFK did it with a simple (mispronounced) sentence, and a generation later Ronald Reagan did it by going there and making the speech of his life.
Instead, the Bush administration called Germany one of "the chocolate-making countries". They called them "old Europe". They accused them of being indifferent to terrorism.
And the result was that they actually managed to swing the German people twenty-six points against us in one year.
If Bush gets a second term they'll probably go Communist.
Why? Why was Bush determined to wage war unilaterally? What did the American people gain from that? Why purpose was served by insulting our allies and going it alone?
It can't be because he was looking forward to a humiliating return trip to the UN with his hat in hand a year later. Because President Bush knew damn well the UN wasn't going to give him the money he was asking for. And what's more he knew he wouldn't need it.
Because we're going to pay for it.
The time has come for hard cynicism. The time has come to "follow the money". The time has come for Americans to ask who will profit from our unilateral invasion of Iraq.
Because we know who's going to be paying for it: we are.
