A classic case of imperial arrogance and overstretch, America's bid for world empire is crashing to the ground around us, writes Gamil Mattar* Many have come to believe that the American government, specifically that part of it concerned with formulating foreign policy, is in the grips of a crisis. Those who hold this view are speaking out of conviction supported by a raft of evidence and many cogent arguments, all of which combine to say that American foreign policy has lost its sense of direction. Proponents of this opinion point to flagrant inconsistencies in US foreign policy decisions and refer us to sharp divisions, both blatant and latent, within the agencies constitutionally empowered to design and execute foreign policy. Nothing is more indicative of America's foreign policy crisis than the US president's remarks in a press conference held jointly with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on 28 July. It was obvious that the two leaders -- whether independently or in concert -- had reached the same conclusion: with Israel's war against Lebanon, the war against terrorism had reached a new and crucial phase. Both Bush and Blair, each in their own way, drove home the point that the war against terrorism would expand and intensify. Apparently, they also both determined that leaving Iraq and Afghanistan was no longer an option now that Hizbullah had ignited the crisis in Lebanon. Their conviction on this score became all the stronger when they discovered the extent of popular support in the region for Hizbullah and the increasing isolation of the ruling elites in a number of Arab countries. In other words, the two Western leaders maintained that the fate of the war on terrorism, along with the fate of the US occupation of Iraq, the NATO occupation of Afghanistan and, perhaps too, the fate of American strategy, currently under preparation, to hem in China and bind Russia, were contingent upon the fate of the war on Lebanon. If, as Bush and Blair have confirmed through their plans and actions, US foreign policy is in crisis, one of the most immediate causes of this crisis is the American president's personality and style of rule. Under the American system of government, the president is a very powerful figure, especially in the formulation and execution of foreign policy. In times of crisis, in particular, people tend to rally around him and support his point of view if there is diversity in opinion. He also is very influential in restructuring the nation's value system because he sets the nation's ideological or moral rudder and can bring to bear considerable powers -- including America's military and economic might -- to keep the ship on course. Finally, he is the public's leading accredited interpreter. One of his main functions is to present to the public America's foreign policy concerns in a sincere, straightforward and comprehensible way. Little wonder that many, including myself, were deeply disturbed by Bush's recent use of "Islamist fascism", a term no less invidious than his use of the word "crusade" in the wake of 11 September 2001. We subsequently felt the drastic consequences of that word. At one level, at least, Bush's use of such terms is no accident. He has always displayed an instinctive aversion to subtlety and a natural inclination to reduce his life, at home and at work, to the simplest, bluntest and basest terms. Apparently, this was one of the qualities for which the neoconservatives chose him as their presidential candidate. They espoused certain policies based on certain ideas and principles, and they needed a person who could put these to the public in a language that was easy to understand and that would make it seem that these ideas came from someone honest and down-to- earth instead of from an intellectual elite with suspect connections and vested interests at home and abroad. This, of course, is precisely the nature of the neoconservative clique. Their own writings over the past decades reveal that they are highly elitist in their outlook, to the degree that some of them have scoffed at the naiveté of the American people and their inability to grasp the magnitude of America's "great calling". Little wonder, therefore, that their choice for president fell upon someone whose seeming ingenuousness would appeal to ordinary people. Take, for example, how with a few short sentences, catchy terms and religious allusions Bush put to his fellow Americans the neoconservative project for global hegemony, as though the matter involved no more than spreading freedom and democracy. Look at how he reduced Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilisations" to diabolic Islamist terrorists at war against freedom and democracy and, hence, against the US and the West. Then, in order to pave the way for the implementation of a plan that the neoconservatives had drawn up a long time ago for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, he persuaded the American public that Iraq was a hotbed of Islamist terrorism, an avowed enemy of democracy and bristling with weapons of mass destruction. Never, as far as I can recall, did he make mention of the enormous sea of oil on which Iraq swims and the role this played in America's strategic and military thinking towards China, Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus and the next confrontation that will take place under the rubric of the clash of civilisations. All that would have been far too complex to introduce to the American public via their presidential interpreter-evangelist. Bush was brutal in his insistence that a raid by the Lebanese resistance against an Israeli military target resulting in the capture of two Israeli soldiers triggered the war on Lebanon, as though this was the root of the entire crisis. Compare this one-dimensional stance with the observation of British historian Timothy Garton Ash: "When and where did this war begin? Shortly after 9am local time on Wednesday 12 July, when Hizbullah militants seized Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev -- Israeli reservists on the last day of their tour of duty -- in a cross-border raid into northern Israel? Friday, 9 June, when Israeli shells killed at least seven Palestinian civilians on a beach in the Gaza Strip? In January, when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in a backhanded triumph for an American policy of supporting democratisation? In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon? In 1979, with the Islamic Revolution in Iran? In 1948, with the creation of the State of Israel? Or how about Russia in the spring of 1881?" Bush is the master of painting things in black and white when the extremists surrounding him need to fuel anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred so that they can take advantage of an opening to promote a war between Israel and Lebanon. Only in attacking the roots could one solve the crisis, the president told the Americans. What were these roots? The capture of two Israeli soldiers and the threat to the stability of a democratic government in Lebanon. As for the slaughter Israeli forces are perpetrating in Gaza and the West Bank; that was clearly due to Hamas's refusal to abide by democratic practices! The following excerpt from the joint press conference Bush held with Blair barely begins to illustrate the lengths of oversimplification to which he will go: "And so what you're seeing is a clash of governing styles, for example. The notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians; those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them, and so they respond. They've always been violent ... " Incredulously, Bush continued: "There's this kind of almost -- kind of weird kind of elitism, that says, well, maybe certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn't be free; maybe it's best just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies. And our foreign policy rejects that concept. We don't accept it." It is precisely the distortion that comes from this reductionism that feeds the emotions that the hawks in and around the White House need to promote their plans to prolong the occupation of Iraq and to paint a glowing image of their number one ally, Israel. The reality, however, as Nicolas Kristof of The New York Times points out, is that this oversimplification only makes things more complicated. International problems become even more difficult to solve when Bush says that the war on Lebanon has given the situation in the Middle East greater clarity, as though the Middle East had been some impenetrable riddle that the Israeli destruction of Lebanon made easy to solve. This highly provocative oversimplification is extremely dangerous. It is one reason why the Europeans and Chinese are growing increasingly sceptical of the competence of the Bush administration, and it is a major source of the mounting hatred between Americans who are taken in by his claptrap and Arabs and Muslims who are deeply offended by it. In 1982, Ronald Reagan -- the neoconservatives' model -- cautioned Menachem Begin against invading Beirut, warning that it would be a bloodbath. The difference between that president and Bush is quite small. The former achieved a victory for the US over the Soviet Union in the Cold War; the latter has no victory to his name. Richard Haas, a former Bush administration official and president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, put it this way: "I am hard-pressed to think of any other moment in modern times where there have been so many challenges facing this country simultaneously. The danger is that Mr Bush will hand over a White House to a successor that will face a far messier world, with far fewer resources left to cope with it." Moisés Na�m, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, expressed a similar sentiment: "This is a distracted government that has to take care of too many things at the same time and has been consumed by the war on Iraq." But even leaders of the new American right have begun to sense the harm their president has done. Their spiritual leader, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard remarks acerbically, "North Korea is firing missiles. Iran is going nuclear. Somalia is controlled by radical Islamists. Iraq isn't getting better, and Afghanistan is getting worse." Being an ultra- rightist himself, Kristol had to "give the president a lot of credit for hanging tough on Iraq". Still, he felt compelled to add: "But I am worried that it has made them too passive in confronting the other threats." To my mind, however, the finest analogy came from Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration: "Every situation makes it more difficult to deal with another," he said. "It's like a juggler. You have to keep all the balls going. Any one of them that is out of trajectory threatens all the others." He only needed to add that because of attention deficiency and the addition of so many more balls, they have already begun to topple to the ground one after the other, heralding the calamitous crash of American foreign policy. The revolutionary moment in America's foreign policy has neared its end. The American quagmire in Iraq, the offence that Bush has stirred among most of his allies by terrorising most peoples of the world with a war that does not concern them, the despair he has spread by the damage he has done to the cause of democracy and freedom through the blatant cynicism of his campaign to spread democracy, his encouragement of Israel into waging a war that added another stinging loss to America's lengthy record of military losses -- all this signals that Bush has reached the end of the road and his extremist foreign policy has cost the US and the rest of the world dearly. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
