Gość: spectator
IP: *.nycmny83.covad.net
01.10.04, 18:37
CocaCola, McDonald, muzyka amerykanski, amerykanski angielski panuja nad
swiatem. 30% swaitowego dochodu jest w USA. Ameryka i swiatem rzadzi Bush i
kapital
Betrayed by Bush
Patrick Buchanan says there is no conservative party in Washington. Instead
there is a Republican party of big business, big government and big war
Washington, DC
Not even the British empire at its zenith dominated the world in the way the
United States does today. US forces are deployed in lands the soldiers of
Victoria never saw. Our warships make port calls on all continents. Our
military technology is generations ahead of any other nation’s. Our GDP is 30
per cent of the global economy. Brand names like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and
Levi’s are household words from Kathmandu to Kurdistan. The music the young
listen to around the world is American or an imitation thereof. Americans
annually claim the lion’s share of the Nobel prizes in science, medicine and
economics. Hollywood films are the world’s most watched. The dollar is the
world’s reserve currency. The International Monetary Fund that keeps scores
of nations from bankruptcy has its headquarters in Washington. The American
language, English, is the lingua franca of the Internet and the international
elite. By almost any measure — military and economic power, technology,
standard of living, cultural dominance, social and political freedom —
America is the gold standard, the ‘hyperpower’ of the Quai d’Orsay’s
resentment.
Yet all republics, all empires, all civilisations pass away. For the United
States the invasion of Iraq and the war to impose democracy upon that Arab
and Islamic nation may yet prove a textbook example of the imperial
overstretch that brought down so many empires of the past. Fallujah, where US
marines were withdrawn before completing their mission to eradicate the
guerrillas and terrorists who had murdered four Americans and desecrated
their bodies, may prove the high tide of an American empire that has begun
its long retreat.
If we were to name one cause of the fall of Britain, it would be war. The
Boer war was Britain’s Vietnam. With it came a loss of faith in the
superiority of British civilisation and the spread of the heretical idea that
a British empire that denied self-determination to peoples of colour was no
longer morally defensible. Then, for ten years between 1914 and 1918 and 1939
and 1945, Britain was locked in mortal battle with the mightiest land power
in Europe. Britain alone fought both world wars from the first day to the
last.
In the first world war, 720,000 Britons died, in the second another 400,000.
America, however, stayed out of the world wars longer than any other power
and thus suffered fewer losses. Not until four years after the British,
French, Germans and Russians had started slaughtering one another at a rate
of 6,000 a day did the doughboys arrive to turn the tide on the Western
Front, only six months before the Armistice. Not until four years after
Hitler overran France did the Higgins boats appear off Normandy, just 11
months before VE Day. In both world wars, we played Fortinbras in Hamlet,
coming upon the carnage in the final scene in the bloodstained throne-room to
take charge of affairs.
During the Cold War, America avoided a war with a Soviet Union that could
have wreaked far greater havoc on us than was visited on Britain in two world
wars. We are the last superpower because we stayed out of the great wars of
the 20th century longer than any of the other powers, and we suffered and
lost less than any of them. Since the end of the Cold War, however, all the
blunders of Britain’s ruling class in its march to folly have been replicated
by our elites, from the arrogance of power to the alienation of allies to the
waging of imperial wars where no vital US interests were at risk.
Spurning the counsel of John Quincy Adams, America now goes abroad in search
of monsters to destroy. We have treaty guarantees with 50 nations on five
continents and troops in 100 countries. Some 150,000 US soldiers are tied
down in seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Should the United
States confront another crisis anywhere on earth, the bankruptcy of our
foreign policy would be transparent to the world.
President Bush has declared it to be US policy to launch pre-emptive war on
any rogue regime that seeks weapons of mass destruction, a policy today being
defied by North Korea and Iran, both of which have programmes to produce
nuclear weapons. The President has also declared it to be US policy to go to
war to prevent any other nation from acquiring the power to challenge US
hegemony in any region of the world. It is called the ‘Bush Doctrine’. It is
a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the
death of republics.
In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, had
not attacked us and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have
since discovered it did not have. His war cabinet assured President Bush that
weapons of mass destruction would be found, that US forces would be welcomed
with garlands of flowers, that democracy would flourish in Iraq and spread
across the Middle East, that our triumph would convince Israelis and
Palestinians to sit down and make peace.
None of this happened. Those of us who were called unpatriotic for opposing
an invasion of Iraq and who warned we would inherit our own Lebanon of 25
million Iraqis were proved right. Now our nation is tied down and our army is
being daily bled in a war to create a democracy in a country where it has
never before existed.
With the guerrilla war, US prestige has plummeted. The hatred of President
Bush is pandemic from Marrakesh to Mosul. Volunteers to fight the Americans
have been trickling into Iraq from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the
spring of this year revelations of the sadistic abuse of Iraqi prisoners at
Abu Ghraib prison sent US prestige sinking to its lowest levels ever in the
Arab world. We may have ignited the war of civilisations that it was in our
vital interest to avoid. Never has America been more resented and reviled in
an Islamic world of one billion people.
At home, the budget surpluses of the 1990s have vanished as the cost of the
Afghan and Iraq wars has soared beyond the projections of the most
pessimistic of the President’s economic advisers. The US budget deficit is
above 4 per cent of GDP. With a trade deficit in goods nearing 6 per cent of
GDP, the dollar has lost a third of its value against the euro in three
years. One in six manufacturing jobs has disappeared since President Bush
took the oath. By mid-2004, the President had failed to abolish a single
significant agency, programme or department of a Leviathan government that
consumes a fifth of our economy. Nor had he vetoed a single Bill.
America’s native-born population has ceased to grow. Its birth rate has
fallen below replacement levels. US population growth now comes from
immigrants, legal and illegal, from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The
religious, ethnic and racial composition of the country, a child of Europe,
is changing more rapidly than that of any other great nation in history in an
era when race, religion and ethnicity are tearing countries apart. The
melting pot no longer works its magic. Newcomers are not assimilating. We are
becoming what Theodore Roosevelt warned against our ever becoming — ‘a
polyglot boardinghouse for the world’.
US primary and secondary education is a disaster area. Test scores have been
falling for decades and are below those of almost every other developed
nation. In o
