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With George Bush on the loose, is the world better off?

Publication date: Thursday, 19th October, 2006

Ofwono Opondo

ACCORDING to George W. Bush it seems there are three worlds, the US, UN, and ?the others? in that order.

And so this unfair format gives open licence to the US, which rained nuclear bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing millions of Japanese to enforce its will and hegemony and to throw tantrums over any country?s nuclear ambition whether for peaceful or aggression ends.

The US, which claims to fight ?proliferation? of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) has used biological and chemical agents, sabotage, assassinations, economic and military blockade, funnelled small firearms through instigating low intensity conflicts around the world.

All these and the current US neo-imperialism rose after the American century was in gestation 100 years after George Washington warned his country against imperialism. yet today, the US?s global actions violate every principle upon which Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine stood for when they confronted the Red Coats.

Built on the imaginations of Alfred Thayer Mahan the naval theorist, Theodore Roosevelt the jingo politician, William Randolph Hearst the press boss, and J. Piermont Morgan and Jay Gould, the robber barons, the US is today fighting everywhere. In 1896, American whites completed their conquest of North America by massacring 300 Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and US Census bureau declared the frontier closed, and America turned its attention to the world.

In that year, US President William McKinley entered world markets through what his Secretary of State John Hay called ?open doors? but by 1918 they began saying ?if peaceful means, military action will be needed? and indeed when the doors of small banana republics have closed, the US Marines kicked them in.

So one asks, why do Americans hate the Nazi when they have killed many more people in the crumbled Spanish empire, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, Central America, China, Vietnam and now Middle East using similar means and installing compliant leaders on their route to ?World Power?!

The Us, the self-appointed conscience of human rights, supported the murders against Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese.

Brig Frederick Funston a hero of the Philippines war ordered the killing of everyone over 10 years, sent 300,000 peasants into concentration camps and set the countryside ablaze, which was emulated in Vietnam 60 years later proudly described in Colin Powel?s ?My American Journey? as shooting any MAM (military-aged males).

Powel, a Major in the Vietnam war, wrote, ?I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-aged male. If helo (helicopter) spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If the MAM moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.?

While British Premier Tony Blair has been pushed out of office by his Labour Party for toying the US ?global war on terror?, Bush is just digging his heels. He is changing the rules allowing no disagreements or challenge believing that the US is the rule. Bush has just forced Congress to enact a draconian law empowering US court martial to try terrorist suspects using evidence obtained through forced confession, and international human rights groups are quiet.

Now faced with Bush?s disastrous hegemonic policies around the world especially in the Middle East, and his adamant refusal to change course, the question now arises whether he has become a ?clear and present danger,? to borrow his phrase!

Five years after 9/11, US?s unparallel force in the battlefields, and Bush fighting with anger and less wisdom to enforce his geopolitical and economic interests, another question is whether the world is a better place today? Although he uses the cover of 9/11 attacks this has been a neo-conservatives project to enforce global hegemony. They believe that oil-rich

Middle East can be remade through violent ?regime change? which after 9/11, Bush broadened to include ?Axis of Evil? Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba.

While this project claim to spread ?democracy,? and ?free market,? the US has been less willing to accept or listen to the true people?s choices in these countries, except ensuring compliant leaders. To Bush, real men don?t talk to people who stand in America?s path ? you jail or kill them.

Without a single item of WMD found three years after toppling and capturing Saddam Hussein, the Bush doctrine is foundering Iraq?s hard soils where a stubborn insurgency, if not a civil war is raging killing tens of thousands.

Where Bush and Blair had hoped for a thoroughly intimidated Muslim population bowing to their feet, it is they who have emerged despised, and instead of dealing with the crimp in Iraq, and Afghanistan, Bush is stubbornly threatening violence against Syria, Hezbollah, Iran, and North Korea.

On North Korea Bush is trying to exploit the nuclear issue to regain what the US lost in 1950 when Gen Mark Clark signed the armistice after a military stalemate.

Unless US leaders change course and employ wisdom and diplomatic skills including managing differences in a constructive way to lead other nations to work together for a lasting global security, their fighting prowess alone will not subdue the world for long, and the next could belong to Asia led by China who seem more pragmatic.