I lived through the 1950s once, and once was once more than enough. But to paraphrase that president who did more than any other to undermine what is good in the American ethos, here we go again.
They are having a parade day in Washington, aren't they? "An axis of evil," the ridiculous phrase poking out at the world from President Bush's state of the union speech last week, says it all. After 11 long years in the desert, a decade and some with no serious enemies, the good times are back, and the Bush administration is dedicated above all to prolonging them.
Never mind poverty eradication and all the flaky thinking that goes with such ideas. Never mind a sophisticated analysis of just where the world now sits, why, and what can be done to advance it. Business executives may take these matters up at the World Economic Forum, of all places, but we've got enemies again.
And there is something deep in the American psyche that makes enemies look a little like gold.
Americans are now invited to accept permanent wartime mobilization -- military and civilian -- as well as bloated defense spending approved without serious scrutiny, curtailed civil liberties, and a political discourse that makes suspect any utterance that veers either side of zero by more than a few cautious degrees. We now count our enemies in the tens of thousands -- a good, healthy supply.
It is time to recognize all this for what it is: It is now evident that the Bush administration has elected to manipulate the events of Sept. 11 to its political, diplomatic, and strategic advantage. This is cynicism so deep as to be unforgivable. The question is whether the world accepts it. One hopes not.
Reviewing Bush's speech, Washington commentators find "axis" evocative of Hitler's World War II alliance with Italy and Germany. It's preposterous: There is no such axis. "Evil" is the operative notion in Bush's phrase, the Reaganesque word that should worry the world: It's metaphysical, it's amorphous, and it can be found everywhere always.
Given the extent to which the Bush people seem to make it all up as they go along, we are left to trade in conditional tenses -- "coulds" and "mights." But an imposing set of possibilities lies before us nonetheless.
Rapprochement with North Korea is a bad thing, a good thing, and now an impossible thing. Iran is an enemy, a prodigal friend, and now an enemy again. By commonly accepted estimates, half a million Iraqi children have died as a consequence of a decade's bombs and embargoes. But we have to watch those Iraqis: They're not with us.
That's the axis of evil. We may as well add this to it: A Palestinian state is not on, it is on, and now it's not on -- all in the space of a few months.
A German correspondent in New Delhi and a dear friend of many years recently traveled to Pakistan and returned to describe telling encounters. What is with you Europeans, senior officials in Islamabad wanted to know. You're the ones who can stand up to the Americans, so when are you going to do it? It's a good question, but it's the underlying sentiment that interests me, for it is evident everywhere: silence, nervous smiles, even the occasional bow before an America that has never been more powerful. Look and listen more closely and you discover a worrisome restiveness and a well-laid foundation for future frictions, enmities, and isolation.
It is a funny thing about paradises occupied by fools: They are always of the fools' own making. Successive administrations in Washington qualify for residence because they have missed an essential feature of the post-Cold War world: While American hegemony has been (and for now remains) undeniable, it is not eternal. It is an interim state of affairs.
The Bush administration, in raising the military ante in its war on terror to the exclusion of any other credible policy, also raises a worrisome prospect: Is America now dedicated to the preservation of its hegemony against the inevitable emergence of a multipolar world? Is that how the Bush people read the present moment? Is Washington, after a dry decade, still hooked on useful enemies? Is Osama bin Laden -- remember him? -- more useful to Donald Rumsfeld on the loose than he is in one of the defense secretary's cages at Guantanamo Bay? These may seem provocative questions. But the Bush administration -- by what it is doing and what it is not doing -- is turning them into good questions, too.
Washington now stands directly opposed to South Korea's recently revived efforts to improve ties with its other half and reduce tensions on the peninsula. This is destructive -- present tense. In the Philippines, US personnel are chasing dope addicts, wayward peasants, and rebel leaders whose influence extends just beyond the next cornfield. Never mind: They're global terrorists now, and these are their "cells." (Now there's a fine, evocative term for you -- straight from the frightening 1950s.) Further out, even to float the idea of a war against Iran is foolhardy. Strange as it may seem to some, Iranians have embarked on a political process that is slow and frustrating but altogether to be encouraged. There are few Iranians who do not oppose the absolutism of religious conservatives. I know not a one who thinks this should be resolved by inviting the Americans back in for another round of extra-political intervention.
"The American president's remarks," Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said over the weekend, "show that he does not have the ability to learn from history." Finally, someone is beginning to understand Americans.
At the World Economic Forum in New York, the talk this year was of "fragile times." It's time to ask what makes them fragile. Unless you assume that the world is going to drop its very evident desire to live in harmony with America but not under it, it is time to consider whether Washington's limited view of our post-Sept. 11 predicament promises to make our planet less or more perilous.
Americans cannot go to sleep again, as so many did in the 1950s. There are too many dangers. And there's too much noise outside.
Patrick Smith is a former correspondent in Asia and the author of Japan: A Reinterpretation. The opinions expressed are his own.
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