Letters to the Editor
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A sense of total despondency
Much as it is clear that this self-serving bunch of yahoos and economic vandals be thrown out of the White House - that eloquent nincompoopery of some rightwing columnists be recognised for what it is, idiocy chamoflaged by a layer of faux erudition -- that genuine professionalism again prevail over the self arrogated expert status of the neocons, how much can this change really achieve.
On every level the Republican Party, all of it, not just George Bush and Cheney, has left the US so deeply mired in the shit that it could take decades to repair the damage. The mess is really quite profound, so many things are FUBAR (which I will revise to F*cked Up Beyond All Repair/Reversal.) At this point it really is desperately hard to see how even the best President the US could elect, the best Congress could fix this mess. Genuinely, it is hard to see what of the disasters the Republicans have so gleefully wrought can even be remotely undone. I mean consider even a few of the issues:
Iraq –
Stay or go, it is going to be a disaster. Stay and watch the body-bags come home, leave and there will be a bloodbath, which will end up with the Turks in Northern Iraq, and most of the rest under Iranian hegemony.
Afghanistan –
The Taliban are back, reconstruction has made little progress, and Pakistan is falling apart next door.
Pakistan –
The US is now totally between a rock and a hard place – Musharref cannot be supported in his coup, but if he goes there is a genuine risk of civil war and radicalisation. The mess in Afghanistan and Iraq are key contributing factors to the situation in Pakistan. What choices does the US have now – no good ones.
Israel/Palestine
Israelis are poised to swing rightward, perhaps re-electing Netenyahu, demonstrating that the phrase “when in a hole stop digging” is not known or understood in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Meanwhile US and Israeli recklessness have left them bereft of an interlocutor on the Palestinian side who has any credibility with his own people – they have made negotiating for a Palestinian a steady stream of demands to sellout for illusory consideration, or even the mere offer that Israel might consider doing what it is morally obliged to do (or stop doing what is morally wrong.) Put simply, the Palestinian view is “what’s the point of negotiating . . . all that happens is we get f*cked with the US’s blessing.” No interlocutor means no peace.
Lebanon
Oh god – where do you start. In encouraging the Israeli invasion, re-supplying the bombing for weeks, admonishing Blair and the Brits to shut up, in the tortured statements of Condeleeza Rice (Cheney’s sockpuppet in this instance) designed to stay on the fence until Israel wrecked Lebanon, what was achieved was to reverse a situation where the Syrian hegenomy in Lebanon was being steadily rolled back to one where Lebanon is close to being a Hezbollah/Syria/Iran suzerainity. Heck of a job Condi! How does none fix that . . . who the hell knows!
Iran
What can the US do. Sanction against a major oil producer when oil is heading for $100 a barrel. Bush blew the opportunity to negotiate in 2003/4 when the US looked strong, now impotence seems borne out by the evidence.
US Influence
Despite Sarkozy’s visit, for foreign leaders being a friend of GWB is like announcing you have a social disease in a singles bar. More important is the objective data from say the Pew Global Attitudes Project http://people-press.org/ which shows how negatively the US is viewed around the world. Being unpopular equals losing influence, and the Bush administration and the Republicans tossed the US’ worldwide reputation in the toilet and spent 7 years flushing repeatedly; what buoyancy it may have displayed is pretty overwhelmed by now.
Fiscal
By 2006, while the Neocons mocked and jeered at the French and Germans, they ignored an interesting and salient detail, that the US public debt, at 64.7% of GDP was EQUAL to that of France and Germany. Anyone looked at the dollar lately, it is over 40% down against the Euro, the currency of “Old Europe.” The US is close to where the UK was in the loan negotiations of 1946 – when the US terms basically ended Sterlings status as the world reserve currency, replacing it with the dollar, a currency even supermodels are not dim enough to take in their contracts. More realistically, any new President and administration is going to have to get the US’ fiscal situation under control, there will have to be tax cuts and spending cuts. The proportion of US debt that is external has also soared, from somewhere around the 20-30% range in 2000 to 60-70% today – China, Japan and the oil exporting countries own the US now.
What can be done – how can someone fix this mess?