What`s Going on in the USA?`
...Given the fact that Saddam Hussein did everything asked of him by the Security Council in permitting inspections for weapons of mass destruction, the President's decision to go to war seemed terribly unjust not only to most of the world, but also to many Americans who believed the UN diplomacy was working as it was designed to work (...) Whether Americans like it or not, the United States by this behaviour is viewed as a threat to the world, not a leader working to make the world a better, safer, more prosperous place...
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What`s Going on in the USA?`
Jude Wanniski
Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Writing for Al Jazeera
A few days ago, I got a telephone call from Doha, Qatar, from a fellow named Ahmed Janabia, the opinion editor of Al Jazeera’s English-language website. He had heard about me from an Iraqi I know, Dr. Mohammed Obeidi, a pathologist who lives in England and has for decades been an opponent of the Baghdad regime of Saddam Hussein. Ahmed told me he had been following my commentaries at this website for several weeks and wondered if I would write an opinion column for Al Jazeera. He suggested a topic, but left it up to me to write something about something I thought would be of interest to his website’s audience.
Hmmm. Well, okay. I figured if the Islamic world will take the trouble to reach out to me, I’d reciprocate. I agreed to write a commentary about "What’s going on in the USA?," an attempt to make some sense of the unusual politics the Islamic world is seeing in the U.S. this presidential election year. Ahmed told me he liked my piece a lot. Here it is. There is a place for readers to comment if you would like to offer direct feedback to Al Jazeera If you’d like to reply to my remarks, please let me know through webmaster@polyconomics.com .
http://wanniski.com/
What's going on in the USA?
By Jude Wanniski
Sunday 03 October 2004 - With only weeks before the 2 November elections in the United States, it is clear to informed Americans that if the rest of the world could vote for President, Sen John Kerry would win in a landslide.
The reason of course is the war in Iraq. A survey of 35,000 people in 35 countries this month showed Kerry winning 46% and President George W Bush winning only 20%. Even though Kerry is unknown, in many European countries Bush gets the support of fewer than 15% of those with an opinion: Germany 10%, France 5%, Norway 7%, Spain 7%, Italy 14%.
In Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair is Bush's closest ally in the war on terror, Kerry beat the incumbent 47 percent to 16 percent.
In a broader sense, the global electorate is not so much expressing an opinion about Iraq, but of the USA's "management" of the world. It is in that sense that the world is taking a greater interest in this election than it has in our lifetimes. This is because everyone in the world now lives in a unipolar world.
After all, the end of the Cold War in 1991 marked not only the end of the Soviet experiment in communism, but also the dawn of a unique epoch in the history of civilization. For the first time since all humankind lived in the Garden of Eden, there was now only one nation that clearly sat atop the global pyramid of power.
To answer the question, "What's going on in the USA?"; we can put it simply: The people of the United States are trying to figure out how to use its power through the same kind of trial and error process that brought it to the top of the global pyramid. It is now being forced to concede that it made a serious mistake in the way it dealt with Iraq.
How shall we go about determining the limitations on our powers and the extent of our responsibilities? The questions are different than any Americans have ever encountered, requiring that our people think about the world differently than we ever have before. There is no historic guidebook to help us at this frontier of boundless opportunity.
All the rules have been written for a world of adversarial divisions. This means we must think through with extraordinary care the steps we take and the paths we choose. Major missteps can only mean we will lose this preeminence and find new power pyramids forming to challenge our leadership.
If we think of the United States as the "father" of the entire family of nations, what it did under Mr Bush 18 months ago was ignore the United Nations, the world's only legal framework for the adjudication of "family problems." Given the fact that Saddam Hussein did everything asked of him by the Security Council in permitting inspections for weapons of mass destruction, the President's decision to go to war seemed terribly unjust not only to most of the world, but also to many Americans who believed the UN diplomacy was working as it was designed to work.
It is as if a father decided to severely beat one son for a perceived misbehaviour even though his wife and other children insisted the son had done no wrong.
Whether Americans like it or not, the United States by this behaviour is viewed as a threat to the world, not a leader working to make the world a better, safer, more prosperous place. We now have UN General Secretary Kofi Annan so exasperated with the continued moves of the US in Iraq, and in other world trouble spots, that he is willing to label the Iraq invasion an "illegal" act. Perhaps Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein, but if the war was unnecessary, as many as 100,000 people – military and civilian on all sides – have paid for the mistake with their lives. They are not better off.
The reason I have been asked to write in this space is that I have made the argument in the American media for several years that it is the responsibility of our leaders to pay special attention to the opinions of the Islamic world.
I say this as a Roman Catholic who has been a lifelong supporter of the state of Israel. The reason is that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation in a world that contains more than 1.2 billion Muslims.
A citizen of any other nation in the world who has a problem with the United States can have it addressed as long as he or she is a Protestant, Catholic or Jew. This is because there are Protestants, Catholics and Jews in every branch of the US government, at the highest levels of the executive branch, the Congress, and the Supreme Court.
But there are no Muslims who participate in this policy-making apparatus. This is a primary source of disequilibrium in the world political economy.
It was because I recognised this problem a dozen years ago that I made efforts to contact American Muslims, including Minister Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. He is the American Muslim most visible to the almost 300 million Americans. Minister Farrakhan and I have become good friends, having spent countless hours with each other in conversation since our first meeting in December 1996. We have both benefited from the experience, I believe, and I have at least introduced him to several of my friends on Wall Street who are Jewish and who share my desire to bridge this political gap between the Judeo-Christian world and Islam.
Indeed, on his world travels in recent years, Minister Farrakhan has made the same point I make in this essay… that the people of the United States should not be judged harshly because they are trying as best they can to figure out their responsibilities in this new unipolar world and are bound to make mistakes along the way.
[Jude Wanniski founded Polyconomics, Inc., in New Jersey in 1978, to advise individual and institutional investors on the impact political decisions have on financial markets. Previously, he was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.]
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D2291A4B-8D60-484D-B8
43-509BC9D8A298.htm
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:: Article nr. 6078 sent on 04-oct-2004 01:39 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=6078
Link: english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D2291A4B-8D60-484D-B843-509BC9D8A298.htm
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