Thursday, February 14, 2008
Two Things About the George W. Bush Interview
The BBC interviews George W. Bush. Summary
here, full text
here. The two things that get me are
1) The mind-numbing stupidity of some of the
comments. I doubt Europeans see the irony in condemning the US for not intervening in Darfur, for example, particularly if the US is supposed to be all about oil wars. Two of my favourites are from Americans.
Wow! After seeing the interview and reading the comments...I guess it's a no win situation for the guy. He sent troops to one place and gets critized and now refuses to do so because lets face it...he got a lot of critisism for doing so before. What is it that people want? I gaurentee that if he were to actually send troops, he would face the same complaints as he recieved when we went to Iraq.
Also, why should we send troops to Dufar? Let the rest of the world deal.
kelly, FL
***
"Why should he send troops to Darfur? Okay, there is happing a genocide but he will be the last who cares. If there was oil or gas in Darfur, he would have been the first to enter Sudan already years ago." Torsten, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Er... Sudan DOES have oil and gas. China gets 2/3 of what they use from the terrorists here, which is why they have blocked every single attempt to take action against them. Typically European trying to pin more blame onto the US.
Seer, USA
It's all amusing in a very general way.
What also gets me is how Bush appears to appreciate a very subtle historical and geopolitical point:
Frei: The Chinese government has been saying - part in response to this that - "America is [slipping back into] Cold War thinking."
Mr Bush: Yeah. Well, you know, they're... I think that's just a brush back pitch, as we say in baseball. It's... America is trapped in this notion that we care about human life. We respect human dignity. And that's not a trap. That's a belief. And that many of [us] in this country recognise that the human condition matters to our own national security. See, I happen to believe we're in an ideological struggle. And, those who murder the innocent to achieve political objectives are evil people. But, they have an ideology. And the only way you can recruit for that ideology is to find hopeless folks. I mean, who wants to join an ideology say women don't have rights? You can't express yourself freely. Religious beliefs are... you know, the only religious belief you can hold is the one we tell you. And, oh, by the way, it's great. You can be a suicider. Well, hopeless people are the ones who get attracted by that point of view. And, therefore, it's in the world's interest from a national security perspective to deal with hopelessness. And it has to be in our moral interest. I repeat to you... I believe to whom much is given, much is required. It happens to be a religious notion. But, it should be a universal notion as well. And... I believe America's soul is enriched, our spirit is enhanced when we help people who suffer.
Churchill he is not. But in a certain way, Truman he is. That Cold War comment is insightful, particularly if you read the bits about Bush not wanting to talk too much about all the money the US is giving to Africa to help fight AIDS.
See, this is basically the reason the US got into enormous contributions to foreign aid in the 1940s, and on into the 1950s and 1960s. It wasn't just to buy off countries. If you read the
Truman Doctrine speech,
the Sources of Soviet Conduct - and just about anything thereafter - you'll realize that foreign aid was a way to do containment on the cheap. If people aren't poor, they won't be radicalized. If they're not radicalized, they might better understand the benefits of the American ways of life / not be foolish enough to resort to communism etc.
When you look at it, the thinking didn't change that much into the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, except for a greater and greater emphasis on sending more money to poor countries. I'm not entirely sure that any of this worked terribly well, of course, but the theory was popular enough to cross generational and party lines.
Now, replace "communists" with "terrorists", "communism" with "radical Islam", and you understand what Bush is getting at. I have no doubt that Bush weaves his Christian Socialism into everything he does, which is why there's so much moralizing discussion about the human condition. Still, when you get right down to it, there's also a strategic logic to what he's offering. It's really interesting.
Posted by Jarrett at 5:31 PM
