November 19 , 2010
Disastrous Decisions
In the US mid-term elections of November 2, which produced a setback for the Democratic Party, one slogan, in particular, “Had enough; vote American”, was symbolic of a xenophobic mood. The prejudicial impact of the depiction of Obama as a foreign outsider with an insidious agenda to undermine America poisoned the national environment. For many voters, the specter of a black couple in the White House is too much to digest. According to columnist Maureen Dowd, the Republicans “were able to persuade a lot of Americans that the couple in the White House was not American enough, not quite ‘normal’, too Communist, too radical.”
Obama’s core problems, however, are largely the inheritance from the Bush Administration, which had launched two destructive conflicts and driven the US economy on a decline course.
According to a New York Times story of November 7 on public perceptions of George Bush, “Most Americans still do not view him favorably and a good portion still revile him for invading Iraq, waterboarding terror suspects and presiding over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
Revealing are the own words of the 43d US President, George W. Bush, in his 477-page memoirs, “Decision Points”, which was released November 9, wherein the gullible Bush focuses on the pivotal decisions of his Administration after 9/11, including some pertinent to Pakistan and the region.
On Pakistan, Bush has this to say (on p. 187): “The most pivotal nation we recruited was Pakistan. No country wielded more influence on Afghanistan.” On page 212, “The primary cause of trouble did not originate in Afghanistan or, as some suggested, in Iraq. It came from Pakistan.” On page 215, he talks of cricket and of meeting Inzamam-ul-Haq.
More significantly, on pages 216 and 217, Bush admits facilitating the exit of Musharraf and then goes on to characterize the induction of his successor in the following terms: “Asif Ali Zardari took his place as president. Pakistan’s democracy had survived the crisis.”
There was not a single reference to Kashmir in the book. It echoes Obama’s silence on Kashmir during his Indian yatra. On this, Arundhati Roy, writing in the New York Times of November 9, said: “While Obama spoke eloquently about threats of terrorism, he kept quiet about human rights abuses in Kashmir.”
This is a conclusive proof of the dismal failure of sycophancy in Pakistani diplomacy and policy.
Similar, too, is the case of the US endorsement of India’s bid to get a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. To preempt and counter this move, this writer has been consistently proposing, for the past two decades, Indonesia – the world’s largest Muslim nation with no contentious disputes – to be inducted in the Security Council. Not having a Muslim voice and representation where it matters is reflective of the crushing failure of the 57-member Islamic Conference, which has been reduced to an international decoration piece after King Faisal’s assassination in 1975, following the high of the Lahore Islamic Summit of 1974.
The combined effect of the collapse of the counter-balancing Soviet Union in 1991 and the 9/11 atrocity of 2001 set the stage for America to stumble into an arrogant overreach.
The disastrous decisions of Western leaders and Muslim governing elites have contributed to a bloody world. As for Bush, he continues to earn the tidy sum of $150,000 for each public speech.
