Back After A While And Blabbing About America

Bush-basher-extraordinaire though I am, I believe that George was not the only reason why the American Foreign Policy has ecdysed into the current form. And though Democrats are known to be genuine “softies” in their dealings with the world at large, I don’t see any new patterns emerging.

Without wasting time referring to the clichéd demise of the Soviet Union and the creation of a unipolar world, I would ask the reader to put himself/herself into a self-simulated imaginary global state where he/she runs an economically and industrially omnipotent nation. We would not need reminders from old father Time on the subject of crumbling empires. That, as GWB (referred henceforth as “the Gawb”) liked to say, woood be toow awbvius.

Then, I would not bother to ask the reader if he/she finds the current situation desirable, for identical reasons. I mean, who doesn’t like to be God?

And then, I would stifle the question on the tip of my tongue-of course you’d like to keep it this way.

And then I would ask the reader to look at America. A nation that realizes the power of the moment. A nation that realizes that every single move counts. That when you have the dream of staying at the top till the cows come home (the Texan quality of the metaphor being not entirely unintended), you have to get your clothes dirty. Good business ain’t clean business. As the Gawb knows too well.

The U S of A has understood long ago that the prime power source of the third planet is scheduled to run out about a century and a half or less from date. This gives them an excellent target. They have been doing dirty business in oil for ages, giving the Middle Eastern Royal Families everything that their hearts weakened by years of debauchery could desire, establishing themselves as preferred customers and “security-providers” wherever they found the soil fertile to sow.

And now they reap. America has been the world’s largest automobile manufacturing and buying nation for ages. Producing the most pollutants, guzzling the most “gas” (I guess they call petrol that because they get it to evaporate so fast), driving the most miles and producing the most award-winning environment savvy television programmes.

And they have knocked a decade or three off that “out of fuel” deadline. Beneath America lie moderately large reservoirs of oil. Untapped. They will be struck when the deserts of Arabia have run truly dry. Enough to help them survive till something else is found for dinner.

So they may come up with alternatives soon. Being the world’s largest users of cars, if they are faced with a “convert or run dry” scenario, they would snap up any alternative energy source. And achieve control of either its source or the technology required to tap it. Oh it would be popular soon enough. I heard a shopkeeper in the Mina Bazar in New Delhi say this-“You can sell anything to an American as long as you talk really nice.”

And so economic domination would continue.

Why did America attack Iraq? The Gawb says bad intelligence. The New York Times says to gain control of Iraqi oil dealing. The stupid Catholic says to destroy infidels forever. Saddam Hussein says Allahuakbar.

What would the reader have done to maintain control over a region whose internal politics have begun to take the situation out of hand? Whose leaders, annoyed by attacks on their “brothers” the Taliban, stifled under fundamentalist elements, threatened by war in Israel and Iraq, were gradually beginning to dislike the idea of selling to America entirely? Plant “intelligent bombs” in Iraq? Provide “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo? Supply “aid” to “war-torn” Israel?

And then, produce a large-scale invasion of Iraq. Shoot Cruise Missiles from destroyers in the Gulf onto Saddam’s blazing palace. Finance Sunni terrorists and revolutionary Shiites. They have played these games for ages.

The effect on the surrounding oil-selling nations? Great Scott! Look at what the streets of Baghdad look like. He did it just basing on “bad intelligence”? Gadzooks! I might be staring up at a bloody nukeheaded ICBM coming down on top of my head next afternoon because the Gawb doesn’t like my beard and Rumsfeld doesn’t approve of hizaab. Damn. I’ll shave tomorrow and give my ninety-seven wives orders to wear G-strings 24-7!!

As Chomsky likes to say- “There’s nothing like the iron hand. The dynamic is very familiar.”

America? Change? Cockroaches don’t need evolution.