Burning Bush
By
Medhat El-Zahed
President Bush seems to be burning with desire to bring democracy, freedom, and human rights into this long-deprived region. He has reviewed the conditions of democracy in every state and come up with a set of guidelines that local leaders should follow to become worthy of US approval. Only those ruling elites that welcome the US occupation of Iraq as a form of liberation, and have no problem with Israel's occupation of Palestine, would qualify.
The ruling elites are being asked to crack down on those who believe in independence and who fail to denounce Palestinian and Iraqi resistance as forms of dark and primitive terror. The elites have also to endorse the neo-liberal agenda that calls for all matters of politics and economy to be dominated by the powerful of the earth.
Bush's brand of democracy is fairly creative. He believes that "those who are not with us are against us", that military intervention is the best means of achieving peace and justice, and that the UN Security Council is useless, unless it toes the line of the US military and intelligence apparatus. Public opinion, needless to say, is a nothing more than a hazardous outburst of demagogic sentiment.
Bush's means are just as enlightening as his ends. If you need evidence to create a sense of imminent danger to US security, forge it. And if scare tactics do not work, fire rubber bullets at protesters and impose more restrictions on civil rights. What Bush wants, we all know, is to impose US hegemony over the rest of the world. It is his simplicity that is disturbing. Step one: trump up an imaginary danger. Step two: preemptive war.
* This week's Soapbox speaker is a journalist with Al-Ahali newspaper.
