It's like watching a bad hypnotist
Cheney made the speech to the World Economic Forum this year, in place of Colin Powell. I can't say I blame Powell for not wanting to speak, given that the core of his speech was found in subsequent months to be based on completely false, and possibly falsified, information.

According to this article from AP, Cheney's speech stressed the need to fight for democracy around the world. Just how stupid do the American leaders think the rest of the world is? Do they honestly think we're just going to forget that their reasoning for stepping up the war on terror to include Iraq has flip-flopped more often than a dying cod on the deck of a trawler?

To their credit, they've now found a focus that they believe they can continue to use for their future campaigns: the fight for democracy. Unfortunately, their logic seems to be a bit stretched. Let's look at just two of Cheney's hypotheses from his speech.

1. Democracies do not breed the anger and the radicalism that drag down whole societies or export violence.
I seem to remember a certain dictator who ruled Germany just 60 years ago and exported violence and dragged an entire world down into war. Unfortunately for Cheney, Bush and their speechwriters, he was democratically elected. In other words, there is no guarantee that a democratic society cannot breed horrific violence. If you need more support for that, just look at Zimbabwe.

Granted, the world has changed a lot since the 1930's, and the rapid spread of information we see now would likely not allow another Hitler to take power and abuse it the same way he did. And Zimbabwe is only a democracy on paper, with Mugabe's thugs preventing any serious opposition candidates from running, and intimidating voters who turn out to vote for them. But the point is that democracy on its own does not prevent violence and terror. The roots of the problems are in the underlying society, and I seriously doubt that the US and its imposed democratization of nations around the world are going to change the fundamental beliefs and values of any country. That's something that happens over a great deal of time.

2. Nurturing democracy is essential to halting terrorism.
This one I really don't understand. One day, Bush is trumpeting Libya's unilateral decision to reveal and dismantle its nuclear weapons program (as immature as it was), as a result of 9 months of negotiation between Libya, the US and the UK; the next, Cheney's saying that without democracy, terrorism cannot be stopped. Need anyone remind them that until not long ago, Libya was on the equivalent of the "axis of evil"? And that the country is still not a democracy but a dictatorship? And yet Libya is no longer involved in breeding and exporting terror, the country's leadership has owned up to the Lockerbie bombing and agreed to pay restitution, and the dictator has voluntarily stopped his WMD program. How do they reconcile this seeming contradiction?

The answer: they don't give a damn about any seeming contradictions. This administration is so internally focussed that they think they can deal with the rest of the world the way they deal with the American public. Unfortunately, they've forgotten two things: 1) The rest of the world doesn't have patriotic sentiments towards the US and therefore is highly unlikely to want to believe the US administration's words on faith alone, and 2) The rest of the world actually gets news and information from sources outside the US, unlike 90% (or maybe even more) of the US population.
- posted by Kamalistan @ 10:03 AM

 
This has a familiar ring to it...
"The great leader of the protectionist party, whatever else you may or may not think about him, has at any rate left me in no doubt...We know perfectly what to expect - a party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad, the trickery of tariff juggles, the tyranny of a party machine; sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the imperial pint, the open hand at the public exchequer, the open hand at the public house, dear food for the million, cheap labour for the millionaire."

Every phrase in this passage can be applied to the policies of the Bush White House since his election in 2000. And yet this passage was written by Winston Churchill in 1904 to denounce the protectionist government that was running for re-election. You'd think we would learn from the past...
- posted by Kamalistan @ 4:59 PM