Business A.M. Five pointers to a deeply worrying Bush strategy by James Taggart
http://www.businessam.co.uk/BreakingNews/articles/0,2790,44475,00.html
DUBYA is off on holiday after only six, hardly strenuous, months in the White House. The burden of a 30-hour week is showing. Community workers in Sighthill should be so lucky. The only fly in George’s liberally applied ointment is that foreign media continue to parade him as a buffoon.
A fortnight ago, the press published a photograph of the president during an audience with the Pope. It was a gift for caption writers, although most left us to supply our own. As Mr Bush was reading his statement, the Pope was holding his head in his hands.
No doubt His Holiness was concentrating on the president’s message, or perhaps saying his prayers: “Lord, why have You forsaken me? Can’t you make this bozo disappear in a puff of smoke?”
None of this seems to bother Mr Bush much. Perhaps he is smart enough to realise that when the media are concentrating on such trivia they are failing to scrutinise his decisions from a strategic standpoint.
I’m probably in the minority, but I would argue that Mr Bush is no fool. He wants to change the profile and direction of the US in geopolitics. He is doing this from a wholly America-centric point of view. He puts US interest at the top of his priorities regardless of the impact on other nations, friendly or otherwise.
The Bush line is becoming clear on at least five main issues. Is there any strategic linkage between them? Below, I suggest two responses to this question. One is deeply worrying, the other far more sinister.
Almost as soon as he took office, the president made it clear that he supported those US companies at the forefront of GM technology. According to him, food with a genetically modified content is tested, safe and wholesome. This was not the emergence of policy on the hoof, but a carefully prepared position.
Within a few weeks, he had taken a view on the California electricity shortages, coming down on the side of Texas-owned generating companies. His solution? More electricity, which means more oil consumption. In turn this means massive exploitation of environmentally sensitive areas of Alaska.
Son of Star Wars came next. Despite warnings from friendly powers, the president is pushing ahead with this technology-dominated policy. It will provide a huge fillip to what used to be called “the military-industrial complex”. Its avowed political purpose is to shield all friendly powers, as defined in the US interest at any point in time, against so-called rogue states, again as defined in the US interest.
The Kyoto accord was rejected with a loose promise of a better alternative to come from the US in the future. This was distinctly reminiscent of Sir Alex Douglas Home’s advice to Scotland in 1979 to reject Labour’s devolution package, as a better Tory version would be along directly. We know what happened to that guarantee. Like the Tories, not only has Mr Bush rejected what was on offer, he is intent on scuppering any further talks on the topic.
Most recently, and most transparently, the Bush administration rejected international agreement on limiting production and use of biological weapons. Succinctly, his spokesman declared that such an agreement was not in America’s business and security interests.
Here is my first answer to the question posed earlier. All five of these issues, and probably many more, will be influenced or determined by the prerequisite to preserve and expand US business and economic interests in international trade and commerce. In other words, Mr Bush’s idea of globalisation is no more or less than Americanisation.
Alternatively, could Dubya’s strategy owe something to conspiracy theory?
Here’s the scenario. As the world heads toward ecological and economic disaster, the isolationist response of the US will be to dominate through control of food and energy supplies. This will be buttressed by a huge and flexible ability to strike against any threat to American hegemony.
US economic growth and high standard of living will be maintained and developed at the cost of all other nations, and not just, as at present, of poorer countries. This might seem a ghoulish blend of Brave New World and 1984. It is, however, a quite acceptable scenario in the middle-class watering holes of Texas and California.
http://www.businessam.co.uk/BreakingNews/articles/0,2790,44475,00.html
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 http://www.yaysoft.com
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