Freshman Prez Flunks Geopolitic: State of the Dubya
An assessment of George Bush's first year as president comes down to just two things: winning the war on terrorism and getting clear of the Enron implosion. The war may momentarily detract from the biggest domestic scandal in U.S. history, but not for long. Bush set out to get Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Omar—and after bombing a lot of Afghan villages, apparently got neither. Meanwhile, as long predicted, Al Qaeda troops have melted away into the countryside to fight another day, and any number of warlords have been resurrected to fight each other.
Things are going back to where they were before the Taliban imposed its fundamentalist regime, but this time, we're stuck in the middle, projecting—if that's the word for it—political power. We're on the verge of destabilizing Central Asia and the Middle East, endangering the Pakistani government, and rubbing raw the discontent between Pakistan and India. We may very well lose Saudi Arabia as an ally. Now facing life in prison, the erstwhile Talib John Walker Lindh is at best a scapegoat, while the detainees at Guantánamo provide a focus for global fury. Running a war on half a dozen fronts and giving the finger to the rest of the world will just end up isolating the U.S.
Enron is Bush's libertarian symbol, deregulation run amok. The issue is whether he has the guts to get rid of Lawrence Lindsey, his economic counselor, who had close ties to the Enron hierarchy; dump his secretary of the army, Thomas White, a former Enron exec who has an appearance of conflict of interest; and sack the ridiculous Harvey Pitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who in 1994 actually wrote a law review article suggesting companies destroy their records lest the docs end up on the front page of The New York Times. Even that step might not do the trick here, since sooner or later Congress will get into Enron's role in manipulating the California energy crisis, in which Bush performed like a Lay stooge, and Enron's mega-million-dollar boondoggle of an Indian power plant. The latter could do serious harm to American foreign policy. The subcontinent is a part of the world with vast potential markets for U.S. goods and services. And nowhere in the world do we look more like real bastards, ripping off hundreds of thousands of poor people on electricity for the benefit of a few rich scumbags in Texas.
[This column also has info on the checkered career of the coroner who pronounced the death of Enron's Cliff Baxter a suicide. Full text: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0205/ridgeway.php]
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx