Sidney Blumenthal: America is not Bush

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/05/31/policy/

America is not Bush

The damage the president has done to our country's reputation can be rebuilt -- by those who uphold our Founding Fathers' ideals.

Editor's note: This article is adapted from remarks delivered to a conference, "From Terror to Security," held by the New York University Center on Law and Security in Florence, Italy, on May 26.

By Sidney Blumenthal

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Among the many consequences of the idea that we are in a war for survival have been the distortion, corruption and subversion of American law and the U.S. legal system, from the abrogation of the Geneva Convention against torture to the suspension of habeas corpus. The corruption is an aspect of a general hostility to and undermining of not only the law but also our senior military, our intelligence community, the Foreign Service, and international institutions including the United Nations and the World Bank.

The romanticization of total conflict has obscured the real one and the ability to deal with it. Projecting the illusion of omnipotence has fueled the illusion of jihadism. The more boastful the claim of our virtue, the more vaunted the jihadists' claim of holy war; the greater the claim of our limitless power, the greater the credence of jihadists' universalism.

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," Bush declared after 9/11, a statement that underlines the one made by Osama bin Laden in 1995, long before Bush spoke on the subject. "This is an open war up to the end, until victory," said bin Laden. Mimicking the terrorist leader's rhetoric does nothing but lend credence to bin Laden and the jihadists.


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The Bush policy has been refuted, but we still must cope with its consequences, and will have to cope with them after 18 more months of inevitable damage. The administration's assumptions have evaporated, but their precipitation remains. But just because Bush has broken things does not mean that the next president must rebuild those very things. Indeed, they cannot be rebuilt because the cracks and fissures were already in the making. As the next administration picks up the pieces, it cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

One characteristic of the Bush administration's false premises, and perhaps the one that has most damaged the nation's reputation, is that its idea of America and its notion of American exceptionalism -- Messianic and Manichaean -- is the only idea of America. But there is another idea of the country, which began even before the country was a nation, before America became the United States, a nation under law. John Winthrop said (and has been cited by Republican and Democratic presidents since) that we must be "as a city upon a hill." The next sentence is: "The eyes of all people are upon us."

We must be unblinkered and unillusioned, conscious of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," as our Declaration of Independence put it, with the sense that America never is alone or isolated -- and not ultimately because we are scrutinized by others but because we understand ourselves and our history. America can begin to recover its reputation in the world only through self-recovery.

[Nay]

1. I like Blumenthal, but he fails to realize that 35% of the population

IS Bush, and a larger percentage than that of rich people identifies with Bush as well.

He also is playing right into the hands of the Repubs who want to separate Bush from the Repub Party in general, so the sheep can be convinced that Pubs are good, Bush is baaaaaad. And Pubs win 2008.

[SharonAnn]

2. The problem is that now they know the U.S. is only as good or bad as its president.

They now know that a president can corrupt the Constitution, commit illegal acts without retribution, an commit election fraud and claim that he was honestly elected, etc.

They now know that there is no longer a core of honesty, "rule of law", or a constitutional foundation to the United States and how it behaves in the world arena.

Whereas in the past foreigners figured that at least a lousy president couldn't do too much damage, now they know he can. So therefore, any treaty or agreement they reach is not with the United States and will not be honored in perpetuity. Is is made with the individual president and will be honored as long as he feels like honoring it, and no longer.