A Flawed Dictate

Nations strike me as being much like individual human organisms, which means they are usually saturated with a sense of pride. Sometimes they see the need to keep it suppressed, nevertheless it can never be extinguished or even lessened, and prudence demands remembering that and not going all the way to Brussels and elsewhere to prick it. Human beings differ somewhat from those most patient and understanding of souls, housecats.

GWBush is currently tooling around Europe, secure in the perception of himself as the leader of the "sole superpower" (as if the European Union, Russia, and especially China no longer exist). He is busy throwing his weight around and telling one sovereign nation after another what they should be doing while glossing over his own numerous missteps, such as invading Iraq, failing to take part in the Kyoto environmental agreement, and not being even-handed or even active in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

One of his hosts, the Belgian premier, is going along with the game by cheerfully saying in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, "It makes no sense to argue now about who was right and who was wrong."

All well and good -- except what about the next time? And what about all those thousands now grievously injured and deceased far ahead of their time?

Bush is famous for never admitting that anything connected with him was a mistake. So, as long as he lacks all ability to retract previous flawed statements, his present efforts to put himself forward as skilled in foreign policy can't in the long run be convincing.

One of his worse misstatements came soon after the beginning of his so-called "war on terror." He loudly spat out on all the other countries of the world a dictum that ran something like: "If you're not with us, you're against us."

As soon as he announced that, I wondered where would Europe have been if, at the outset of World War II, the German leaders had expressed a similar state of mind by means of their usual blood and steel. Surely the Europeans would have cooked in a deeper, filthier cauldron than the one they actually suffered. Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland in particular would then have faced the choice either of taking part in the Nazi nastiness or of being on the hurting end of it themselves, and people fleeing the Nazis wouldn't have had as many nearby borders beyond which they could hope to find refuge and survival.

Even in a "war on terror," neutrality or the appearance of it can have a moral aspect. A person can totally oppose acts of terror while at the same time disapprove some of the actions taken as countermeasures. One can reject car bombings while also rejecting schemes such as the Patriot Act. One can decry suicide attacks from the air while also seeing little or no need for imprisoning people indefinitely without the due process of law in concentration camps like those set up by the Bush Administration in Cuba and in Iraq. And nations can decide on their own approaches to dealing with terrorists without being bulldozed into the methods of pre-Fascists (aka neocons). These nations recognize the grievousness of the wounds suffered by the U.S. , and in some cases they have already been badly injured themselves, but they have decided on the approaches that, in their view, are best suited for dealing with the situations, and often that involves more quietness and less posturing.

A person shouldn't try to limit the options of his friends. To do so clearly indicates that he himself is not such a friend after all.