Most of my friends know that I am no fan of Bush. I have never been really impressed with his speech writers either, and Tuesday’s State of the Union speech was no exception.
Around the world everyone who cared enough to listen were waiting to hear how soon the small “coalition of the willing” were going to go to war and whether the US had come up with any compelling reasons to do so. Unfortunately, there was much of the usual, though there was a promise to reveal evidence. I think the last time that was promised we were told of aluminum pipes that the IAEA believe can be unrelated to nuclear arms research.
The speech was, however, an interesting study in what has increasingly become the debate over America’s approach to foreign policy and the terms it uses…
In the speech, for example, we are told how the US Constitution is not merely about protecting the rights of Americans, but is about “human dignity” and about “confound[ing] the designs of evil men” We are assured that liberty is, contrary to a more mainstream approach to democracy, “God’s gift to humanity”. Bush remarks, in an almost Hegelian way, that “free people will set the course of history” I always thought we were to believe that it was those unfree who fought for freedom that set the course of history.
Rather than the oppressed unfree fighting against their oppressors, there will always be free people (and presumably the powerful states who represent them) who will be around to get the job done. We are told that America “doesn’t depend on the decisions of others” but is free to act unilaterally on the behalf of enslaved peoples. Of course, he is also describing one of the basic features of hegemony, irrespective of whether its pursuits are noble.
I can almost picture Bush in Napoleon’s overly small uniform as he strides across a reluctant Europe, where an (un-)Holy alliance of the morally decadent France and Germany is still found in resistance.
In addition to getting a status update on the axis of evil (report card) which included a “good luck” for Iranian reformers, I couldn’t help noticing the strange inclusion (coinage?) of the word “Hitlerism”. This is presumably an example of the failure of scholars and politicians to sufficiently define “fascism”. OR, it can either mark the complete passing of the word out of fashion. Or, perhaps Bush is just a little uncomfortable using a word which has been whispered in cafes across the world in describing the US since 9/11.
This might be more likely, given that in the same phrase, we find the inclusion of an even more “out-of-fashion” word when “Communism” is listed as one of the enemies of free peoples. In this post-cold-war climate, when were are all focusing upon that classic foe of “terrorism” this seemed an odd point to pick on Communism. Apparently, however, the battle against “hitlerism [Germany], militarism [Japan] and communism [The Soviet Union]” is over thanks to “the will of free people, by the strength of great alliances and by the might of the United States of America” There is of course, a hefty dose of selective memory at work here.
The coming war is going to have be fought by the “might of the United States of America” alone.