inside the glass house

God help the world! Four more years of ‘moral, traditional values’
NEW YORK– Perhaps one of the best post-election wisecracks came from a comedian who joked that President George W. Bush is no longer in a hurry to bag Osama bin Laden, whose capture was to have been a pre-election October surprise. With a new mandate, Bush now has four more years to do so.

Humour apart, the re-electon of Bush as US president for the next four years has virtually stunned not only the outside world but also the liberal establishment and the mainstream media in the US which mostly rooted for Bush's rival, John Kerry.

The victory– although a remarkable achievement for the incumbent president– was no cake walk. The popular vote was 51 percent in Bush's favour as against Kerry's 48 percent.

But the reactions that came from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America were overwhelmingly negative. If Bush decides to continue with his unilateralist policies-- marginalizing traditional US allies and skirting the United Nations-- the next four years remain rather dismal.

After a chaotic, violence-ridden Iraq, what's next on the Bush foreign policy agenda? Iran? Syria? Sudan? Cuba? If Bush continues to keep most of his loony bunch of foreign policy advisers, the US could end up invading every country with which it disagrees, including perhaps France.

Paul Weyrich, founder of the conservative right-wing Heritage Foundation, posed a legitimate question last week: "Are we going to continue on the offence, where we make more enemies than we can defeat? Or are we going to return to the traditional foreign policy that we do not attack unless attacked?"

Bush's victory was attributed primarily to the religious right, including Christian fundamentalists who were appalled by Kerry's perceived support for same-sex marriages and abortions.

The voter turnount among evangelical Christians was overwhelmingly in favour of Bush helping to turn the tide in last week's elections. But the tragedy of it is that Bush is supposed to have won because he upheld "moral and traditional values."

But what "moral values" are reflected in the killings of civilians in Iraq (according to the last count over 100,000), and tacit US support for Israel's savage policies against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza?

How in the world can Christian evangelicals claim that these are sound "moral values" the Bush administration has stood for outside the country's borders?.

Last Wednesday was also an international day of mourning at the United Nations where staffers on lunch breaks were glued onto TV's watching an unbelievable spectacle unfolding before their eyes.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who recently irritated the White House by describing the US invasion of Iraq as "illegal," had little or no choice but to welcome four more years of a new Bush administration.

After congratulating Bush, the secretary-general issued the usual diplomatically-nuanced statement that he is "committed to continuing to work with President Bush and his administration on the whole range of issues facing the United Nations and the world."

Since Annan is expected to finish his second five-year term only by the end of December 2006, he will have to cooperate with the new Bush team at least for the next two years-- whether he likes it or not. Bush, whose new four-year term will end December 2008, will also determine who should be the next secretary-general, possibly from Asia. The Bush administration, which went to war in Iraq without UN authorisation, has also remained at odds with the United Nations over sending a large team of UN employees to organise elections in the occupied country in January 2005.

Annan has stood firm against sending a team because of the deteriorating security environment in Iraq. But how long can he stand firm against US and Iraqi government demands?

"If the United Nations is to survive as an institution, it has to learn to live with the United States," admits a longstanding Asian diplomat. It has to either cooperate or perish.

The right wingers in the Bush administration are expected to go after the world body–and possibly Annan– over a growing bribery scandal relating to the UN-supervised, now-defunct oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Unfortunately for the Secretary-General, even his son who worked for one of the contracting firms has been dragged into the growing controversy making Annan vulnerable to rightwing attacks. Even before the presidential elections, several conservative, right-wing publications, including the 'Wall Street Journal' and the 'Washington Times', have been on the offensive singling out the UN Secretariat for strong criticisms. Now, they will go for the kill.

Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy, was pessimisitic about any radical changes in foreign policy by the new Bush administration.

"The Bush policies toward the United Nations are likely to remain similar – viewing the United Nations as a significant tool when useful to Washington and as an irrelevant ritual otherwise,'' he said.

"Likewise, we'll see Washington continue to use the rhetoric of 'multilateralism' when expedient, while taking unilateral action whenever convenient,'' he added.

Perhaps the last word came from columnist Mark Moford of the San Francisco Chronicle: "It simply boggles the mind: we've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well- documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant."

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