RE: [A-List] Napoleon?

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Stan

I know Mark has some good perspectives on this but for my own money's worth I reckon it's more Clintonian than Clinton, with appearance trumping reality at almost every turn.

Bush has to be seen to relax because he must look as if he's in control. Hence the extended stays at Crawford, which emphasise his down-homeyness (like all the common people have a ranch to strut around in) and Texan-ness particularly, given the machismo that seems to be so important on occasions like this. The latter helps us to forget Bush's engineered evasion of active service in Vietnam.

This risks an image of complacency, however, so Bush has to make repeated appearances at his ranch railing against this and that in order to look like a hands-on president, in addition to the summits and meetings that take place on the ranch (adding further to environmental degradation thanks to all the air travel between DC and Crawford).

But, given Bush's obvious lack of grasp of the issues (beyond an appreciation of John Wayne-style "diplomacy" and the need to avoid daddy's perceived mistakes), his team must jockey for position around him, and the lack of leadership from the top means that the vacuum is being filled by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton and Rice -- Powell is very isolated in this company, which may partly explain why Baker, Scowcroft, Eagleburger and other Bush 1 veterans are being wheeled out of obscurity to throw some much needed cold water on the administration's delusions (to call them plans would be overly generous). But these guys have limited credibility within Bush 2 because Bush 2 is governed primarily by the need to avoid the supposed mistakes of Bush 1, thereby keeping the Republican right on-side (depriving Pat Buchanan of an entrée in 2004) and claiming to be governing in the spirit of Ronald Reagan, whose relationship with the elder Bush was never easy anyway (east coast aristocrat being patronised by some west coast ham actor schmuck). Hence absolute rejection of any wishy-washy environmental stuff, sabre-rattling in all areas of foreign policy, encapsulated by the reactivation with a vengeance of the Monroe Doctrine: Reaganite anti-communism via Otto Reich and John Bolton (Cuba and Venezuela), the FTAA (overtly conditional free trade, the condition being utter subservience to US interests including abject dollar hegemony), intensification of the "war on drugs" (surpassing Clinton's Plan Colombia) and subjugation of national bourgeoisies together with those domestic bourgeoisies in partnership with non-US (primarily EU) capital. The latter has come undone quite spectacularly as with Paul O'Neill's reversion to Rubin/Summers orthodoxy despite loud laissez faire-inspired disavowals at the beginning of Bush 2. Indeed the economy as a whole is screaming for the sort of intervention that the conservative base at the heart of Bush 2's appeal cannot countenance.

With contradictions like these piling up and mid-term elections pending it's no wonder that reality is being supplanted by tub-thumping since threats, real and imagined, have to be created and sustained long enough for Bush 2 to recapture the senate and push through its preferred legislative programme (despite the obvious contradictions inherent in that -- ideology trumps pragmatism until it's too late). In other words, it's bare-faced electoral calculation of a kind that surpasses Clinton's well-documented efforts. And, unlike either Clinton or Napoleon, Bush 2 is only a figurehead administration, with a dangerous power vacuum at the very top sucking in the very worst short-sighted, reactionary, dim-witted and utterly reckless "policymaking" that ultimately exposes the Gordian knot that US imperialism has tied for itself and now cannot undo without inflicting serious, painful damage upon itself. That is not to say that the damage would be irreparable (in the medium term, not counting all the undoubted environmental disasters and resource constraints detailed by Mark in other posts). However, it appears that US capitalism as it is presently configured is structurally incapable of making the sorts of sacrifices necessary to ensure its survival in the longer term, even assuming that there was no ecological crisis. The latter simply underlines the incredible psychosis of the system, of which there is no better personification than Dubya.

Michael Keaney