September 5, 2002	Thursday	Jamadi-us-Saani26,1423

WASHINGTON: America floats on an ocean of credit. After a couple of months’ good behaviour, you get overwhelmed by junk mail and calls from organizations desperate to lend you money. It is common for families to run themselves up to the maximum on a stack of different cards. It is easy to assume it will last for ever. Then comes the reckoning.

Now the government has been seduced in just the same way. A year ago, sympathy for the United States was close to unanimous across the planet. The murderous attacks raised the country’s moral credit rating sky-high. But it was not limitless. And the Bush administration dissipated it all on a spending spree of ideological indulgences and hubris.

Leave aside the question of whether its own Iraq policy might possibly be right. What is indisputable is that the US government has wrecked, possibly beyond repair, its hopes of persuading any other country to that effect by simple, arrogant incompetence. It is terrifying to watch. It could be the next bestseller: “How to Lose Friends and Influence No One, by George W Bush”.

Much of the process has been public and obvious: over issues such as the environment and the Middle East. We have also had the humiliation of Russia over nukes and the volte-face over steel tariffs, when years of free trade principles were tossed aside for a few steelworkers’ votes in the Mid-west.

Overall, the US’s list of wholehearted allies, as opposed to mutinous vassals, is now apparently down to Israel (provided it keeps getting its own way), Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.

This is the kind of point oppositions are meant to pick up. But the official opposition is inaudible. In 2000 a plurality of Americans voted to put into the White House a man whose knowledge of, and commitment to, environmental issues was unparalleled in presidential history. Yet out of funk, Al Gore spent the campaign pretending he knew nothing, and cared less. The planet? Oh, that old thing!

The Democrats are now worse than ever. They have almost a dozen possible candidates for the presidency in 2004. One of them, Joe Lieberman, has tried to out-hawk the Pentagon over Iraq; nearly all the others, Gore included, have just squirmed.

The leadership of the opposition appears to have reverted to the president’s father, acting through his surrogates. It is easier to fathom the workings of the Tikriti clan. The informed scepticism has come from unelected quasi-politicians (including three of the last four secretaries of state) and a regiment of ex-generals.

Let me suggest a possible message for the Democrats that might be worth mentioning to the electorate. The last Gulf war cost $60 billion, spread globally. Say this one runs to $100 billion. That would leave the US taxpayer with a bill of $2,000 per household (minus a few cents from the Micronesians).

Never mind. Perhaps they’ll stick it all on their credit cards and forget about it.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.