| 03 November 2004 | Wednesday | 19 Ramazan 1425 |
Stuck in the groove
Alms and the man
The October surprise
Agonizing over America's choice
The latest news out of Paris and the hospital where Yasser Arafat is being treated suggests that no definitive findings have yet been made on whether or not the Palestinian leader has leukaemia. It will be, by all accounts, many days before the French doctors are able to confirm their diagnosis.
The Palestinians, as indeed most of the Arab world, are in a ferment. There is no obvious successor, and there are, therefore, grave apprehensions about a possible power struggle and its consequences for the Palestinian cause.
For the moment, a facade of unity is being maintained. Prime Minister Qorei has chaired a meeting of the Palestinian National Security Council while Mahmoud Abbas has presided over the meeting of the PLO's executive committee. In both cases, the chair of Yasser Arafat has been left empty to underline the fact that the Palestinians expect him to return in good health and resume his leadership of these two bodies. Much has been made of the fact that Arafat is staying in touch and is still in charge. According to one report, he instructed his finance minister to ensure that the employees of the Palestinian Authority were paid their salaries before Eid.
A suicide attack by a 16 year old Palestinian on a crowded Tel Aviv market has killed three people and injured scores of others. The attack has been claimed by the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and there is speculation that the PFLP may have carried out the attack as part of the jockeying by its leaders to stake a claim to the leadership of the PLO hitherto dominated by Arafat's Fatah group. Some Israelis have discounted this possibility suggesting that the suicide bombing was well planned and was probably prepared well before Arafat's illness became publicly known.
The attack has been condemned by Prime Minister Qorei and other Palestinian leaders. It is probable that at this time, and to the extent that they are able to exert some influence, the leaders will try and prevent such attacks. There is every reason to believe, however, that some Palestinian groups within the PLO, such as the PFLP or even the Al-Aqsa brigade, the fighting arm of the Fatah, will not heed such pleas and will seek to increase their influence within the Palestinian movement by launching spectacular attacks on Israel.
Present indications are that Israel will not at this time launch an attack on the PFLP or the refugee camp from which the suicide bomber came. But this restraint will not last. Sharon is in deep trouble politically. The insistence by senior members of his own Likud Party that the proposed withdrawal from Gaza be put to a referendum has created an untenable situation for him. The withdrawal plan had only a thin majority in the Knesset and that majority was contingent on the support of the opposition Labour party.
If stalwarts of the Likud party now insist on a referendum as a condition for continued support, and he refuses, as refuse he must if he wants the withdrawal to go ahead, chances are that his government will fall and fresh elections will be called. For the moment, if further attacks do not take place Sharon can afford to take a wait-and-see approach, by holding withdrawal plans in abeyance until Arafat's fate is known and until, in the event of Arafat's recovery being unlikely, a new leadership emerges in Palestine.
Another question mark with regard to the Gaza withdrawal will be the degree to which the PLO is able to prevent, in the absence of Arafat, a consolidation of the hold of Hamas on Gaza. It has been the contention of the Israelis and the Americans that even with Arafat in control, the Palestinian Authority had not been able to rein in the activities of Hamas in Gaza. In Arafat's absence, the task will be doubly difficult. If Hamas becomes more active, Sharon will have the excuse he needs to call off the entire withdrawal exercise.
My own suspicion is that the withdrawal would never have taken place in any case. There has been a pattern to the so-called Israeli concessions to further the peace process. The Oslo roadmap was derailed when former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak permitted Sharon to go to the Al-Aqsa mosque and to set in motion the cycle of violence that marked the commencement of the second Intifada. Barak lost his job as prime minister but the Israeli state was spared the problem of entering into serious negotiations on vacating Palestinian territory.
Now Sharon has obtained American or at least Bush support for a settlement that will enable Israel to hold on to a great deal of the territory that it had occupied in 1967 and for the building of the fence. It has also secured an erosion of the American stand for a freeze on settlements.
The latest discussions the Americans have had with the Israelis on this subject apparently permit the Israelis to allow for "natural expansion" that is for the settlement to be enlarged to meet the needs of the children of the settlers but also to permit expansion to cover the distance between the settlement proper and the synagogues constructed at some distance from the settlement.
These concessions are now irreversible even if Sharon cannot live up to his side of the bargain. The dynamics of the American domestic scene will ensure this. Sharon may lose his job just as Barak did but Israel will not need to honour the commitments that Sharon had made.
Elsewhere in the Muslim world, the situation is deteriorating. Thai security forces have followed up on the massacres earlier this year - in a fake encounter with terrorists in Thailand's Muslim provinces - by using of brute force to quell peaceful demonstrations.
In an action reminiscent of what the Afghan warlords had done Thai Muslims protesting against the illegal arrest of some of their co-religionists were packed into trucks like cattle and permitted to die of suffocation. Eighty people are said to have died. As far as one can tell, there has been not a word of protest from the OIC, or even from Muslim Asean countries. Only Malaysia has raised its voice to protest the slaughter.
In Sudan, the genocide appears to be continuing with the light-skinned Muslims waging a war against dark-skinned Muslims.
In China martial law has apparently been declared in some of China's central provinces after bloody clashes between the Hui Muslims and the Han majority. Chinese troops are now deployed in the region to protect the Hui Muslims, who according to reports, are of the same ethnic stock as the Han but are converts to Islam or descendants of intermarriages between Arab settlers and Han wives.
In Iraq, preparations appear to be underway for what would almost certainly be a bloody assault on Fallujah. Whether this will make it possible for the interim government and the Americans to hold elections in January or even to reduce the level of insurgency that prevails throughout the country is not clear. What is clear is that it will only intensify the rage of the Iraqi people and further reduce the credibility of the interim government.
In Iran, matters appear to be coming to a head on the demands being made by the West for Iran to suspend permanently its programme for creating a nuclear fuel cycle that would include uranium enrichment and a heavy water plant for use with natural uranium. The fact that Iran is not violating any international norm or its obligations as a NPT state in creating this fuel cycle is not likely to weigh heavily with those who are intent on ensuring that Iran desists from this activity. There is no likelihood that Iran will succeed in persuading the West that similar action needs to be taken against Israel's nuclear programme.
In Saudi Arabia, the embattled royal family is continuing its war on the terrorists and taking tentative steps towards reform. There have been some successes but it would be naive to assume that the battle has been won or even that a definite upper hand has been established.
In Pakistan, the battle against foreign terrorists and local sympathizers continues with mixed results. The government appears determined to eliminate them not only in the mountains but also in the cities. However, the roots they have struck are deep and are protected by the same groups and parties that until not too long ago were patronized by the government itself.
The president has called upon the moderate majority to assert itself and to assist the government in ridding Pakistan of the evils of extremism but there are many who believe that the government's own leadership role in this regard will have to be much more concretely manifested before the silent majority can be galvanized into action.
There is a clear sense of crisis in the Muslim world. In far too many of the situations that the Muslims have to contend with there appears to be a lack of will to accept hard and harsh realities. These realities dictate that rather than counting on "divine intervention" and the "power of faith", Muslim leaders must recognize that to ensure the survival of their countries and to secure a chance to rebuild their economies they must "cut their losses".
The Palestinians must recognize that there was a price to be paid for the defeats they suffered in 1948, 1967 and even in 1973. They cannot get on the negotiating table what they failed to get on the battlefield. The same lesson must be learnt in other parts of the Muslim world. The leaders must educate their people to accept these realities rather than encouraging them to entertain false hopes.
The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Stuck in the groove
Almost four decades ago, during the Vietnam war, the great liberal, Senator J. William Fulbright, captured more eloquently than any recent commentary what was at stake in yesterday's US presidential election.
There were, he said, two Americas: "One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good humoured, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power."
Which of these two Americas prevails is a question of huge significance for us all. It can be seen in the intensity of interest across the globe and in the large numbers of Americans who said that this was the most important election of their lifetime. The outcome will determine whether America reaches out to the world in a spirit of partnership or continues with its posture of sullen rejectionism. It will determine whether this misdirected war on terror continues to escalate into a clash of civilizations that puts us all in greater danger, or can be turned into an effective campaign to address the political causes of terrorism.
It will also determine the course of American politics for a generation. With up to four supreme court judges likely to be replaced in the next four years, the occupant of the White House will be in a unique position to influence the direction of American constitutional law. A Bush victory would enable him to entrench his harsh, moralistic conservatism in ways that would be impossible to reverse for many years. A Kerry presidency would have less room for manoeuvre, but might at least stop the rot that has seen American liberalism in almost continuous retreat since the 1960s. This is a battle for America's political soul.
For most of the democratic world, there are good reasons for wanting a Kerry victory. His promise to create a much broader international coalition against terrorism carries with it an implicit acceptance that the views of countries other than America must once again be made to count for something. To lead, he will have to generate consent. Even so, it is important not to exaggerate the extent to which a change of president would lead to a change in American foreign policy.
In order to mount a credible challenge to Bush, Kerry has felt the need to pander to Republican prejudices across a wide range of issues. Don't, for example, hold your breath for ratification of the Kyoto treaty or a tough line against Israel's land grab in the West Bank. The limits of the possible will be determined by, among other things, a Congress that looks set to remain firmly in Republican hands. Whoever occupies the White House, conservatism will remain America's governing ideology for the foreseeable future.
The reasons for this need to be analysed and understood if there is to be any hope of bringing America back into the community of responsible nations on anything more than an occasional basis. This is about much more than one administration and the policies it pursues. It is fundamentally a question of global power relations and the distorting impact of American primacy.
As Fulbright argued: "Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favour." Along with the preponderance of American power comes an unshakable faith in the superiority of American ideas and an irresistible urge to act on them. The folly is to imagine that it could be otherwise.
For Britain, this poses some uncomfortable choices. Britons could continue to pursue their "special relationship" in the hope that America behaves with enough self-restraint to avoid compromising other relationships that matter to them, most notably in Europe.
This would certainly be easier with Kerry in the White House, but it would do nothing to address structural causes of America's lurch to the right. By putting fidelity to the "special relationship" first, Britain can only weaken Europe's collective voice and encourage America's unilateralist impulse, further souring transatlantic relations and leaving it exposed - the choice one has always attempted to avoid.
The truth is that if Britain wants a durable transatlantic partnership that works in the common interests of Europe and America, it will only become possible if the country is prepared to abandon the illusion of "specialness" in its relations with America and give priority to the objective of forging a common European approach. This is not primarily a matter of treaties and institutions; it is much more a question of mindset.
One of the most remarkable features of the Iraq war was the extent to which several European governments were willing to ignore the opposition of their own voters in order to support Bush. Like the native administrators of some colonized land, there is the tendency in parts of Europe, and Britain in particular, for the political classes to identify more with the "colonial power" than with the people they are supposed to represent.
Tony Blair represents such an extreme example of this condition that it is difficult to imagine how a Europe that includes him among its leaders can ever hope to restore to the transatlantic relationship a necessary measure of balance.
Yet what is the alternative? Michael Howard's adoption of a more critical position on the war and the Bush-Blair relationship is utterly unconvincing, and the Liberal Democrats, though sincere, are not yet ready for government. The only other potential prime minister, Gordon Brown, is still mired in third-way ambiguity, positioning Britain as equidistant from Washington and Brussels.
Few doubt that he, like Blair, would have followed Bush into Iraq; yet even so, there is one important difference between them that at least raises the possibility that a change of leader might enable Britain to loosen the suffocating embrace of the "special relationship". It comes down to an issue of pride.
It is entirely likely that Blair, in moments of private reflection, understands that he made an enormous mistake in selling his support to George Bush so cheaply. But even if this were the case, any public admission that he got it wrong would, at this late stage, destroy the little authority he retains. Consequently, he is obliged to plough ahead without any room for manoeuvre. Brown carries none of this baggage.-Dawn/Guardian Service
Alms and the man
We have been enjoying very pleasant weather in Islamabad. One day when the sky was overcast I decided to take my daily walk at noon, as I do during the winter, instead of going out in the evening and coming back in the dark.
As I passed in front of a British diplomat's house on my usual beat, a pick-up stopped and the driver ladled out for the private security guard a big helping of chana pulao from a cauldron.
I asked him if he was selling or distributing. He said a gentlemen called Lakhani living in Sector G-9 sent out the pick-up every day, mainly for the underpaid security guards and for anyone else who wants to partake of his gesture for eating at iftari. That day, he said, he was rather early.
This was not far from the multiple crossing on Margalla Road where I give a five-rupee note every day to Faheem, an Afghan boy on crutches whose legs were shattered by a land-mine and who seeks alms from passing motorists who halt there at the red light.
The day I don't have those five rupees I feel as if I am neglecting my humanitarian duty. Just as Pakistan is full of crooks and conmen who know innumerable ways of helping themselves with state funds and the public money, there are also many good souls who silently help the poor.
The well-to-do have varying views on charity, especially on the habit of giving cash to beggars. I am all for helping beggars, and I don't believe in the modern social nonsense that it encourages indolence. In fact I despise those self-righteous opulent women sitting in Mercedes and Land Cruisers in the bazaar contemptuously advising begging men and women, "Why don't you do some work?" I have earned the scorn of some of them whom I had foolishly advised in turn to find a job for even one of the beggars. Who will give them work?
As for the so-called demeaning habit of begging, it is the most widespread part-time vocation in Pakistan. Every industrialist, businessman, politician and bureaucrat in this country is all the time begging shamelessly (and needlessly) for bank loans, money-earning licences and other favours that he never intends to pay back. It is a national trait, and the NAB's offices are full of their exploits. Even the Pakistan government has become addicted to begging and can be seen standing bowl in hand outside finance institutions in some of the world's capitals. So don't give me that crap.
I am not shy of telling people that I never turn away a beggar and that I collect about 13,000 rupees every month for some indigent families that have no other source of income. Of this amount Rs 3,000 is my personal contribution. And I am not a rich man, having only my pension, though I do earn a goodly sum from my writing. I don't own a house or any other property. My late wife was one with me in this and we were proud of this "anti-social" practice. In fact she was an inveterate philanthropist in secret. It was she who, despite this secrecy, taught me to talk about our generosity.
Her point was that it was a noble habit, and if by telling people about it we can make them follow our example, it might do good to so many needy families. I am glad that our two daughters walk in our footsteps in this regard, and every now and then they are soliciting contributions from friends and relations for one family in distress or another.
They say the amount they ask for is so small that it makes no difference to the donors since they are all well-to-do, while the total so collected makes a lot of difference to the poor at the other end and may mean food for a whole month.
What are the three most popular words uttered by most of us outside the home? Certainly they would be "Baba maaf karo," the standard reply to importunate men, women and children accosting us for alms. It is a request to be pardoned. Why do we want to be excused? Just because we are talking business with an acquaintance, or eating French fries and ice cream, or just because we don't have change for the hundred-rupee note in our pocket? We should be asking for pardon from our Maker, who we believe watches all our moves. In what way can a beggar in rags excuse us or pardon us? We should thank the Almighty that we are not in his shoes.
In the bazaar we may have spent a couple of hundreds on satisfying the whim of an obstinate child for a useless trinket or a video game, but we want to be excused from giving a couple of rupees to persons who, as we are fond of saying smugly, demean their human status by begging in public. I often say to friends that even if a beggar has hoarded thousands in some hiding place, he deserves charity simply for the reason that he is ready to lay aside his self-respect and grovel for a handout.
I have talked about rich women in limousines admonishing beggars and asking them why they don't do some kind of honest work. But look at their behaviour when they do come across, say, a girl of ten or twelve, or a woman with an infant in her arms, selling clips and buttons. This is honest work and deserves to be encouraged by letting them keep the change.
But no, the habit of haggling cannot be given up and these poor females are told, "You want five rupees for this tape? In Aabpara market I get it for three rupees. I won't pay more than that." The lady never thought of haggling with the owner of the fancy shop who has just charged her more than double the real price for a useless item.
There is no shortage of the needy in this country. Even if you live in the most posh locality there is no escape from the stark reality of grinding poverty among domestic workers. Aside from an occasional tip for doing some outside chore, I give Niaz Ali, a neighbouring security guard, my collection of old daily newspapers (I get all of them free) which he sells twice a month.
He doesn't want charity but he is grateful that I pay for his little son's school fees and his school books and uniform. What I mean to say is that one doesn't have to go far to look for the needy. And now we have the problem of Alice, our washing-ironing woman who has somehow lost her mind and is unfit to work and will just have to be given a monthly handout.
Many of my readers will say, "Doesn't this man find it in bad taste to talk blatantly about his so-called generosity?" Maybe I do, but it is not as bad as the taste that the poverty around me leaves in my mouth. In any case, I don't mind what they say as long as they are willing to do what I do.
The October surprise
The spectral image that has haunted this presidential campaign finally surfaced last weekend on television with an attack ad of his own. All that was missing was the tag line: "I am Osama bin Laden, and I approved this message."
Osama's campaign video was quickly dubbed the "October Surprise," but the real surprise is something different: It is that, despite warnings by US intelligence that Al Qaeda was planning a pre-election attack, it hasn't happened. Indeed, there hasn't been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001, and the intriguing question is: Why not?
Perhaps someone in the bowels of the CIA knows the answer to this riddle, but I suspect they're mostly just guessing, like the rest of us. And for all the sparring between George Bush and John Kerry during the campaign over who could do a better job of fighting bin Laden, I doubt either of them could explain the Al Qaeda puzzle.
The long-dreaded attack could still come at any time. But analysts suggest several possibilities: Al Qaeda may be much weaker than generally believed, bin Laden's ambitions may increasingly be political, and disruption efforts against him may be working.
The weakness of bin Laden's organization is clear to Peter Bergen, one of the few western journalists to have interviewed him. "I don't think they have the people here in the United States to conduct operations. It's that simple," contends Bergen, who is now a fellow at the New America Foundation. This view is shared by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operations officer who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "He would have struck us by now if he could have," he argues.
Gerecht discounts a widely cited estimate that 18,000 to 35,000 terrorists passed through Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan. In rebuttal, he cites an interview he conducted in 1999 with bin Laden's chief Afghan rival, the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated two days before September 11, 2001. He told Gerecht that he had faced at most 700 to 1,000 of bin Laden's Arab-Afghan fighters.
Bergen believes that the bin Laden of the latest video was attempting, in his own bizarre way, to join the presidential debates. It's the first time Bergen has seen him photographed without a gun at his side, for example. And in the full text of his comments, released by al-Jazeera, bin Laden talks about some unlikely themes, ranging from election fraud in Florida to Halliburton's contracts to the size of the U.S. budget deficit. He says his strategy is "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy" by luring it into a costly war in Iraq.
A similar view of Osama bin Laden as a political wannabe comes from Charles M. McLean, whose Denver Research Group analyzes thousands of sources of information in English, Arabic and other languages to frame what he calls "aggregated thought" about a topic. "Our systems are indicating that bin Laden's ultimate goal is to turn his movement into a political force within the Middle East," says McLean. He notes that in polls, Osama gets higher favourability ratings than George Bush or Tony Blair in Pakistan, Jordan and Morocco.
A final theory is that America and its allies have been successful in disrupting bin Laden's operations. The best account I've seen comes from George Friedman, who runs a private intelligence service called Stratfor and has just published a book called "America's Secret War."
Friedman argues that all the intelligence alerts and warnings, combined with arrests of suspected Al Qaeda operatives around the world, have put bin Laden off balance. Every time the Bush administration issues a warning about a possible plot, Osama bin Laden has to assume the worst. His operatives "could be captured without Al Qaeda knowing it," Friedman writes in a recent analysis. "Worse, they could be captured, turned and released back into the field without Al Qaeda knowing it. Even if the latter is unlikely, Al Qaeda simply cannot be sure and, not being sure, they must abort the mission."- Dawn/Washington Post Service
Agonizing over America's choice
Dear Senator Kerry,
It ought to become clear at some point today whether it would be reasonable to address you as Mr President-Elect.
Perhaps not. In recent days, those of us who had pinned our hopes on regime change in the United States of America noted with dismay that some opinion polls were edging your rival's way. A dangerous trend, perhaps, rather than a decisive shift. Besides, pollsters are sometimes way off the mark. All in all, very few psephologists were willing to lay their reputations on the line through confident predictions one way or the other. A suspenseful "too close to call" remained the mantra until the bitter end.
Yet there were indications beyond the marginal shifts of opinion that suggested George W. Bush was on his way to obtaining a popular mandate. Which would, of course, be a first for him.
There was a flurry of reports about voter intimidation and electoral fraud, including the case of the missing 58,000 postal ballots in Florida's Broward county - which, despite the hanging chads, voted overwhelmingly for Al Gore in 2000. There and in other swing states, the local Republican party machines had drawn up lists of thousands of voters - mostly African-Americans and Hispanics, who tend to vote largely for your party - whose eligibility to vote they intended to challenge in hundreds of voting booths.
The received wisdom is that high turnouts favour Democrats. Therefore those who are fanatical about exporting democracy to Iraq, Afghanistan and other "dark corners" of the world (excluding Saudi Arabia and, for that matter, Pakistan) seemed desperate to restrict it in their own homeland.
I'm sure you have long been aware of all these machinations. The Democratic party is reported to have recruited thousands of lawyers, and there was some apprehension that in the event of a close result or statistical tie in yesterday's polling, court cases could continue for months before a winner emerged.
It's highly unlikely that most Americans would wish to go through a repetition of the 2000 experience. And such problems ought to be off the radar in a nation that posits itself as a democratic exemplar on the international stage. But they are not, and one can only hope that election observers have been keeping a close eye on the proceedings.
What these observers can't do anything about is the role that corporate donors play in determining the "popular choice" in your country. You, Senator, can make a difference, especially if you're elected to the White House. Campaign finance desperately needs an overhaul: "the best democracy that money can buy" is a huge blot on the American political landscape.
And the electoral college system, weighted at its inception towards the slave-owning southern states, is surely an anachronism. But for a filibuster by segregationist senators, it would have been voted out in 1969, while you were fighting the Vietnamese. It wasn't. If it hadn't been in place four years ago, Al Gore would have been seeking re-election yesterday.
Anyhow, the overall impression of the campaign has been that the Republicans were decidedly more determined to keep the White House than the Democrats were to gain it. Perhaps that's not all that surprising. Why should you want to be stuck with the consequences of Bush's actions? The trouble, of course, is that four more years would open up so many opportunities for the neoconservatives to wreak further havoc. And there's no guarantee that the American electorate would make a wiser choice in 2008.
I have to confess, Senator, that the psyche of the average American voter leaves me somewhat mystified. Why, there was Osama bin Laden - who was supposed to have been smoked out of his cave three years ago - audaciously addressing the American people last Friday. Striking a statesmanlike pose, the uber-terrorist didn't look like a man on the run. One would have thought that would make most Americans wonder about the efficacy of the so-called war on terror. But no, we're told many of them mistook it for affirmation that their nation is at war. And it is said to have prompted a small surge in support for the incumbent.
Bush has consistently outpolled you in security matters. Why that should be so is less than obvious. Bin Laden may be bluffing when he claims to be capable of striking again inside the US. But the alert level keeps going up and down. That can mean only one of two things: either a significant threat still exists, or the administration has been lying. Neither scenario reflects too well on those in power. Yet they are considered the safer bet.
Why? Why hasn't it been obvious to most Americans that their president's policies have played into the hands of violence-prone fundamentalists and have levelled the battlefield, so to speak, for the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?
It's got a lot to do with false consciousness, evidently, which is catered to by much of your nation's media. To be sure, there are honourable exceptions. But they are few and far between. And perhaps that also helps to explain why the alternatives on offer in presidential elections are ideologically so undifferentiated. A gap appears only when one of the centre-right rivals drifts too far to the right.
That sort of extremism tends to be portrayed, inaccurately, as an aberration. The subsequent correctives are invariably far too mild to drag the centre of gravity back to the centre. It tends to stay further to the right than before, as witnessed in Britain and the US after the excesses of the Thatcher-Reagan era. What I'm leading up to, as you may have guessed, is the widespread suspicion - nay, the fear - that a Kerry administration wouldn't be a million miles removed from the Bush clique.
Let's face it, Senator, you have attracted the support of roughly half the American electorate (and a much larger proportion of the world's population) not because you are the same height as Abraham Lincoln nor because you share JFK's initials, but because you are not George W. Bush. A Kerry presidency, should it eventuate, comes with no guarantees other than that it won't be quite as bad as what went before.
That may have given millions of Americans sufficient cause to vote for you, but beyond that the lack of unorchestrated enthusiasm doesn't reflect too well on you. Unfortunately, you're no longer the John Kerry who, after his tour of duty, took an unequivocal stand against the war in Vietnam and denounced the war crimes being committed there by his compatriots.
Back then, the Nixon administration was keen to prevent you from becoming "another Ralph Nader". But it needn't have worried too much. You became a politician. And now you're no longer even the idealistic young legislator who so enthusiastically took up the Iran-contra investigation two decades ago.
It seems scandals involving the abuse of power don't enrage you the way they once did. I don't think the words Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay so much as passed your lips during the campaign. You have described the Iraq war as a "colossal error of judgment" and as "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" (echoes of Vietnam here), but what do you plan to do about it? Deploy more troops. Cajole a few more allies into sharing the burden of a wrong war, a colossal error. That's an incoherent position. You must realize that the only hope for a cessation of violence in Iraq lies in the US extracting itself from a quagmire it gratuitously created.
Perhaps you have better ideas up your sleeve but kept them to yourself lest they be twisted and used against you in the court of public opinion. But I fear that on Iraq as in other spheres, such as terrorism (you voted for the Patriot Act just as you voted for the war), electoral reform and the deteriorating economy, all you can offer is a bit of tinkering on the periphery. A cosmetic change here, a fudge there.
That wouldn't be good enough, but it may have to do for the time being. At least you appear to be under no illusion that you have a direct line to the Almighty. Your rival's messianic zeal evidently strikes a chord among Muslim as well as Christian fundamentalists, who discern in him a kindred spirit. But the question is, if Bush is so sure of his divine connection, why did he apparently deem it necessary to be wired to a more secular source during all three of his televised encounters with you? (It's not rocket science, but sceptics may wish to see a Nasa analyst's evidence at www.motherjones.com.)
Of more serious concern is an unnamed Bush aide's pronouncement, revealed last month by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine, that "we are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality". That's hubris of Hitlerian proportions - and just one indication among many of what Americans would be letting themselves in for with four more years of George and the Bushies.
Senator, 1,100 American lives have been sacrificed thus far in creating this "reality". And, at a conservative estimate, a hundred times as many Iraqi lives. I cannot in all earnestness bring myself to say that if Bush is elected, the people of the United States will get what they deserve. I also cannot help but wonder what, in that case, will become of the rest of us, the billions of un-Americans. Frustratingly, there's little we've been able to do other than to rage against the dying of the light. If you lose, join us for the wake.
Email: mahirali2@netscape.net