America Unbound

I really liked this book review from the Times, looking at a few books about the excesses of the Bush Administration.

the Only Superbad Power: It is inevitable that a foreign policy couched in biblical symbols, eschewing subtleties and advanced by Texans, oil-men, neocons and industrialists would be insufferable to liberals, doves, internationalists and New Englanders (conversely, remember what Bill Clinton did to conservatives). One suspects that even the senior George Bush occasionally looks out from his crag at Kennebunkport on the policies of his firstborn with some misgiving. Still, it is difficult to explain the level of loathing that the junior Bush and his government have achieved among otherwise rational liberals. The assaults in these books range widely in theme and quality, and Bush's defenders are likely, with some justification, to dismiss the more strident writers as congenitally allergic to any manifestation of American power. But the urgency with which they sound the alarm requires attention. History is too clear on what unconstrained power can lead to.

...Among the books here, ''America Unbound'' deserves the closest attention... The research is admirable, the arguments are well marshaled, and the absence of stridency adds considerable authority to the portrayal of Bush as a president whose ''worldview simply made no allowance for others' doubting the purity of American motives.''

Of the others, in the order of my preference, ''The Sorrows of Empire,'' by Chalmers Johnson, an Asia scholar and onetime consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency who has become a fervent critic of Washington's military policies, is an exhaustive -- sometimes exhausting -- study of the spread of American military and economic control over the world. Johnson produces voluminous research on the many United States military and intelligence outposts unknown to most Americans, and weaves a frightening picture of a military-industrial complex grown into exactly the powerful, secretive force that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against -- made more dangerous by an aggressive executive branch, creating a state of perpetual war and economic bankruptcy. His assessment is chilling: ''It is not at all obvious which is a greater threat to the safety and integrity of the citizens of the United States: the possibility of a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction or an out-of-control military intent on displacing elected officials who stand in their way.'

''The Bubble of American Supremacy,'' by George Soros, the billionaire investor... is more an extended essay than an academic study. He proclaims at the outset that his purpose is to do whatever he can to prevent Bush's re-election. In a deliberate, didactic style, he indicts the administration for hijacking 9/11 for its own ''radical foreign policy agenda,'' and then concealing its true goals behind a facade of freedom and democracy. ''When President Bush says, as he does frequently, that 'freedom' will prevail, in fact he means that America will prevail,'' Soros writes, adding: ''I am rather sensitive to Orwellian doublespeak because I grew up with it in Hungary, first under Nazi and later Communist rule.''....

I have saved a discussion of Emmanuel Todd's ''After the Empire'' for last, not because I deem it least but because it is the view of an outsider, and a highly troubling view at that... I often wonder whether Americans are aware of the depth of the dread and revulsion in which Bush's United States is held by many foreigners. In Todd's study, translated by C. Jon Delogu, a relentless condemnation of everything American arises from an acute sense of betrayal. A French historian and anthropologist trained at Cambridge University in England and descended from Jews who were refugees in America, Todd says he used to see the United States as a model, as his ''subconscious safety net.'' Now, he declares, it is solely a ''predator,'' living way beyond its means, racking up video-game victories over defenseless nations and undermining human rights... Todd's solace is also his main thesis, that American power is fast waning because of the country's profligate spending: ''Let the present America expend what remains of its energy, if that is what it wants to do, on 'war on terrorism' -- a substitute battle for the perpetuation of a hegemony that it has already lost.''...

Though I have lived abroad for many years and regard myself as hardened to anti-Americanism, I confess I was taken aback to have my country depicted, page after page, book after book, as a dangerous empire in its last throes, as a failure of democracy, as militaristic, violent, hegemonic, evil, callous, arrogant, imperial and cruel. Daalder and Lindsay may be constrained by an American sense of respect for the White House, but they too proclaim Bush's foreign policy fundamentally wrong. It is not only Bush's ''imperious style,'' they write; ''The deeper problem was that the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution -- that America's security rested on an America unbound -- was mistaken.'' The more moving judgment comes from Soros, a Jew from Hungary who lived through both German and Soviet occupation: ''This is not the America I chose as my home.'' Posted by HongPong at January 29, 2004 09:13 PM
Listed under The White House .