Bush's attention span

Editorial

To his critics, U.S. President George W. Bush appears to be ransacking the globe with a very short attention span. He quickly dubbed three diverse countries an "axis of evil," invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, turned his attentions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now seems to be focusing on Liberia.

His opponents – including, according to a poll this week, two out of three Canadians – view Bush as a sort of marauder, drunk with power as head of the world's last remaining superpower. Critics of American power accuse Bush of acting as the world's policeman which, truth be told, Bush would probably not view as an insult, though he might prefer the image of an old-west sheriff.

The world has truly changed since the end of the Cold War, often in ways we could not have foreseen. Lacking the competition of two ideologies seeking converts, it has been left to the so-called leader of the free world to turn his attentions to whatever particular world crisis he seeks to influence. Sadly, there has been no shortage.

George Bush Sr. took it upon himself to "liberate" Kuwait, though last week's election, in which only men voted, betrays a certain failure on that front. Bill Clinton made heroic efforts on the Israeli-Palestinian front, only to be disappointed by the recidivist murderer Yasser Arafat. Clinton also did what he could in the Balkans and to aid in the economic development of the former Soviet Union.

But it is the current President Bush, cast against type as a powerful leader on the foreign relations front, who has utterly redefined American involvement in the world.

The motivations vary. In some areas, the United States has clear strategic interest, though the interests vary from oil supplies to stanching nuclear proliferation and, of course, bringing to justice those behind the attack on America Sept. 11, 2001.

Liberia is a country with a particularly curious history and connection to the United States. Liberia was intended as an African refuge for freed slaves from the United States. (The country's flag is similar to that of the United States, except with one star instead of 50.) America's strategic interests in this country may not be large, but some people consider its moral responsibility to be enormous, given the countries' shared history.

But the Liberian exercise taking place this week may give way to the next obsession of G.W. Bush next week. This, say his critics, is evidence of immature foreign policy and a leader with so much power he doesn't know how to rein it in.

That's one view.

A more realistic, albeit more depressing, view is that, as the remaining superpower, the United States has taken it upon itself to intervene in the countless regions where anarchy has taken over. True, this used to be the role of the United Nations and it could easily be shared with that body or other bodies, such as the European Union. That would be one way to quiet, though not silence, Bush's critics.

The bigger issue in all of this is not the actions of the United States, but the reality of the world today, which is in such turmoil that any "empire" with a concern for human well-being is obligated to intervene in some fashion as attempted genocides, mass starvation, torture and political repression seem to be flourishing.

In the Congo alone, an estimated three million people have died in fighting that has only vaguely entered the minds of the North American public. Three million people.

Inexplicably, mass murder like that in the Congo is all but completely ignored by a world audience, at the same time that critics of Israeli defence policies publicize Israeli "atrocities" as though the rest of the world's problems have ceased to exist.

Like every country, Israel is imperfect and can stand to be corrected. But the energy with which Israeli policies are opposed is completely out of proportion to the realities of the contemporary world. This week's television screening of Confrontation at Concordia, about the violent suppression of free speech at a Montreal university, demonstrated again the rabid hatred of Israel in some sectors. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tragic and no Jew needs to be reminded of its heart-wrenching collapse of an entire world every time a human life is lost. But, put in the context of a world subsumed by human misery, Israel smells like a rose.

While many of his critics like to view Bush's transient international obsessions as the symptom of some intellectual or psychological flaw, it is the single-minded hatred of Israel's critics that bears the mark of true pathological obsession. The American president, for all his failings, has the capacity to recognize the difference between a tiny nation like Israel defending itself and the flourishing of genocidal hatred in other flashpoints. Anti-Israel zealots don't seem to care what happens elsewhere.

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