‘Bush’whacked

A rich rogue nation can flaunt the will of a disparate majority. New York Times columnist David Brooks uses these words to describe the Bush government’s aggressive views on Iran. I reread the article to figure out if the columnist were talking about Iran or the US. After my second read, I realized that it indeed was Iran.

The columnist talks of how the Iranian government does not know what it is doing because there are four factions at work there. The logic being how can the US understand what the Iranians are up to when the Iranians themselves do not know what they are up to.

Then the talk veers to how the Iranians have armed the Hezbollah in Lebanon against the wishes of the UN, how they repeatedly flouted international rules by going ahead its nuclear program, and how China, India, Russia are by cooperating with the Iranians are making it difficult for the Americans to make the Iranians see their point of view.

Ah! I said to myself, that is the crux of the problem. While I was reading the article I was mentally replacing Iran with the US and found that for a country that has repeatedly ignored international voices in the name of national security, they sure are behaving like whining bullies.

Let us look at the US’s history since 1945. That was the year they dropped Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan citing the need to do so to humble an expansionist Japan. By dropping those bombs, the US became the first country to explode Atomic bombs in the world and to this day remains the only country to have done so.

Then came the Cold War era when in the name of national security, the US indulged in an arms race with the erstwhile USSR, stockpiling nuclear bombs and arms, which America continues to own to this day. But it is again a case of one rule for the King and another for the commons.

When India under the Vajpayee government conducted a Nuclear test, the US went around the world screaming murder. I think the Americans forgot that India as a country has never attacked anyone in the world, while the Americans have a history of engaging in wars (e.g., Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq) on fictitious grounds of national security. I guess America has a right to worry about national security but others do not.

Since America decided that Communism was bad, they unilaterally decided that it was bad for the rest of the world too. Since America feels Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is a menace, it wants the whole world to concur. Since America feels that Iran is a potential threat, it wants the whole world to think so too. Since America thinks that China and India are the reason for the spike in food prices, the rest of the world has to agree. In short, the world has to see through American eyes, or opt to be blind.

I am no supporter of Iran, nor do I believe that Communism is the best thing to have happened to the world. At the same time, I do believe that for America, America has been and continues to be its single-biggest enemy.

The foolhardiness of American politicians in propagating the either you are with us or you are against us theory has caused the American people and the world at large the most grief. And American politicians, even after 60-odd years of following this policy and achieving little in terms of peace and more in terms of war, continue to walk the same path.

That forces me to think that Americans should, before pointing fingers at the Iranians and everyone else in the world, look inward. If they do so, they will realize that their problems are a result of years of their government not knowing what it is doing, but continuing to do so with foolish conviction, rather than the rest of the world knowing not what they are doing.