George W Bush and the Ugly American

If Fahrenheit 9/11 were to be print, this book is what it would look like. It is, essentially, one long rant against George W Bush, a catalogue of his sins.

Facts and figures are impressively marshalled towards proving the author's thesis that the Bush presidency has been disastrous for America and Americans. It's plain that Graydon Carter is a very angry man.

And why not? As the author points out, this is what Americans have lost"" "We've lost our good reputation and our standing as a great and just superpower. We've lost the sympathy of the world following 9/11 and turned it into an alloy of fear and hatred. We've lost lives and allies.

We've lost liberties and freedoms. We've lost billions of dollars that could have gone towards a true assault on terrorism. It could be said that in the age of George W Bush, we have lost our way."

The unjustified and unnecessary war on Iraq is of course to be blamed, but the author's grouse against Bush goes much further. He says that Bush is to be blamed for the lack of jobs in the US economy, for the massive fiscal and current account deficits, for the destruction of the environment, for the assault on civil liberties, for the underfunding of education and health care, and for crony capitalism.

This is no academic inquiry into the reasons for the rightward shift in American politics, but an emotional response to it. The author's aim is simple""to influence hearts and minds so that Bush is not re-elected. Take, for instance, his list of US, British, and other "allied" soldiers killed in Iraq""he mentions every soldier by name, over eleven pages in the book. Or take the last chapter of the book"" "The President By Numbers".

In this ingenious presentation, Carter associates a number with events in the Bush presidency. For example 0:number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his State of the Union addresses; 83: number of times Bush mentioned Saddam, Iraq or regime change in his addresses.

Here are some more nuggets""75 per cent:per cent of Federal farm subsidy funds that went to the wealthiest 10 per cent of American farmers; 87 per cent: per cent of American families that say they felt no tax relief whatsoever from Bush's tax cuts; 5.95 million: number of unemployed when Bush took office; 9.3 million: number of unemployed in April 2004; 35 million: number of Americans the government defines as "food insecure" , or, in other words, hungry; and 43.6 per cent: number of Americans without health insurance by the end of 2002 ( more than 15 per cent of the population).

But, apart from the figures and the arguments, there's an important sub-text throughout the book""a sub-text which proves, time and again, that this is an administration that consistently lies to the American people.

To give one well-known example, in order to to prepare for the Iraq war, the government co-opted the CIA and other agencies into producing the required "intelligence" pointing to Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Even soldiers in Iraq are not spared""after Bush pontificates that every US soldier "in harm's way" should have the best possible equipment, Carter does a devastating analysis showing how the US military (with a budget the largest ever, in inflation-adjusted terms, since the Korean war) penny pinches on bulletproof vests, and how mothers of kids sent to Iraq frantically try to buy these vests for their sons.

These and other examples highlight the crassness and the doublespeak of the Bush regime. Carter's point is the one made by George Soros, the billionaire speculator, on the one hand, and Michale Hardt, left-wing author of Empire, on the other: viz. that global capitalism is being ill-served by the likes of Bush and his extremist cronies.

These people feel that a more flexible, more multilateral and more sophisticated response to global problems, including not just terrorism but also the the problems of the global economy, is called for.

They advocate the Clinton, rather, than the Bush approach""but recall that Clinton was responsible for US arms inspectors spying in Iraq, for bombing Iraq on a regular basis, and for bombing a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

In other words, the aim of both the Bush followers and these critics is the same, they differ only on how to achieve them.

That has been brought out very clearly in the Bush versus Kerry debates""Kerry too is jingoistic about Iraq, but he wants to involve more people.

The only difference is that Kerry is less reckless than Bush, realising that too much arrogance can antagonise even America's allies, while inviting a backlash from its enemies. As the journalist John Pilger has pointed out, despite all the political posturing, on May 6 the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which,in effect, authorised a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran.

The vote was 376/3. And if the problem is limited to Bush, how does one explain the slavish silence of the US media when it came to reporting about the so-called threat from Iraq?

In short, while Carter is undoubtedly right about George W Bush, US imperialism is a much wider phenomenon.

As a matter of fact, many of us would be glad to see Mr Bush re-elected, so that the divisions within the global elites become wider, so that the ugly face of the present system is no longer hidden and so that the hypocrisies of the ruling classes become crystal clear.

Graydon Carter
Little, Brown
Price: £12.99
Pages: 338

What We've Lost