|
CounterPunch
March 3,
2003
Bush's Contempt for Democracy
Bribing the Government of Turkey
By ROBERT JENSEN
Many around the world are skeptical when George
Bush says he wants to use war to help create democracy in Iraq.
As a step toward bolstering his credibility, Bush might start
taking seriously democracy in the rest of the world, and at home.
U.S. reaction to the weekend news that
Turkey's parliament had rejected a proposal to accept the basing
of U.S. troops for an Iraq war only confirmed what has long been
obvious: The Bush administration believes democracy is wonderful
-- so long as it doesn't get in the way of war.
Let's remember the basic notions behind
democracy: The people are sovereign. Power flows from the people.
Leadership is beholden to the people.
If those ideas are at the core of democracy,
Bush's recent reaction to the will of the people suggests he
has contempt for the concept.
Bush has a habit of praising as "courageous"
those leaders who most effectively ignore their people. In the
U.K., polls show more than half the public against the war, and
close to a million people turned out for the Feb. 15 protest
in London. In Spain, 2 million hit the streets of Barcelona and
Madrid, and 74 percent oppose the war. But Bush has praised the
courage of prime ministers Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar in
remaining fanatically prowar in the face of massive public opposition.
Silvio Berlusconi is another favorite
of Bush. The Italian prime minister has to ignore the 80 percent
of his people who object to the war, and on Feb. 15 the largest
demonstrations in the world were in Rome, where police put the
crowd at 1 million and others estimated two to three times that
many.
But perhaps the most courageous leader
in Bush-speak is the prime minister of Turkey, Abdullah Gul.
The Bush team found that it took some
convincing (and $15 billion) to secure the ruling Justice and
Development Party leadership's support for U.S. use of bases
for a war. In that effort, as a former Pentagon planner and ambassador
to Turkey explained, "the biggest problem is that 94 percent
of the Turks are opposed to war."
After winning over the key leadership,
U.S. officials faced another problem: The Turkish constitution
requires a vote of parliament to allow those new U.S. troops.
With tens of thousands of Turks protesting in the streets during
the debate, the proposal failed by a narrow margin.
The State Department, expecting a favorable
vote, had prepared a statement of congratulations. Because the
initial reports out of parliament suggested the proposal had
won, that statement was released and -- you guessed it -- it
applauded the Turkish government for its "courageous leadership."
U.S. officials hope to reverse the vote
later this week. No doubt Bush's people will be tough negotiators,
but the Turks also can expect understanding of the problems that
Gul and his party face. During earlier negotiations between the
United States and Turkey, one U.S. official explained the process
was time-consuming because, "We are dealing with a new and
inexperienced [Turkish] leadership that is feeling very much
caught by the situation."
"Experience" in this context
means the ability to ignore and override the will of the people,
an endeavor in which U.S. politicians have considerable experience.
And what of democracy at home? When asked
about his reaction to the hundreds of thousands of Americans
who rallied on Feb. 15 to oppose a war, Bush brushed them off
as irrelevant. To pay attention to the largest worldwide political
event in recent history, he said, would be like governing by
focus group.
Of course, political movements -- people
coming together because of shared principles to try to affect
public policy -- are not quite like focus groups, which are convened
by folks in advertising and marketing to test out their pitches.
Demonstrations are real democratic expressions of the strong
commitments of people; focus groups are a research tool used
to craft manipulative slogans and advertising strategies in order
to subvert real democracy. But let's put aside the president's
confusion and go back to his assessment of how the system should
work:
"The role of a leader is to decide
policy based upon the security -- in this case, the security
of the people," Bush said.
That's all well and good, but beside
the point. The question is, does Bush think "the people"
have any ideas about their own security that are worth considering?
Robert Jensen
is an associate professor of journalism at the University of
Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author
of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
and the pamphlet "Citizens of the Empire."
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Yesterday's
Features
Dr. Richard Lichtman
Psychologists
and War
John Stanton
Life
in a Barrel of Oil
Carol Norris
George Bush's War on Himself: the World is His Battlefield
Wayne Madsen
The
First Shots of the War
Pablo Mukherjee
Orwell's
Bastards: Lies and Shameless Pretence
Larry Mosqueda
A Duty to Obey All Unlawful Orders
Behzad Yaghmaian
Scarf and Make-Up: the Modern Face of Islam
Jason Leopold
Hell-Bent for War: the Six Year Campaign by Right Wing Think
Tanks to Promote Takeover of Iraq
Anthony Gancarski
Bush's Divine Inspiration:
What If Jesus Were a Gunslinger?
Ellen Cantarow
The
Day of the Barricades: New York City Against the People
Sam Bahour & Michael Dahan
Snow Covered Rubble
Website of the Day
Bush
and Blair: the Duet
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti-War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
February 22
/ 23, 2003
Laura Flanders
Security Threat?
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey Barred Entry to US
Alexander Cockburn
The Trouble with E-Bombs
Kathy Kelly
Letter from Baghdad
Tight Squeeze
Subcomandate
Marcos
A Universal
No to the War of Fear
William Cook
Armageddon Anxiety
Jo Freeman
Conservative Women
Michael Colby
Howard Dean is No Green
Ben Tripp
Fact-Checking the Constitution
Joanne Mariner
Pets Unite!
Richard Falk and David Krieger
Iraq and the Failures of Democracy
Uri Avnery
War Crimes and Sharon
Ian Williams
John Bolton in Jerusalem
Michael Wolff
How Sanctions Destroyed Iraqi Education
William Hughes
The Zev and Ari Show
Susanna Sonnenberg
Boxing Missoula
Michael Ortiz Hill
Peace and Humility
Anis Shivani
When Kafka Aligns with Orwell
John Mihelich
The Hidden History of Butte's
Working Class
Rich Procter
Bush and His Fabled Gut
Adam Engel
Voice of the Nation
Becky Johnson
The Hopscotch Rebellion
Krieger, Tripp, Ashley
Poets' Basement
Website of
the Weekend
The
Pedro Martinez of Palestine
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|