“George W Bush’s two terms marked the moment when US power peaked and he overreached, with execrable consequences.”
“The United States is still careening toward bankruptcy. Sometime between now and then (2020) the catastrophe will come.”
These recent quotations are not the latest wisdom from the Spartacist League of Toxteth and Greater Merseyside or from the International Association of Friends of President Hugo Chávez Frías (Islington chapter).
The first appeared in the Financial Times under the byline of Lionel Barber, the editor. The second is by David Brooks, in the international edition of the New York Times.
If such is the declared opinion of these well-informed commentators, is it not time to start putting aside decades of special pleading by the Rip van Winkles in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence, the British Council, the CBI and other such bodies and start doing something about Barber’s and Brooks’ intimations of US mortality?
And in such circumstances, shouldn’t the global fraternity of Zionists, who may have the most of all to fear from the declining ability of the US to help them, start treating the neighbours better – those whom they have been attacking and trying to humiliate for decades? They need to re-think their future strategies.
The sad truth is that the alliance which brought Winston Churchill close to Frankilin D Roosevelt and many, although not all, of his fellow-countrymen in 1941, in the Second World War, to oppose Hitler has long ago outlived its usefulness for this country. Although tardy, the arrival of the Americans into the conflict was welcome and I treasure memories from my boyhood in the 1940s of GIs striding the streets of Chiswick from their camp across Kew Bridge. However, in recent years, the “special relationship” has developed in into a weight around Britain’s neck. It needs careful and well thought-out attention. Whatever economic advantages it offers Britain should be preserved, while the damage it causes cannot be allowed to get worse.
The misfortune that the last two Labour prime ministers brought on this country with their commitment to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the revenge attack on Afghanistan needs little rehearsal here.
The death and maiming of many soldiers, the transformation of millions of civilians into refugees, the destruction of buildings and property and the plundering of the museums at the cradle of civilisation are in themselves evidence enough of the barbarity of Western countries which constantly try and convince the world of the high standards they say they maintain. Our country needs to escape the US embrace, have a shower, scrub down and put on clean clothes.
While Britain is doing that, it should take the opportunity of expressing its rejection of the way Nato is involved in new Middle Eastern disasters and condemn the US support for the colonisers of Palestinian land. Backing for Israel’s apartheid policies is bringing a mounting and justified Arab backlash. Bizarrely, this is an outcome which a number of deluded religious extremists in the US are eagerly awaiting. We cannot risk the Grenadier Guards going into battle for Benjamin Netanyahu and the haredim of occupied East Jerusalem.
Nor should Britain take part in the campaign of threats and vilification of Iran. Britain’s own support of the Shah and his Savak secret police a generation ago is too shaming and unsuccessful to allow us to meddle with the present regime or back any US-Israeli attack on Iran.
Britain needs to stop following Washington in its forlorn attempt to remain top dog in the western hemisphere. After half a century when the US was responsible for giving political backing to every ninth-rate gangster – the Somozas in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Papa Doc in Haiti, Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, the generals in Brazil, Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, to name just a few – willing to take Uncle Sam’s dollar, the Latin Americans are waking up.
Hugo Chávez in Caracas, Lula and Dilma Rousseff in Brasília, Evo Morales in La Paz, Fernando Lugo in Asunción and Pepe Mujica in Montevideo are doing something to correct the vast inequalities in their societies. It is the duty of a British government to aid the cause of reform – and of increasing of local markets for British exports – not try to stamp it out, as Washington is trying to do in Venezuela and Honduras.
The gradual moving away from the US in military and strategic spheres has to be accompanied by much greater circumspection towards US financial antics. If the US government has crippled itself buying weapons and waging wars it cannot afford, US banks have shown their incompetence with their own money. If they had been cleverer, fewer of them would have had to shut down as Lehman Brothers did, and Britain and its European Union partners would not be in their present financial hole.
But more important than any one Wall Street crash is the fearsome drive towards the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich combined with an increasing pauperisation of everyone else.
George W Bush announced that he was on the side of “the haves and the have mores”. In the US Congress, the perfect hunting ground of the lobbyists of big business, Bush’s partisans, most of whom have close connections to large companies, provide a form of politics which is the finest money can buy. And it shows. One per cent of the US population controls 24 per cent of the national income, compared to 9 per cent in 1976. In 1980, a manager of a large US company earned 43 times more than a mid-level employee. In 2001, this rate stood at 531. It is now close to 800.
Most voters in this country would surely object to being catapulted into such a social imbroglio, but that is what will happen be if we continue down the US route.
For the sake of political sanity and financial austerity, the Home Office should show wisdom and pay for Tony Blair’s one-way ticket to New York or Washington. There he can commune with US friends such as George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Rupert Murdoch, and hardworking British taxpayers could avoid the hefty bill for his 24-hour security.
