From one failure to the next [Archives:2006/995/Opinion]

By: Hassan Al-Haifi
In remembering how the United States was just before the turn of the Millennium, the observer is inclined to believe that American might and hegemony is facing its worst challenge in history. This remarkable phenomenon in the metamorphosis of power is that this challenge was brought about, not so much due to outside enemies being able to outdo the United States in all the elements that project its formidable might economically, militarily and even socially – to a certain extent. This challenge is more the result of failure in the inside and moreover an moot display of poor leadership – the worst of its kind in American history. The underlying factor in this unusual turn of direction in American political configurations is that this did not come as a result of change in American military and economic capability. Nor for that matter is it due to the ability of foreign members of the international community to make it hard for the US to maintain its ability to dictate its own terms of international behavior. The stark reality is that the United States has been goaded to pursue policies that first of all have little relations to the convictions most of the people of the world have been led to believe underline all foreign policy pursuits of the United States. In fact, one is inclined to believe that for the first time in the history of the United States a new slate of convictions have taken over the foreign policy ramifications of unchallengeable world power. This new basis for pursuing foreign policy does not stem from a desire to stand for the principles that supposedly have given the United States and the American people distinction. Rather than that, American policy has become guided by the beliefs and suppositions that American power is a God given right to serve the interests of the minority of stakeholders in the US, who have methodically taken over all the elements of power and decision making, and in a sense deprived the overwhelming majority from the right to influence policy and the strategy to achieve questionable aims that are as far away from American interests as they are distant from bringing about world peace and harmonization.

The results of this reliance on a dog-eat-dog perception of the international theatre are obvious even to the most uninformed of observers, including some of the elements of the American right that has in the past saw logic in some of the pursuits of the Administration of President Gorge W. Bush. The driving force supposedly of these pursuits have been a so called “War on Terror””