Bully America

"We have pacified some thousand of the islanders & buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, & turned their widows & orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines & other slaves of our business partner Sultan of Sulu, & hoisted our protecting flag over that swag.

"& so, by the Providence of God--& the phrase is the government's, not mine--we are a World Power."

--Mark Twain

The spectacle of America swaggering down the street, jostling erstwhile allies into the gutter, kicking treaties, covenants, and solemn obligations into the garbage can, bellowing loutish threats to the world at large is nothing particularly novel, however much America's allies may be decrying the new uncouthness, with the British, French, and German press vibrating with fury at this supposed "new isolationism."

One of the profuse illustrations in a History of the United States for school kids is a Puck cartoon from 1900, featuring President McKinley as a tailor measuring up a monstrous Uncle Sam for a new suit of the American flag, with extra stripes added to the pants, labeled Puerto Rico, California, Alaska, Texas, Florida. The tailor's bolt of cloth has written upon it the words "rational expansion."

Teddy Roosevelt, the man lofted to the presidency by McKinley's assassination, liked to describe the White House as a bully pulpit, and launched the Great White Fleet on the ocean wave to display America's might.

Anyone wanting to trace the ancestry of George Bush's self-righteous rhetoric about America's crusades against Evil will find its purest distillation in The Winning of the West, where this same Roosevelt (Bush's favorite president) deals briskly with the issue of Native American rights: "The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil ... The settler and the pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages."

A few decades earlier, here in the Mattole Valley, Tom Henley, the superintendent of Indian affairs, was writing sadly to his boss 300 miles south in San Francisco about the settlers, great-grandparents of some of those kids on today's school bus, who "have attacked, killed, or driven away all the Indians ... and are now waging an indiscriminate war upon all who can be found."

It's not so long a timeline between the American Indians self righteously exterminated in the mid to late 19th Century and the hot pursuit of Evil in the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan or in Baghdad or Somalia or the Philippines or Indonesia and all the other nations where America has its task forces, uniformed or covert, intent on extermination of terror.

But is there not a novel, brazen edge to President Bush's insouciance toward the opinions of America's allies aghast at the ghastly treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo, the bluster about the Axis of Evil, and most recently the flouting of WTO rules with the 30% tariff imposed by the US on steel imports?

It's true. In terms of international decorum Bush is pushing the envelope, as is his Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, a career lout who learned his stars in crudity back in Nixon-time. Before 9/11 Rumsfeld was being widely derided as a man hopelessly at sea in his vast domain. After the terror attacks Americans were in the mood for tough, even bloodthirsty talk, and Rumsfeld has been supplying it ever since.

Bush's apprenticeship in bully talk has followed the same arc. Before 9/11 Americans were beginning to cringe at his fumbling engagements with the English language and his overall faltering performance. His faltering responses and erratic travels on the terrible day of crisis augmented popular concern that he simply wasn't up to the job. Then, for that famous post-9/11 speech to the joint session of Congress, he reinvented himself into the John Wayne role of killer of Indians and avenger of slaughtered settlers and has stayed high in the polls ever since, though there are increasing signs that the people are concluding that Bush's John Wayne moment is pretty much done and he is shrinking by the day to his erstwhile modest stature.

But the disdain for international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of POWs, or on the Kyoto Accords on global warming, or irksome restraints of WTO rules, have deeper roots than the discovery by Bush and Rumsfeld that the Wayne role still plays well in America.

Dislike for the United Nations has always been a staple of American conservatism, even though the isolationists had been effectively outmaneuvered from the very moment the UN was founded after World War II. But some time in the mid-1970s erstwhile "internationalists" in both the conservative and liberal camps began to chafe at what they saw as intolerable restraints imposed by the UN on the ability of the US to do as it pleased.

For conservatives it was treaties such as the Law of the Sea. Thirty years ago we remember the right-wing columnist William Safire, former speech writer for Nixon, planting one tirade after another about the Law of the Sea in his allotted pasture on the New York Times opinion page. The always manic, but increasingly influential Wall Street Journal editorial page crackled with even more vivid indignation against treaties on arms control.

For their part, liberals instinctively in favor of the UN and the brotherhood of nations, began to fret increasingly about UN insistence on a settlement in the Middle East and justice for Palestinians. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, paradigm liberal Democrat, catapulted himself into the US Senate in 1976 with a campaign photo of his defiant "No" vote in the UN (where he had served as US ambassador) against a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

Of course the US and its allies had always held the upper hand in the UN, therefore esteeming it as a vital theater of operations in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. But even before the Soviet Union collapsed the US was displaying increasing indifference to world opinion, as expressed in UN votes. Take as just one example UN condemnation of US attacks on Nicaragua in the 1980s. More than one vote had only Israel and maybe El Salvador siding with the US.

Then the World Court in the Hague condemned the US for its mining of a Nicaraguan harbor. The United States simply flipped its finger, announced it would ignore the court and proceeded to establish tribunals to try opponents such as Milosevic, whose challenges to the tribunals' legitimacy have some merit. Since the US senses that even these tribunals might become inconvenient, it will probably abandon them, too.

This is the coalition powering the latest bout of America-First bullying: yahoo conservatism which is now dominant in the Republican Party, allied with almost all factions of the Democratic Party (with the possible exception of the Black Caucus), which have Israel's supposed interests as a prime concern and which see Europe as supporters of Palestinian terrorism.

Tony Blair must be brooding on a minute-by-minute basis about the unfairness of it all: Britain rallies to a wounded Uncle Sam and volunteers eagerly for the mission of revenge. Rumsfeld publicly deprecates Britain's senior general. Bush ignores Blair's desperate phone call urging him to abandon the 30% tariff on steel imports.

Have these affronts roused much stir here?

Americans are schizophrenic. Recent polls attest once again to the importance they attach the great war on terror being waged in concert with the Allies. The Axis of Evil speech embarrassed a good many people. But aside from the old line internationalists (looking like antiques from the Museum of World Federalism), there's no major political constituency presenting a challenge to Bush's indecorous performance as world bully.

Bullies, remember, nourish a sense of injury, and September 11 offered plenty of fuel for that.