February 25, 2006
Remember Globalism and Democracy?
By Richard Reeves
DALLAS -- Forget for the moment the flap over doing business
with Peninsula & Oriental Steam Navigation Co., the port-management
company sold by the British to the United Arab Emirates. Did you
see that Intel is moving ahead with plans to spend hundreds of
millions of dollars to build a computer-chip plant in Ho Chi Minh
City?
That's globalization.
It is cheaper
to build chips, the engines of our computers, in a communist country
than in the rich precincts of Silicon Valley. If I felt like it,
I could make a persuasive false argument that it is dangerous
beyond measure to have commies planting their evil little fingers
in the machines that make capitalism and American national security
work in these troubled times.
So what's
the big deal about having friendly Arabs take on some of the mechanics
of running our ports -- especially when there are only a couple
of small American companies capable of doing the work? We long
ago stopped doing such chores ourselves because many foreign ports
and the companies running them are far more modern, efficient
and cheaper than their few outdated American competitors.
That's globalization.
We have spent
the last decade and more selling the world on capitalism, on globalization,
on democracy, on freedom. Then when foreign countries actually
practice the American way, and we don't like the results, we move
to destroy them. If we don't like the results of Palestinian voting,
we condone cutting off aid and every other kind of help to the
winners. If we don't like the winners of global bidding wars,
we move to change the rules.
That's hypocrisy.
And that is what the world has come to expect of us. If things
don't go our way, we attack.
The crisis
in our ports is not that a government-controlled Arab country
is willing to venture to make a few bucks doing work we don't
want to do ourselves; it is that we are unwilling to spend the
bigger bucks to modernize our port facilities to deal with the
new realities of the post-Sept. 11 world. We would rather spend
our borrowed dollars in a vain and stupid effort to take over
our own Arab country, Iraq.
Forget that;
it's over, part of the weird overreaction to the horrors of Sept.
11, 2001. Bush's answer to that terror has been to try to take
over the world. No chance.
But the president
is right on the port-management deal, even though he has characteristically
blundered into a domestic crisis by trying to keep the deal secret.
But then no one is accusing him of being competent. This time,
he either didn't know about the port deal, or he did know about
it and is lying. Either way, he tried one more time to circumvent
the checks and balances of our system by pushing through the deal
and keeping it secret from Congress, press and people.
That's the
usual modus operandi of this White House. This is the first administration
to lose a city, New Orleans, since our own civil war. Perhaps
that is why he and the few people he talks with were so drawn
into civil war in Iraq.
It goes on
in ways small and large. One of the small ways beginning to come
to light is refusing to allow scholars and students into the United
States, particularly from countries with any Muslim population,
most notably India.
That is not
globalization. In fact, Muslims have some justification in claiming
that we have declared war on Islam. We would have to be nuts to
do that, but we are sure exhibiting signs of doing it. Iraqis
preparing for civil war are not blaming each other for outrages
such as the destruction of the Shiite Askariya mosque in Samarra.
They are blaming us.
We are tipping
toward disaster. I, for one, was shocked to see that even The
Wall Street Journal has noticed enough that it began Friday's
editorial page by preparing to question what the White House has
done and is doing, writing: "Critics of President Bush's
Iraq policy have been predicting -- and, in some cases, hoping
-- that without Saddam's iron rule the country was destined for
sectarian civil war. Following Wednesday's devastating attack
on the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra, it would be foolish to
dismiss the possibility."
That, like
Walter Cronkite's 1968 attack on the Johnson administration's
management of the war in Vietnam, could be the beginning of the
end of the American brand of imperialism and the beginning of
more enlightened policy that brought together Intel and the ghost
of Ho Chi Minh in Saigon.
Copyright
2006 Universal Press Syndicate
