American Theater

Bush’s war on terror is a war of lies, a calculated political strategy designed to muzzle critics and impose a single-minded tunnel vision of the world in domestic polity.

To be sure, Americans enjoy some level of protection after surrendering their civil liberties and privacy rights. But only because the Bush administration has outsourced the victims of terrorism to other parts of the world.

There the mayhem marches on. Attacks coordinated by cell phone triggers in Mumbai, are not native to India and have nothing to do with domestic religious strife.

But things are just hunky dory here, if you listen to the media elocutionists of power, peddling the same mantra: “We want to go there so they do not come here.” The U.S. National Intelligence Estimates acknowledge a surge in terrorism worldwide since the Iraq War, including, of course, in Iraq itself.

Then there is Bush’s empty, godly mission of democracy, even as he coddles long-reigning dictators throughout the Middle East. Two of his lofty experiments in democracy in Iraq and Pakistan have transformed both countries into breeding grounds of terrorism and the rest of the world a testing laboratory to kill people.

Benazir Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan in a U.S. State Department-brokered deal to preside over a pretend democracy, is only the latest and most recognizable victim of an imperious, flawed and criminally inept U.S. foreign policy – another human sacrifice while fishing for a Bush legacy.

The “theater” of the war on terror, as U.S. media allude to hotbeds of terrorism in the vaudeville that passes for news, may well expand to India, Asia’s most enduring democracy, should Pakistan spiral into chaos following Bhutto’s assassination.

But for the Bush administration, the interests of other countries, even its allies in the bogus “coalition of the willing,” are of little consequence. Callousness is the hallmark of Bush’s foreign policy and incompetence an abiding principle. Preemption, the doctrine of destroying someone simply on blind suspicion or a hunch fans the flames of terrorism worldwide.

Does any presidential candidate have the courage to admit the deception, the hypocrisy and the craven selfishness in the six-year long bogus war on terror and do any of them have the decency to humanize America’s foreign policy in the global public interest?

Or, are they content watching the mayhem and the gore play out in another theater – killing a Bhutto here, a few thousand Iraqis there, just so American malls are secure for shopping?