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'Exploring the transformation of US' foreign policy'
 Power Trip US Unilateralism And Global Strategy After September 11 Edited by John Feffer Published by Seven Stories Press, New York, 2003 Pp. 254 “WITHOUT VIOLENCE or hatred, we must work for a world where all human beings can live in peace and justice,” said Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere. Following the US-led war against Iraq, thousands of letters are being exchanged between soldiers serving in Iraq and their parents and friends in the United States. Most of these letters show the growing opposition, among Americans, against the existence of their forces in Iraq and against Bush administration's foreign policy that politicians try to hide. A mother of two sons operating in Iraq sent them a letter saying: “I am loosing both of you for nothing.” Another one sent by Fred to his friends in Iraq says: “What we can all do to start moving America back in the right direction.” `Power Trip' explores the transformation of the US foreign policy begun by the Bush administration when it took office in 2001 and implemented with greater easiness and heightened enthusiasm after Sept. 11. It examines how the US is losing its moral standing in the world and squandering international sympathy created in the wake of Sept. 11. The volume is made-up of legal geopolitical and cultural analysis and studies by top politicians and writers, such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Ahmad Rashid, Stephen Zunes, William Hartung, Coletta Youngers, Michael Klare and many others. The book is divided into six chapters, according to the subject tackled, the people, the policies, the “Archipelago of Evil” and the response to it, in addition to how things should change and how they changed. Feffer, a writer of several political books, points up in the book's introduction that the Bush team used the fight against terrorism as a justification for everything, from cracking down on civil liberties and reorganising intelligence-gathering operations, under the new homeland security bureau, to expanding presidential authority to negotiate free trade and threatening to withdraw US peace keepers if countries didn't grant them immunity from the international criminal court. In the chapter “Archipelago of Evil”, specialists analyse the implications of the Bush policy around the globe, with a special focus on the targets of the “war on terrorism”. Stephen Zunes, an associate professor of politics and chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Programme at the University of San Francisco, writes in his article titled “The Middle East” that the United States became the “target of terrorists not because of the country's freedom and democracy, as President Bush claims, but because US Middle East policy has had nothing to do with freedom and democracy.” “A policy based more on support for democracy, international law, arms control, and sustainable development will make American interests far safer than the current policy based on punitive sanctions, invasion, arms exports and support for repression and economic policies that primarily benefit wealthy elites,” writes Zunes. He adds that despite State Department and CIA analyses criticising Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon's ongoing provocations and overreactions, Bush has focused almost exclusively on Palestinian terrorism as the cause of the crisis, using the same basic rhetoric as Sharon. Titled “The Response”, one of Feffer's articles discusses the new exercise of US power and focuses on how things should change. “Because whatever the lineage of the current Bush policies, however much they represent continuity or change in US foreign policy, they threaten to rip the fabric of the international community and plunge the world into the very chaos that they are supposed to prevent.” “The power trip that the United States is on, as so many have discovered at home and abroad, is a very bad trip indeed,” concludes Feffer. The book can be found at Bustan Lil Kutob bookstore in Shmeisani. Hada Sarhan Monday, December 8, 2003 |