George Bush part II

So, George Bush took his oath on the steps of the Capitol Hill in an atmosphere of ludicrous contradiction. He proclaimed a goal of "ending tyranny in our world" in an inaugural address, which was delivered under unprecedented security. About 100 square blocks of Washington DC were closed to traffic as black-clad sharpshooters kept watch from rooftops, fighter jets and helicopters patrolled, bomb-sniffing dogs searched vehicles, and 13,000 soldiers and police officers guarded the streets. The inaugural speech lasted 21 minutes, and the President of the United States used the word "freedom" 27 times, "liberty" 15 times and "free" seven times.

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," Bush declared. "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world," he said, and then added, "Freedom by its nature must be chosen and defended by citizens."

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But perhaps never did the words of an American President, the presumed leader of the free world, ring so hollow before. A recent Post-ABC News poll found that George Bush is already auguring ills in the minds of his countrymen. Only 45 percent said they wanted the country to go in the direction Bush wanted. Another 58 percent disapproved of the way he has handled the war in Iraq. George Bush never mentioned Iraq or terrorism in his inaugural speech.

Perhaps politics has it common with magic, because much of their success is rooted in illusion. Who doesn't remember the Teflon presidency of Ronald Reagan? The Iran-contra scandal, failed 'supply-side economics,' the ludicrous invasion of Grenada, death of 241 Marines in Lebanon, the cost of a military buildup named Star Wars, which kept America closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis and left it billions of dollars in debt. Yet when Reagan left office, he was recognised as one of the greatest American Presidents of all time.

Those who were disappointed last November were reminded last week that even bad guys could get a long life. Somehow luck played a big role here, and Bush got rewarded for the mistakes of his first term. He got more votes, a wider margin in Florida and more seats in both senate and Congress. He played politics with a sleight of hand. It happens in democracy, you can win elections by casting a spell on the people.

It is interesting that Bush said in his inaugural speech that America's relations with "every ruler and every nation" would be predicated on how they treat their own people. Wish someone had said the same thing to Bush. How should the rest of the world deal with him for deceiving his own people? A survey of nearly 22,000 people in 21 countries by the BBC World Service last week found that 47 percent see US influence in the world today at largely negative and 58 percent believe Bush's re-election will make the world more dangerous. It is obvious that Bush's spell is not working outside of America.

By now it is no secret that the inspiration for much of what went into Bush's inaugural speech came from a book written by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet political prisoner turned conservative Israeli politician. In that book called "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror," Sharansky outlines what he calls the "town square test." It means that a country is not free if its citizens cannot go to a public place and express dissent from the ruling power without fear of reprisal.

Now that is understood. What about people who are free to say what they like, but nobody is paying attention to them? There is no threat of reprisal, but the citizens are not taken seriously. Senator Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used the term 'malarkey' during the confirmation hearing of Condoleezza Rice to describe how the Bush administration undermined the intelligence of the American people. It claimed that it trained 120,000 Iraqi troops and wanted everybody to believe in it. The Senator said that the actual number was 4,000. Richard Cohen, a columnist of The Washington Post retorted that he could explain what happened to the missing 116,000. Possibly they were guarding weapons of mass destruction in the Iraqi province of Oz.

If the first term of George Bush is the original movie, then its plot was thick with lies and deception. But the second term looks hefty already. Even former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who wrote Bush's father's inaugural address, couldn't hold back her reaction. She wrote in the Wall Street Journal that while it was not wrong by any means to talk about ending tyranny in the world, it seemed to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Because although tyranny was a very bad thing and quite wicked, one couldn't expect to eradicate it any time soon. She reminded us that we didn't live in heaven, we lived on earth.

The hallmark of the first term of Bush presidency was unbridled mouth. The president and his mean said things they could never prove, the uranium, the WMD, link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and much more. But the second term has started on a different note. It is unbridled thinking this time, the sky-is-the-limit type of soaring ideology such as spreading of freedom, ending of tyranny and success of liberty. This time Bush is aiming high perhaps to prove that he doesn't always imagine things, sometimes he can actually apply his mind. So he borrows ideas from a book and promises to change the world. Little does he know that others tried it before him, the communists, the fascists, the ideologues of the world, who learned it the hard way that the world couldn't be run from the pages of a book.

Judging by the history of movies, sequels are seldom as interesting as originals. The first Bush term was wild goose chase. The second term looks like a mirage, since Bush is vowing to fix in four years what prophets and messiahs couldn't do in hundreds.

So what? A man is always entitled to his dream. In his second term, George Bush will try to leave the mark of that dream on history. Only regret is that it will be nightmare for the rest of us. For four more years!

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.