Why does the US look like us?

Depends on how you take it. While the Americans are slowly waking up to their mistakes two years after they have wrongly wrecked another sovereign country, Halliburton, the world's largest military private contractor, which was once headed by US Vice-President Dick Cheney, has already made at least $8 billion out of Iraq. But that is not the end of the story. Bunnatine Greenhouse, the highest-ranking civilian in the US Army Corps of Engineers, saw the contracts handed to Halliburton pass over her desk. She objected to all of them on the grounds that the government was being too generous to the Texas-based company. Now it appears that she might lose her job.

Let us put it on the back burner for a while and talk about the other issue. The judge who ordered the removal of the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo needed police protection lest members of the religious right tried to attack on him. In order to placate the religious right, George Bush signed a bill and his brother Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida, tried to forcibly remove Terri Schiavo from her hospice. It was the local police who made it clear that they were not going to let that happen without an order from the judge.

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Tell me something. Do you smell the same rat that I smell? Isn't the US beginning to look a lot like us? The highest evolved democracy gives us the telltale signs of corruption in the highest places. Holy cow! Third World vices are seeping over the ramparts of American virtues. What about religious fundamentalism? Almost the entire Congress voted for a legislation to keep Terri Schiavo on the feeding tube in the name of God, which made a representative from Connecticut fume that the Republican Party had become a party of theocracy.

You would still be living in your mother's womb if you did not expect politics to have some of its ploys. People blame their mistakes on others and success in politics depends on who does it better. But US politics always boasted that it had certain standards. The American politicians refused to stoop as low as their counterparts in the Banana Republics or other hellhole nations.

Now the inquiring mind wants to know: what is the difference? The wild goose chase in the rest of the world to find religious fundamentalists seems ludicrous when a God-fearing President sits in the White House and tries extreme measures to keep alive the living dead in the name of his faith. Now watch it, before you say anything. Nobody is saying, George Bush and his Christian friends are doing anything wrong. It is their God and it is fine so long as they keep it to themselves.

Also so long as they let others do the same and don't try to tell how others should profess their faiths. If Bangladesh is a fundamentalist nation, our judges have not yet needed police protection from the religious right. Nobody has tried to kill a doctor for performing an abortion. We believe that life and death are in the hands of God. It has never been an issue whether a terminally ill person should live or die. The average Americans are not different from us. A recent survey showed that 9 out of 10 Americans did not want to die in an institution. When asked what would they do if they were told they would die within a short time, 82 per cent of them responded that they would like to go home. Nearly 70 per cent of Americans disapproved that their President took a side on whether Terri Schiavo should live or die.

If you are talking about corruption, let me ask you why Bangladesh has been topping the TI list year after year? What is the total amount of money that passes hands in this country, when $8 billion passes only a few hands in one deal in the United States? How about other aspects of corruption, about manufacturing stories, cheating the people, and attacking another country under false pretense? What about killing and torturing innocent people in the name of protecting their rights and freedom?

Those who rule also make the rules, and it is not difficult to understand why what is good for the goose is also not good for the gander. But these days you cannot even tell the difference. What happens in the United States is only an understated version of what happens in the so-called rogue nations of the world. Most interestingly, the United States is becoming its own nemesis. Everything it is blaming on others is happening in its own backyard. Sounds familiar if you know of parents who criticize the upbringing of their neighbours' children only to find that their own children have gone astray.

It is the same age-old dilemma on a global scale. The small fries go to jail, while the big shots make laws. Imagine the reaction in the United States, if our parliament had taken sides with the religious right to annul a marriage, abort a pregnancy or pull the plug on a dying person! When the US Secretary of State referred to Bangladesh as a "troubling" nation, she was indicating at corruption and religious extremism, which have given us a stereotyped image before the rest of the world.

True as that may be, the United States has no right to blame us for it, although it has all the might to impose that blame on us. We are a small nation, poorer and weaker, but we have not lied, cheated, or invaded another country. In any other respect, what happens here also happens there, all that corruption and religious frenzy, the gut-churning depravities of crime and prejudice.

In the end, it is all about perception. The United States with its power and wealth has managed that perception better than us. It has gone to steal from another country while we have been stealing from our own. It resorts to religion in its zeal to save the living dead. We resort to religion in our zeal to save the living from life after death. People make mistakes and people die. It happens all over the world, but the approach varies from country to country, religion to religion.

Cutting through the clutter, now it seems that the US looks a lot like us. Be it corruption, be it religious extremism, the Americans have lost their moral right to blame us. Someone needs to turn around and tell it to them to their face. The government will not do it, because all governments are like-minded. But we the citizens can, because corruption or right to die, at the end of the day, it is our bloody business.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.