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It's
been years, it seems, since I've had anything positive to say
about US foreign policy. Whether it's the jackass mathematicians
and careful parsers of phrase in the Pentagon, or the mannequin
posing as Secretary of State, the whole operation has proven to
be all-too-effective fodder for the socialists protesting US wars
overseas. It's almost seemed inevitable that any move Washington
made would be essentially debauched – spiritually, economically,
diplomatically, militarily – as if designed to appeal to the
jackasses who went to the pre-war pro-war rallies and brayed about
liberating some other helpless jackasses whose names they couldn't
even pronounce and whose cities they couldn't find on the map.
I'm
a cynic, I guess; I don't care much about people I don't know,
have no intention of meeting, et al. It doesn't surprise me that
"liberation forces" had to resort to wrapping a town in barbed
wire – In The Service of Freedom. America is a culture of enforcement
at this point, as it must be, given that our women are taught
to be harlots by corporate culture and that our men are taught
to do as they're told. A recipe for freedom? Hell no, my brother.
A recipe for Apocalypse, and for the end of the American experiment,
whatever the hell that actually meant.
But
when my thoughts turned most cynical, along came a savior on a
white horse. George W. Bush, the FNC "Beltway Boys" man of the
year? Please – suggest that to my face and I'll piss down
your throat, and then send you a bill for "services rendered."
Pope John
Paul II? As much as I appreciate the Raimondo argument on
his behalf, the Pope has presided over a weakening of
the Catholic Church domestically
from which Rome will never recover. Donald Rumsfeld, the nonagenarian
nincompoop in the Pentagon that worthies like Victor Davis Hanson
and Midge Decter write paeans to while
waiting to burn in hell? Some jokes are their own punch lines….
No,
the "History Repeating Man of the Year" is not one of the usual
suspects. He's a man that shows up and gets things done, without
worrying about press conferences and the fatuous trappings of
self-promotion. A former Secretary of State who should be restored
to his former position forthwith, my choice for Man of the Year
is none other than the old Bush hand, the Fixer, James Baker.
Look
at the man's record in December alone. He worked Paris,
Rome,
Japan and China,
just to name a few, to get debt forgiveness for the newest, sorriest
U.S. protectorate – and was successful. As opposed to Colin Powell,
the current Secretary of State who wanted to pay Turkey roughly
a million dollars a soldier to occupy Iraq just months ago, Baker
sees the bottom line and the balance sheet and acts like a professional,
keeping those in mind above all other concerns.
This
column shares the Chomsky/Kissinger contention that "foreign policy
is not missionary work," if only because that neat phrase punctures
the bloated guts of the asinine advocates of Middle Eastern Liberation
more quickly than any other five words that can be said in polite
company. James Baker embodies that phrase. An elite speaking to
elites in a language that resonates, Baker Gets Things Done, and
he doesn't even have to threaten carpet bombing Mecca to do so.
Critics
of Baker love to quote
him, apocryphally, telling an intimate in the Poppy Bush administration
something along the lines of "Fu*k the Jews – they didn't
vote for us anyway" as a way of justifying a policy toward Israel
not entirely consistent with the tenets of dual-citizenship. Did
Baker say it? Is anyone alive that actually heard him say it?
Will that person go on Fox News and validate these craven chickensh*ts
who compile the "historical record?" If not, let's dispense
with the smearing of the only statesman in Washington with a vision
and the acumen necessary to extricate America from its current
"hyper-powered" binds. 2004 has to be a year in which things change
dramatically in terms of US foreign policy, and I defy anyone
to come up with a better agent of change than the well-traveled,
unimpeachably-proven James Baker III.
~
Anthony Gancarski
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Anthony Gancarski,
the author of Unfortunate
Incidents, writes for The American Conservative, CounterPunch,
and LewRockwell.com. His web journalism was recognized by
Utne Reader Online as "Best of the Web." A writer for the
local Folio Weekly, he lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
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