The Village Idiot: Does the Free World Need This Leader?
Bush, Star Wars and the End of the American Empire

"A coup d'etat."
The London Observer

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything."
- Joseph Stalin

-Kevin Sanders, War & Peace Foundation: Jan 19, 2001

With the inauguration of George W. Bush after his selection by the US Supreme Court, the world sees with alarm the failure of the American system. An improbably close election has exposed antiquated voting machines and an anachronistic, undemocratic electoral process. As an upshot, twenty thousand nuclear bombs - two thousand of them on ninety-second hair trigger alert - have fallen into the hands of Alfred E. Newman in cowboy boots. As The Nation cover story has noted; the world worries. And with his threat of Star Wars the world worries a lot. Carl Sagan fretted that in our irresponsible stupidity, we have already booby trapped the planet for destruction with Cold War nuclear weapons. Star Wars he said, could end up nuclearizing the inner solar system. If Bush and Cheney lead the world into a new arms race that poisons the planet, the gene pool and the inner solar system, then the vanishing posterity of the species will surely record them as assholes. Big Time.

Great nations - like great people - must be modern. Even before the Bush takeover, the US Constitution was already failing from early programming design errors. The rich, white, slave-owning males who tried to patch together an improved version of the European parliamentary system were prisoners of their age and brought their incomplete views of freedom and democracy to bear in framing the constitution. And they never imagined the exigencies of the nuclear age that their government would one day bring into existence. Nor could they have imagined their system would allow Jesse Helms to seize control of the government's nuclear weapons policy and defy the world by refusing to sign a test ban treaty and abrograting the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty.

In no parliament in Europe would it be possible for an embarrassing clown like Helms to get beyond the far back benches. But in the US system, Big Tobacco, military contractors and the rural Christian Right have put in place a Senator who could endanger the survival of the species. With the Republicans now controlling the White House and both houses of congress, Helms may be unstoppable. If so, it will not be the result of any democratic process. In London the Observer described the election as "a coup d'etat." The Guardian editorialized that Europe may have to resume greater authority in global affairs.

The world watched, at first, in bemused fascination the spectacle of the chaotic, ramshackle election system of the country that so insistently asserts itself to be the necessary nation and the leader of the free world. In Europe The Times of London described it "a parody of democracy". "America today is a laughing stock", claimed the Mirror in London. In Asia, The Independent of Bangladesh said the US election had "undermined the confidence of the democratically minded people of the Third World." The Nation in Thailand said "It smack of pure political sleaze."

On the internet an article by a politician in Zimbabwe is enjoying wide distribution. It offers a contemptuous third world take on the situation. The article speculates on an election in a mythical country in which "the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister, and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police"… a victor "who lost the popular vote," but won by a number "less than the machine's margin of error" in a system based on "some old colonial holdover from the nation's pre-democracy past", and whose victory "turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother" through "a poorly drafted ballot" in a district in which many of the "nation's most despised caste turned out in record numbers to vote against him." Reports of such events the writer says, would cause the reader to "wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere."

A Moscow Times editorial noted that "But in the middle of much muddle, a few things became clear even naked: The owners of the country want their presidency back, and they'll stop at nothing to get it... The Republic slowly sinks into the swamps of Florida... The secret government has shown its face at last. And what a strange, multi-headed beast it is."

There is even a petition underway for an appeal to the World Court by a US human rights group calling for a ruling against the US Supreme Court's halting of the vote count. The Economist of London calls him "The accidental president."

In war, business and politics truth comes down to numbers. The Florida ballot cards - the DNA of the election, as James Carvell called them -- are being scrutinized by the more discerning human eye, aided by common sense and deduction. When the newspapers count the votes and publish the results the numbers will almost certainly show Gore the winner in Florida and therefor the nation. If Bush is shown to have slithered into the White House through accident and legal treachery, he will face a unique ignominy and loss of authority.

Bush is a simple servant of Big Oil -- pushing for a takeover of the Mid-East oil fields, He represents an even greater global threat: the military-aerospace-congressional complex pushing Star Wars. With the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as war secretary in the Bush cabinet, the revival of Reagan's suicidaly insane plan to weaponize space is now inevitable. It was Rumsfeld's contrived and misleading report on behalf of the arms industry on the imagined and deliberately exaggerated threats to the US that helped revive Star Wars last year.

As for Secretary of State Colin Powell - the naively supposed Great Black hope for moderation and sanity amidst the mad Republican Right - he has alas, already opened the way for the Big Oil lobby to seize control of Iraq with his menacing "we'll get Saddam this time" speech. And although he knows Star Wars is crazy, he also knows he is outnumbered in the Cabinet. Powell has already caved in with his declaration that "we will move ahead" with Star Wars. In this process, Bush is largely irrelevant. Charlie McCarthy will say what he is told. Those who own and run America will continue to write Bush's words. Reading them -- with wrong inflections, first from one teleprompter then another, like watching a slow motion tennis match -- Bush will announce that, in order to guard against accidents or "rogue state" nuclear attacks, the US will proceed with plans to "protect" itself and its allies by scrapping the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) system, and launching a sixty-billion dollar first step of a so-called ballistic missile defense system.

The move will divide the nation and mobilize a world wide wave of protest. No nation supports star wars. "Have Americans gone mad?" asks The Times of London. Europe, China, Russia, the UN. Nobel scientists and concerned citizens in the US and around the world are moving to halt it.

Already, the blatantly illicit election process has deprived the US of the torque of moral and political authority. The international alarm and rage over Star Wars will mark the end of the American hegemon.

The declaration by Powell that the US will go ahead with Star Wars sounded the first worldwide alarm. In Canada both Putin and Chretian quickly spoke out against the plan. In the UK, The Guardian has warned of the disastrous international repercussions of Bush Spar Wars plan. In behalf of the monster US aerospace weapons industry, the Bush administration is attempting to haul an unwilling world over the precipice into a new arms race in space that will threaten the entire planet and all future generations. As the debate over Star Wars intensifies, the US claim to world leadership will seem ever more dangerous and ever less legitimate.

In a best-case scenario the coming Star Wars controversy could further undermine US claim to world leadership. Authority would flow to Europe, Russia, Asia and the UN world community to intervene and save the world from the madness. The hope abroad is that the continuing election fiasco has already so delegitimized the Bush administration that the world community will be able to block any such insane global adventures.

Meanwhile, the unscripted Bush remains a constant source of ridicule and peril. Sooner or later he will drive Cheney to his final heart attack. Then? Maybe Powell becomes Veep. In 2004 Powell beats Gore. And Hillary. Or anyone else. The first black President -- ironically and improbably, a Republican. Those who admire him could hope he would then shake off the Bush gang and unfurl himself as the wise, independent leader so many want him to be. He could reign in the military and let Star Wars fade away. A deep healing for America and the world could follow. Who knows?

But in the meantime, with neither mandate nor legitimacy -- real or perceived -- the Bush presidency will probably remain powerless and its agenda gridlocked. Good thing too, for the rest of the world. Fewer Hiroshimas and Nagasakis to end wars. Fewer Vietnams to save the villages. Fewer NATO humanitarian bombings to save the people. Fewer Star Wars schemes to protect the planet. The free world no longer needs such leadership as Bush seeks to provide. Let the United Nations -- with all its faults -- try managing the world's problems for a while, the way it was supposed to. And not just the governments, but the UN global civil society. The blended judgments of concerned humanity could better lead the world than Bush's corporate America.

Within the US, bitterness over the election continues and festers. The election has already claimed many victims. The major pre-election polling services were wrong. As for the long night of shame on the national TV news services, the networks are already steeling themselves for a congressional grilling. And it must be dawning on the chagrined big-name TV news stars that they have forever lost their uniquely inflated authority as anchors. Indeed, the only ripple their lives will leave in the great river of time will be in the historic video tapes, endlessly replayed every election in classes on politics and the media, introducing unborn generations of students to long-forgotten news anchors as they all triumphantly announce the wrong results twice.

The US public has suffered a painful lesson in the shortcomings of their voting system to record and count their sacred votes. There is a revealing irony in a political process that spends three billion dollars on national campaigns to glorify the candidates and brainwash the electorate, while at the same time refusing to update the broken down thirty year-old voting machines through which the people must express their inalienable democratic will.

But it could not have come at a better time for the rest of the world. At the UN there is expectation that the delicate and distrustful balance in the US government will result in a tense political stability. For the rest of the world, it could mean a welcome and relaxing period of US introspection and inertia that will preclude anything so controversial as Star Wars, or even a new war against Iraq. A new US government report warns that in the coming multi-polar world, threats to the US are likely to come from terrorist groups rather than nations with nuclear missiles.

On November 29th, Gallup reported in their update election summary: "A president viewed as having arrived at the office illegitimately would undoubtedly be in a less certain and less powerful position than one whose ascension to the White House has the public's imprimatur of legitimacy." In such a situation the US claim to world leadership will be so undermined that any attempt to abrogate the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty will, hopefully, be doomed to failure. Europeans - including NATO nations particularly -- can be expected to unite against American pressure to join in Star Wars. As Gore Vidal has said, it is time for the Europeans to cast off their American masters.

Already the European Union is at work on a European Defense system, independent of the US-dominated NATO. Putin has suggested Russia would like to participate in such an international force. This marks the real end of the Cold War. Germany is now opening up new geopolitical links with Russia. And Russia is forging new security links with the Middle East to help counter US-NATO domination. In an unexpected initiative Russia now plans to build a tunnel to the US across the Bering Strait. In the Southern Hemisphere Australia has just independently expanded its potential security peacekeeping capacity in South East Asia.

The developed nation-state democracies of the UN -- to the extent that they need or seek leadership of the free world - are likely to look to a coalition of more politically mature European countries and the other non-threatening developed nations of the world. A politically and morally weakened America could hasten the historically inevitable move toward a multi-centric leadership of the so-called free world - whatever that is.

Many things conspire toward that end. The issue of capital punishment is likely to figure in Europe's increasing world leadership. Any nation with the death penalty is automatically excluded from the European Union as too brutal and backward. In this regard, America already seems primitive to much of the world. The flawed and undemocratic US election system that has put in power a death penalty zealot like Bush will reinforce the impression. In Europe there is mounting outrage at what is perceived as US irresponsibility and cover up concerning the victims of depleted uranium weapons used by the US military in the Gulf war and in and Kosovo.

So too the US war on drugs continues to alienate America from its more mature and reflective allies. According to recent reports European governments are refusing to join US efforts to internationalize the drug war through the UN. Belgium's decision to legalize pot is likely to be followed throughout Europe. US isolation on the drug issue is likely to be exacerbated by US Attorney-General elect, John Ashcroft. Americans have been dismayed to discover Ashcroft is a fundamentalist religious zealot who has publicly asserted that the US is a monarchy under "King Jesus." In the continuing confirmation hearings Ashcroft has already made it clear that he is ready to fill the American jails with anyone who tokes, snorts or otherwise ingests any molecule or substance he deems ungodly. On this too, the free world will distance itself from its US leader. Worldwide resistance to the destructive US war on drugs will strengthen.

But it is the US threat to put weapons in space that will truly discredit America. A united global community could arise in resistance to the Star Wars threat; a world polity more modern, planetary and relevant than the present US hegemony. A self-selecting, leaderless network of the world's concerned elites, both government and non- governmental, could emerge to fill the political and moral vacuum created as a preoccupied US turns inward to heal and sort itself out after the election trauma.

The first step for a world no longer under US "leadership" would be to get to work on some urgently needed planetary housekeeping. In the UN pressure on the US will mount to sign the Kyoto accords on global warming, and to ratify Clinton's support for an International Criminal Court. Already Republicans are threatening to overthrow Clinton's agreement on the Court.

An illegitimate US presidency would renew and intensify world pressure on nuclear nations to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and to reaffirm commitment to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The US is virtually the only major nation still to hold out against these essential first steps to world law and security. Russia is calling for hastened nuclear disarmament, while the US is urging an expansion of the arms race to space. And still - ten years after the supposed end of the Cold War - at this very moment, the US and Russia continue to threaten the world with incineration in the next twenty minutes from thousands of nuclear bombs on missiles ready to launch in less than two minutes.

Within the United Nations a quieter, less intrusive and less imperial America would be welcome. And if a gridlocked congress is searching for bi-partisan global issues, the Democrats might consider running with George Bush's campaign mutterings about taking nuclear weapons off alert and to reducing their numbers. If the Democrats were to support and lead these policies it would also help them build bridges to the green defectors. Nader had called for immediate nuclear de-alerting and disarmament.

Nader had also called for an end to work on Star Wars, and re-affirmation of the ABM Treaty. How a fractured and fractious US government will handle the ABM issue is not clear. Powell, despite his public assertion that the US will go ahead with Star Wars, is said to privately oppose to the idea. "Where are the enemies?" Powell has demanded of the Republican hawks who are pushing the missile defense. Powell has also predicted privately that "it will never happen." Meantime, he publicly cheers along.

To the vast majority of the world's nations -- who voted repeatedly and overwhelmingly against Star Wars at the United Nations -- the mounting evidence of criminal fraud in the Florida election has provided unexpected hope that the resulting perception of illegitimacy will so weaken the presidency that the planet may be spared an arms race in space.

In a world of reduced and receding US power the question will soon arise: Does the free world need a leader at all? In a time of speed-of-light global communications and the Internet (America's greatest contribution to posterity,) a more modern arrangement is needed to maintain order in a world of jerry-rigged nation states, empires and other relics left over from two thousand years of historical accidents – all dissolving rapidly now into cyberspace in which a civil balance between freedom and the rule of law is needed more than leadership." A new CIA report on the next 15 years acknowledges that nation state governments -- including the US -- will continue to loose control of international affairs as the world becomes increasingly globalized by corporations, organized crime and the Internet.

Even before the current US election crisis, there had already been an historic shift in the direction of human affairs with the American defeat in Vietnam. Until then, Oswald Spengler had been right that "history records only those victories in which the will of the strongest becomes the law for all." But with the victory of a peasant army lead by a barefoot poet against the world's strongest military superpower, the ethos of human history began to change.

And as nations mature, they shed the trappings of power. They come to shun charisma and national triumphalism. In a hundred years most great nations states will have become as irrelevant as the European Royal Households or the Vatican, their hollow majesty enduring only as sentimental theater and an attraction for tourists.

In Switzerland today the president is a rotating position among members of the cabinet. No White House. No Air-Force One. No aggrandizing display. No pompous flags and brass bands. No endless, embarrassing proclamations of greatness, past or present. Boasting is always a mark of the second rate. The Swiss system works very well. It is how the world should be run -- and will be run when the world moves, finally, out of the last Dark Age of nationalistic militarism and its strutting leaders.

The uncertainty surrounding the election of the US president challenges not just the legitimacy of the presidency, but more deeply its relevance to America and the world. The shock of discovering that things can work remarkably well without a powerful -- or even a legitimate -- US president may encourage reflection on steps that lead toward a more modern America in an increasingly planetary world.

Destiny makes no mistakes. Meantime, the world prepares for the struggle to stop Bush's disastrous plans for Star Wars.

UN Bureau
War & Peace Foundation
777 United Nations Plaza
New York, NY 10017