America’s Appendicitis
In Ukraine as in most of the world, the war in Iraq has triggered a wave of resentment against the “ugly American” not seen in decades. For whatever objective merits or demerits there may be to the case US President George W. Bush might possess for his invasion of a country that might or might not have “weapons of mass destruction” forbidden by international treaties, the American head of state has done more damage to his own country’s reputation than the Communist propaganda machine could accomplish in seventy years, and in the face of such understandable outrage a loyal American citizen can only point out the difference between the American people and those who have led them to such a costly and damaging mistake.
It should above all be remembered that in the last US presidential elections more votes were cast for Bush’s Democratic opponent than for him, and he won the presidency only because of the mechanism of the Electoral College, a leftover from the eighteenth century that has become the American system’s analogy to the appendix in the human body, a vestigial organ of no known use that can become inflamed and threaten the life of the entire organism. In other words, America has what might be termed political appendicitis. If the old saying, “let the best man win,” refers in politics to the person who got the most votes, a political archaism of the US Constitution is responsible for preventing the best man from winning, and the American body politic is suffering the consequences of the worst presidential election since 1876, when the Electoral College last denied the presidency to the man more voters had cast their ballots for and, incidentally, brought the republic to the verge of a second civil war. Over 100 times in American history constitutional amendments have been introduced to get rid of the Electoral College. It is quite possible to revive the issue and give America its long overdue political appendectomy.
Secondly, even before the first US combatant was flown to Kuwait in preparation for the ground invasion of Iraq, the United States already had the streets of its major cities filled with a vocal mass movement against the war that had been advertised so long in advance. On the eve of the American action, public opinion polls showed the American people about evenly divided over whether such a move was justified or not. Of course, as is the American tradition, the president’s popularity rose once the bullets started to fly. However, messy, protracted wars far from home for poorly understood objectives tend to lose popular support. This happened during the Vietnam War in the US and even during America’s own war of independence in Great Britain, when the British could have sent another army after Lt. Gen. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, but the British Parliament decided that enough was enough.
In any case, the American people has a history of coming to its senses after its leaders have led it to folly. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time. You can fool all of the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” The world will watch as President George W. Bush inevitably learns the truth of this maxim. An in the meantime, please be indulgent of those US citizens outside their native land, most of whom did not vote for the man responsible for the current mess. Incidentally, this includes a substantial number of Americans in official posts, whose positions prevent them from criticizing their government.
