Over the last few days there have been a number of articles in the US media concerning the fate of President Bush when he is out of office.

No, I am not talking about whether he will be indicted on war crimes charges or be taken to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. These things happen only to those who are ‘against us’ and not for the ‘good ol’ boys who are with us’. President Bush can rest assured that he will not be tried like a common war criminal. After all, he is an uncommon one.

On the other hand, he may not be so lucky as to that which matters most to him. As most people know, President Bush has the fervent belief that history will somehow vindicate him. That sometime from now, people will look back and say “Wow, he was a great man who saw what none else did at the time of his presidency.”

President Bush has always wanted to be remembered as a great president right up there with Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman. The only problem is that Bush has not achieved anything near as important as either of those two presidents. In any case, those achievements may one day come back to haunt the fame of the presidents who now bask in their glory.

But let’s get back to President Bush. He has recently been compared in the Washington Post to presidents Polk and McKinley. Both of these gentlemen, according to Douglas Brinkley, are well remembered today because they managed to gamble in war and win. Polk managed to annex a huge part of Mexico, and McKinley used an accident aboard the Maine to start the American-Spanish war.

According to Brinkley, these Presidents hover near the top of past Presidents lists because they won, rather than because they were moral or honest in instigating those wars. The lesson, I presume, is that Bush will not be remembered well because he managed to lose the war in Iraq. The moral considerations, I also presume, do not count for much.

If this is the kind of discourse that is going around Washington, and if this is the way that Americans want to be judged, then I wonder why anyone outside of immediate American jurisdiction should bother with caring for the fact that there is now a war of terror being fought against America?

Why should I, as a European, care that Americans are in danger, both in their homeland or abroad? Further, why should I lend them a hand? And, finally, why should I place myself in danger by identifying with the American cause?

Both Polk and McKinley used trumped up charges against the Mexicans and the Spanish in order to start a war against them. Is Brinkley saying that the current “war on terror” is a similar trumped up charge against a Muslim nation? Is he saying that Iraq has been devastated in order to confiscate or at least control important resources that are of ‘vital US interest’? It is certainly looking more and more like that as time passes.

The only difference between Bush and his two predecessors, according to Brinkley, is that Bush lost the bet. In other words, Bush is not a good gambler, (I suppose just as he’s not a good drinker), and so his fame will suffer as a consequence of that.

American arrogance, it seems, has reached such a high point that I am afraid the rest of the world will eventually decide that it’s better off without the US as a member of the global family. US interference in the name of its ‘vital national interests’, (interests based on American gluttony and greed, rather than legitimate concerns), has taken a great toll on many people around the world. The only other powers that compare to the amount of death and suffering that the US has caused on this planet are Nazi Germany, the USSR and the British Empire…

Chris Voidis

Over the last little while there’s been considerable mention in articles dealing with the troubles in Lebanon that many of the youth today, who are itching for a sectarian fight, are too young to remember the horrors of the previous Lebanese civil war. These article fail to mention though, the fact that most of these youth were brought up with stories of glory and bravery emanating from the civil war years.

If the Lebanese are anything like the rest of the people of the Mediterranean, then they’ve probably raised their children on a diet of stories from those year. Most certainly these would be stories about how an older brother, an uncle or a father were killed unjustly by others, or how justly they themselves killed others.

When I was a little boy, I was living in a small Greek village. My grandfather and grandmother told me many stories of both the second world war and the Greek civil war that followed. Of all the dead relatives and friends of the family I learned about, all had died in glory, either in a flash of bravery fighting the enemy, or at the hands of cowards who had set up a trap for them. All this, 30 years after the war had ended!

Now, imagine how fresh these memories are in Lebanon, and how vivid these stories must seem to the young minds who’ve heard all of them. Also keep in mind that we mostly never tell stories of cowardice and injustice about our own. Rather, we keep silent, or worse, we lie. These lies, and even this silence, will invariably lead another generation to its death, in Lebanon, and anywhere else people insist on glorifying the most inglorious of human enterprises…war….