Unconnected Dots

"'It's a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld – giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,' the first Pentagon adviser told me. 'It's a global free-fire zone.'" – Seymour Hersh, The Coming Wars, the New Yorker magazine

George Bush's all-foreign-policy inaugural address offered a globe-enveloping neocon version of a Pax Americana world. Analyses in the days that followed tended to mention, often critically (as did the Democrats), that the President named not a single country in his speech, not even Iraq – though there was a clear reference to our war there. ("Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon.") In fact, the only foreign place name, Sinai ("the truths of Sinai"), was fittingly enough for this president a reference to the Old Testament in a speech that God ("the Author of liberty") evidently did everything but write.

In truth, though, there was no need to mention the names of specific lands. For one thing, the president's men and women were, in the days around the inauguration, out on the hustings mentioning names galore. Dick Cheney went on the shock-jock Imus Show, threatening Iran by name with the big stick of Israel ("... the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards"); while Secretary of State designate Condoleezza Rice, in her Senate testimony, listed a six-country Fistful of Evil ("outposts of tyranny") – Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe – as well as a Quadrangle of Reversible Tyranny – Russia, China, Pakistan and Egypt – "friendly" states which needed to institute democratic reforms or else. Meanwhile, in the New Yorker magazine, Seymour Hersh was informing us that the president had already signed a fistful "of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia" including Iran.

So the president had no need for place names, not just to avoid his well known penchant for mangling them, but because his intention in his inaugural address was to take possession of the whole planet in the name of "freedom" (whose essence, like "torture," turns out to be all in the definition). After all, as the speech made clear, he wasn't addressing just Americans or Iraqis or Pakistanis or North Koreans or Israelis; he was, in near-revolutionary fashion, issuing a warning to "every ruler and every nation" (you know who you are); he was addressing "anew" all "the peoples of the world," no exclusions or exceptions. It was the all-embracing inaugural equivalent of those frequent smaller moments when our president simply states that other countries, peoples, movements must do this or that. This time, in an excess of retro-triumphalism, he laid his giant "must" like a footprint on the planet itself!

If his reach was planetary, his speechwriter's ability to yoke words together on the battlefield of freedom was creative: There were, for instance, two tiny, symbolic shotgun linguistic marriages in the speech – of force and freedom ("the force of human freedom") and of diplomacy and intelligence ("the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy"). OK, he didn't quite say "the Pentagon" – no names after all – but Seymour Hersh did and George might as well have in his sweeping desire to bring "freedom" to those we declare unfree at the point of a sword, cruise missile, or Special Forces team. After all, he did say, without irony or self-consciousness, that, as humanity yearns for "freedom," so no "human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies."