Bush Vision

Where would today8217;s anti-imperialists be without Dubya?

I SORT OF LIKE GEORGE BUSH. Prem Shan-kar Jha perhaps sort of chokes at the men-tion of the US president. While it is true and right that in the marketplace of com-mentaries, a mere journalist commands far less premium than an ex-editor/ex-prime ministerial aide/columnist-at-large, I still have one big advantage over Jha. I know I don8217;t see the world through and only through George Bush. Jha does, but he doesn8217;t know he does. And his attempted grand narrative of capitalism and the future of man flounders on that lack of self-knowledge.

Jha ends his narrative with a reminder that Kofi Annan has been persecuted by the Bush administration: The Norman Coleman bipartisan commission in the US Congress, set up to investigate corruption in the UN8217;s oil-for-food programme. This is a shockingly casual indictment. Only Natwar Singh has been as insistent that the whole oil-for-food scandal was an imperialist smear on those fighting for a just, multipolar world. Natwar at least was fighting for his job. Jha has no such excuse.

Jha8217;s thesis8212;the biggest crisis facing the world system is America8217;s pursuit of self-ag-grandisement at the cost of institutional effi-cacy and other nations8217; sovereignty8212;desper-ately needs George Bush to be even considered as a hypothesis. But for those hanging chads in Florida and the 5-4 split verdict from the nine-member US Supreme Court they engendered, Al Gore could have been America8217;s president.

Then, even after 9/11, would America have in-tervened in Iraq? For Jha8217;s thesis to work, some-thing like Iraq would have had to happen. A Democratic Gore presidency would have had to exhibit the same proclivities as the Republi- can Bush one. Does that sound credible? That question more or less damns the book.

Jha wants to belong to that school of histori-ography that looks at history as only a play of grand, inexorable forces. Specific actors don8217;t matter. Systemic greed and systemic compul-sions do. Had Al Gore won in 2000, I am pretty sure Jha would have written a different kind of book. His is not the first Left-leaning inquisiti-on of capitalism that depends on powerful in-dividual actors for writing the chargesheet while claiming individuals don8217;t really matter.

But the failing shows up a lot more as Jha ma-kes one extraordinary analytical error. Put sim-ply, he forgets about two very large countries. To ignore China and India and what their capitalism/globalisation-aided transforma-tion mean for the world is a heroic folly. As US presidents would be the first to tell Jha, they don8217;t feel they can enjoy decades of unfettered, world-dominating power when they look at China. China8217;s rise to global reckoning8212;and India8217;s potential rise8212;is to Jha8217;s thesis what American cluster bombs were to Baghdad resi-dential complexes.

And8212;a humble contribution for Jha8217;s next book8212;if China and India fail, it would be mostly their own fault, not the West8217;s, not America8217;s and not George Bush8217;s.