Bush Admin A Laughing Stock

Bush Admin A Laughing Stock

As I drove into work one morning, along a rain swept motorway in the heartland of British suburbia, I wondered what it must feel like to be the citizen of a country whose administration is rapidly becoming an international laughing stock.

The prompt for this line of thinking was the morning radio broadcast heaping scorn and derision upon the Bush administration for its latest dictate that aircraft passengers should be discouraged from queuing for the toilet. Evidently unregulated hopping from foot to foot outside the tiny cubicles that pass for rest rooms on long haul aircraft poses a terrorist threat. Milling around, according to the report, is also on the list of unacceptable activities which should please the health lobby who actively encourage passengers to exercise during long flights to avoid contracting deep vein thrombosis. Could it be that the real raison d'être for this apparent display of paranoia is to provide an Air Marshal with a clear line of fire to ensure that he can take out any would-be hijacker, and the aircraft control lines, with a single bullet?

That a President from Texas should insist on airlines including such armed guards on aircraft stirs up visions of the traditional western gun fight where two surly gun slingers exchanged snake eyes before the bad guy - the one in the black hat - was summarily despatched to a luxury ensuite plot under Boot Hill. Not that this scenario would work on any modern aircraft as the aisles are too narrow for gun slinging, and the crew would of course insist on finishing the drinks service first, already having their hands full with passengers dashing by as their numbers came up on the 'toilet vacant' indicator. No, the protagonists would have to wait until everybody was fed, watered, and bathroomed before any such nonsense could take place. And we would have to use the bathroom before landing otherwise our finger prints on our otherwise grubby hands would not show up clearly when we arrived at US immigration.

And arrive we do in droves because the UK enjoys a special relationship with the US, giving us all the benefits of shared wars and visa waiver programmes. This latter facility relieves us of the burden of queuing up at the US Embassy in London - a great place to get to if you live anywhere north of Birmingham - filling in detailed forms, and handing over hard earned cash to get our passports stamped with the American seal of approval. That is of course if we have machine readable passports by October 2004 which our Government tells us will not be achieveable. In which case we will have to spend hours travelling to London to spend many more hours filling in forms promising that we are model citizens who have never done anything naughty, and that we will carry enough money - do you take Euros? - to pay our way. Finally giving our solemn oath, with hand on heart, that we will return to the land of Blair after enjoying the hospitality of the fifty States, having previously had that hand fingerprinted and pictures taken just to be sure. Goodness, just imagine what we might have faced if we did not have our special relationship with the land of the free?

Not that we will be able to afford foreign travel much longer because, according to the International Monetary Fund, the US will soon owe the world as much as 40% of its total economy. No problem, say the Washington spokes persons, the numbers are not significant, and anyway we have 'a plan'. Glad to hear it, and please don't worry that global interest rates are currently at an all time low, which can only increase the cost of servicing America's overwhelming debts over time. Don't even think about the weakening dollar that will make it increasingly difficult to repay foreign debts whatever happens to the cost of loans, and feel free to completely dismiss the baby boomers whose pension demands will place an intolerable burden on the badly weakened US economy within the next ten years. Assuming of course that there is still an economy left after paying the bill for rebuilding and stabilising Iraq.

But as with any good story we should go for the big finish, and in this case we have the recent news that the Bush administration has just withdrawn 400 weapons experts from Iraq because they could not find the legendary weapons of mass destruction. This is only a minor problem because although such weapons were touted on both sides of the Atlantic as forming the lynch pin of the decision to invade a sovereign power, the real reason it subsequently transpired, was to rid that country of the nasty Mr Hussein and his cronies. The fact that there are far worse regimes around the world who oppress their people more severely and pose a proven, immediate threat to world peace - Libya, Burma and North Korea come to mind - is not important. And Iraq's huge oil supplies, the potential for billions of dollars worth of business for the administration's industrial friends, and the strategic foothold that the US now has in the Middle East played no part in the equation. That reasoning is understood by everyone in the international community, especially by certain members of the British Government and the Peter Pan Is Real club.

Which is why, as I extricated myself from the sodden highway, turned into the puddle laden car park of my current employer and turned off my car radio, I looked past the lazy motion of my windshield wipers and decided that the cold, grey skies of the UK were not so bad after all.



	As I drove into work one morning, along a rain swept motorway in the heartland of British suburbia, I wondered what it must feel like to be the citizen of a country whose administration is rapidly becoming an international laughing stock. The prompt for this line of thinking was the morning radio broadcast heaping scorn and derision upon the Bush administration for its latest dictate that aircraft passengers should be discouraged from queuing for the toilet. Evidently unregulated hopping from foot to foot outside the tiny cubicles that pass for rest rooms on long haul aircraft poses a terrorist threat. Milling around, according to the report, is also on the list of unacceptable activities which should please the health lobby who actively encourage passengers to exercise during long flights to avoid contracting deep vein thrombosis. Could it be that the real raison d'être for this apparent display of paranoia is to provide an Air Marshal with a clear line of fire to ensure that he can take out any would-be hijacker, and the aircraft control lines, with a single bullet? That a President from Texas should insist on airlines including such armed guards on aircraft stirs up visions of the traditional western gun fight where two surly gun slingers exchanged snake eyes before the bad guy - the one in the black hat - was summarily despatched to a luxury ensuite plot under Boot Hill. Not that this scenario would work on any modern aircraft as the aisles are too narrow for gun slinging, and the crew would of course insist on finishing the drinks service first, already having their hands full with passengers dashing by as their numbers came up on the 'toilet vacant' indicator. No, the protagonists would have to wait until everybody was fed, watered, and bathroomed before any such nonsense could take place. And we would have to use the bathroom before landing otherwise our finger prints on our otherwise grubby hands would not show up clearly when we arrived at US immigration. And arrive we do in droves because the UK enjoys a special relationship with the US, giving us all the benefits of shared wars and visa waiver programmes. This latter facility relieves us of the burden of queuing up at the US Embassy in London - a great place to get to if you live anywhere north of Birmingham - filling in detailed forms, and handing over hard earned cash to get our passports stamped with the American seal of approval. That is of course if we have machine readable passports by October 2004 which our Government tells us will not be achieveable. In which case we will have to spend hours travelling to London to spend many more hours filling in forms promising that we are model citizens who have never done anything naughty, and that we will carry enough money - do you take Euros? - to pay our way. Finally giving our solemn oath, with hand on heart, that we will return to the land of Blair after enjoying the hospitality of the fifty States, having previously had that hand fingerprinted and pictures taken just to be sure. Goodness, just imagine what we might have faced if we did not have our special relationship with the land of the free? Not that we will be able to afford foreign travel much longer because, according to the International Monetary Fund, the US will soon owe the world as much as 40% of its total economy. No problem, say the Washington spokes persons, the numbers are not significant, and anyway we have 'a plan'. Glad to hear it, and please don't worry that global interest rates are currently at an all time low, which can only increase the cost of servicing America's overwhelming debts over time. Don't even think about the weakening dollar that will make it increasingly difficult to repay foreign debts whatever happens to the cost of loans, and feel free to completely dismiss the baby boomers whose pension demands will place an intolerable burden on the badly weakened US economy within the next ten years. Assuming of course that there is still an economy left after paying the bill for rebuilding and stabilising Iraq. But as with any good story we should go for the big finish, and in this case we have the recent news that the Bush administration has just withdrawn 400 weapons experts from Iraq because they could not find the legendary weapons of mass destruction. This is only a minor problem because although such weapons were touted on both sides of the Atlantic as forming the lynch pin of the decision to invade a sovereign power, the real reason it subsequently transpired, was to rid that country of the nasty Mr Hussein and his cronies. The fact that there are far worse regimes around the world who oppress their people more severely and pose a proven, immediate threat to world peace - Libya, Burma and North Korea come to mind - is not important. And Iraq's huge oil supplies, the potential for billions of dollars worth of business for the administration's industrial friends, and the strategic foothold that the US now has in the Middle East played no part in the equation. That reasoning is understood by everyone in the international community, especially by certain members of the British Government and the Peter Pan Is Real club. Which is why, as I extricated myself from the sodden highway, turned into the puddle laden car park of my current employer and turned off my car radio, I looked past the lazy motion of my windshield wipers and decided that the cold, grey skies of the UK were not so bad after all.