What started out as a dream

Monday, July 04, 2011

What started out as a dream

Roedad Khan

Three men, more than any others, ended British colonial rule and helped bring the United States into being: George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The urge to separate from Great Britain was sweeping across the land “like a torrent.” The Congress created a Committee of Five, as it soon was called, to prepare a Declaration of Independence. It adopted the Declaration, drafted by Jefferson, on the evening of July 4. With that, it transformed His Majesty’s colonies into a sovereign, independent country.
When the National Convention met in Philadelphia with George Washington as its president, a deliberate decision was taken to create a weak and subordinate executive power, which could without danger be made elective. The nation possessed, in the words of Tocqueville, two of the main causes of internal peace; it was a new country, but it was inhabited by a people grown old in the exercise of freedom. Besides, America had no hostile neighbour to dread; and the American legislators profiting by these favourable circumstances created a weak presidency. All that has now changed.
Three persons, George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – all conservative men and successful members of the colonial elite turned revolutionaries – set the world ablaze and changed the course of history. The future Sole Superpower was born. Independent America, it was hoped, would become an “asylum for mankind,” and offer refuge to the world’s oppressed. Like a shining beacon, America, it was hoped, would herald the “birth day of a new world,” the beginning of an epoch in which humankind across the earth could “begin the world over again.” Instead, the successors of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson betrayed the American dream which has now turned sour.
“All men are created equal,” the Declaration asserts, but Jefferson and the others were not thinking of those who owned no property or slaves – those who themselves owned property. They were not thinking of women either. It took American democracy – billed as the greatest democracy in the world – 86 years to abolish slavery, 144 years to enfranchise women and 189 years to assure the black people the vote! Jefferson’s attempt to incorporate a paragraph attacking slavery in the Declaration of Independence was struck out by Congress.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once remarked that the United States was “morally superior to Europe.” No longer. America lost its city-on-the-hill idealism, its moral edge, long ago. From the beginning, America was more than a place. It represented the values and ideals of a humane civilisation. Two hundred years ago, America caught the imagination of the world because of the ideals which it stood for. Today its example is tarnished with military adventurism and conflicts abroad. In the past, some envied America, some liked America, some hated America, but almost all respected her. And all knew that without the United States peace and freedom would not have survived.
Today the war on terror is used to topple weak regimes. Today Washington’s main message to the world seems to be: Take dictation. Today America does not chase out an occupier, but occupies; does not push back an intruder, but intrudes; does not repulse an invader, but invades. No wonder, very few respect America these days. The poor and the weak are scared to death and fear the world’s only superpower. In the eyes of millions of Muslims throughout the world, America is perceived today as the greatest threat to the world of Islam since the 13th century.
Today American troops are scattered around the world, from the plains of Northern Europe to the mountains of Afghanistan and the plains of Iraq, in search of a phantom enemy, bombing and killing innocent Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani men, women and children. Though it rejects imperial pretensions, it is, for all its protestations, perceived in the world as peremptory, domineering and Imperial. Its actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Pakistan and Libya, are perceived as part of an open-ended empire-building plan with geo-strategic goals. Under this plan, the United States will acquire a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan for projecting its power in Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
The photo of the naked, black-hooded, wired, Iraqi prisoner standing on a box after having being told he would be electrocuted if he stepped or fell off may well become the lasting emblem of this cruel, unjust war, much as the photo of a naked, fleeing, napalmed little girl became the emblem of the Vietnam War. The United States would no more be symbolised in the Statue of Liberty but with the naked black-hooded Iraqi man.
America, for all of its nascent idealism, began as an instance of brutal European imperialism, with the extermination of indigenous peoples and the enslavements of Africans. The invasion of Iraq was, therefore, not an isolated episode. It was the culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew 14 governments for various ideological, political and economic reasons. The first foreign leader to be overthrown, in January 1893, was Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii.
Muslims do not hate your freedoms. They have no quarrel with the American people or their way of life. They hate American policies. They hate their blind support of Israel in its war of aggression against the people of Palestine. They hate the killing of innocent men, women and children in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. They hate American support of usurpers, hereditary monarchs, military dictators and corrupt and effete rulers in the Islamic world.
To the people of Pakistan, the American commitment to idealism, democracy and liberty worldwide sounds hollow and hypocritical. If America is the vanguard of democracy, why doesn’t it start with Pakistan, ill-led and ill-governed by corrupt rulers supported by America? Why this doubletalk? Why this doublespeak? Today America speaks with a forked tongue. It cannot apply double standards. It is screaming hypocrisy. This does not endear America to the people of Pakistan.
As America, mired in cruel, unjust wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Waziristan, approaches July 4, President Eisenhower’s words in his 1961 farewell address once again demand attention and respect:
“In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful method and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
“What to the slave is the Fourth of July”? The black orator Frederick Douglass would ask in 1852 in an Independence Day oration and would answer that, “your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us... You may rejoice. I must mourn.”
On the fourth of July, like millions of my countrymen, I feel a deep antipathy towards the Yankees who have, with the help of our power-hungry generals, and corrupt politicians, turned independent, sovereign Pakistan into a pseudo-republic and a rentier state, and allowed a venal dictatorship to take root.
The writer is a former federal secretary. Email: roedad@comsats.net.pk,www.roedadkhan.com