On Oscar night, Michael Moore said it well in his short but to the point acceptance speech, "We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president…who's sending us to war for fictitious reasons." Frighteningly, this fictitious president is engaged in a war that is all too real, a war that is being carried out on two fronts. The first front is against the international community as a whole. The second front is against the American people at home. With such widespread alienation at home and abroad, it's no wonder that he "doesn't even have the Dixie Chicks or the Pope behind him," to highlight Moore's closing remarks as the orchestra drowned him out on Oscar night.
Front One: Attack on the International Community. The Bush administration advocates a might-makes-right policy over one of international cooperation, and has thrown out all basic tenets of diplomacy in the process. As the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, Bush has the largest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction at his disposal. He is the leader of the only nation on the planet to ever unleash the devastation of nuclear weapons, killing upwards of 140,000 civilians with one bomb in the period of about ten seconds in Hiroshima and 70,000 people with another bomb in Nagasaki in 1945. In only 58 years, these horrors are already being forgotten. Last year, the Bush administration released its National Security Strategy, which takes a radical turn away from a nuclear free world and advocates the use of nuclear weapons in first strikes as a matter of policy.
Moreover, this document advocates the use of pre-emptive war on any sovereign nation that is deemed to pose a future threat. The accuracy of Bush's crystal ball notwithstanding, such a policy of launching aggressive wars directly violates the tenets of the United Nations Charter (Article 51) and the US Constitution (Article I, Section 10), not to mention the very foundation of world security. It is a policy that was used by emperors of centuries past, and is deplored by the modern world community for good reason.
To seal this unilateral policy of military domination over systems of international law, the administration worked against the establishment of the International Criminal Court at every turn. While the world court now has authority, despite the administration's efforts, to try cases involving war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and international terrorism, the signature of the United States is notably absent from the treaty. And the Bush administration is diligently working to exempt US soldiers from prosecution, even to the extent that it has threatened the use of military force against any country that would attempt to prosecute an American in the court (as outlined in the "Hague Invasion Act"). Such a court is and would be the ideal vehicle for bringing to justice such criminals as those who perpetrated the terrorist acts of September 11th. The court could certainly benefit from the support, rather than obstruction, of the world's sole superpower.
Front Two: Attack on Rights and Liberties at Home. The administration's policy of bow-down-to-Bush is not only being applied abroad, but also at home where Bush's Attorney General is leading the attack. As a sequel to the Patriot Act, the first volley of fire against the home front, Ashcroft's office drafted a bill entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, dubbed the Patriot Act II. The January 9 document outlines sweeping new laws to further shut down the use of Freedom of Information Act requests, lift restrictions on government spying activities, and increase the government's ability to hold suspects for years in pretrial detention. The most chilling provision of this proposed bill is the section granting the government the ability to strip away an American's citizenship. No joke. The federal government would have the power to expatriate you!
With this proposal to grant government the power to decide who is or is not American, the violation of the US Constitution, UN Charter and the blatant disregard for the opinion of Americans and the world in its rush to wage pre-emptive war on Iraq, the erosion of hard won civil liberties and provisions for a transparent government, and this administration's ability to take power without actually winning an election, one might begin to think that the United States has slipped into a totalitarian regime. In any case, we are increasingly being left with a fictitious democracy.