By Joseph J. Honick
Just think if you were around the world that used to look to the United States for strong, decisive leadership or at least predictable unity after heavy debate of major issues ... and then figure out how the world now sees us.
Here we are, mired in conflicts abroad we can neither stop nor win, attempting to make a victory out of an Iraq mess that never seemed to reach a real decision, and then diving into not only the Libyan rebellion but victimized when that exercise got out of hand.
And those are only a few of our bipartisan global miscues.
Now it’s revealed we’ve jumped into the rebel side once more in the Syrian uprising by spending considerable millions to provide allegedly (at least for now)” non military aid.” The claim is we’ve so vetted the recipients that we’re certain none is of the Al Qaida operations. (The background noise is snide laughter of those who’ve seen all this before as we almost always ended up shipping real combat stuff to the delight of arms manufacturers and others.)
Amid all this comes the months of verbal confusion out of the halls of supposedly national leadership, debate allegedly leading to some kind of resolution to meet the threat something still more confusingly called “sequestration.” One bright young news commentator quite accurately summed up the “sequestration” colloquy as “sandbox politics.”
And why not? After all, hasn’t what passed for intelligent discussion of an economic crisis looked more like kids throwing sand and other stuff back and forth to see who could do the most damage?
Considering that other nations and continents are struggling mightily with their own politics, corruption and lousy economics, one might think the world’s mightiest power would literally gleam brightly as a beacon of hope.
But how could that be now, what with the political PR flacks helping to churn the propaganda mills about fiscal cliffs, sequestrations suggesting virtual apocalypse and the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives suggesting his Senatorial counterparts have their posteriors immobilized.
If the recent Oscar ceremonies had included a category for political tragicomedy, the men and women of our theoretically bipartisan national leadership would have walked off with a statuette while still arguing over who did the most to confuse all of us.
Consider as well we’ve omitted the tactical and often poorly aimed use of drones, the welter of debate over whether horse meat is finding its way into our food under other names. Shakespeare could have only been frustrated by an inability to write fast enough for the comedy plot lines coming from every direction!
And, while it’s some kind of mangled humor simply to recite the realities, the closing act of these dramas will hardly yield praise from a world once envious of our overflowing opportunities.
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Joseph J. Honick is
president of GMA International in Bainbridge Island, Wash. |