The Dickensian Decade

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”

Can we use the stirring words of Charles Dickens to describe the first decade of the twenty-first century, the “Oughty-Noughties” (2000-2009 or the 00s) as it has come to be called?

Answer: A qualified “Yes.”

The decade began with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in March of 2000. Eight months later, George W. Bush claimed the presidency of the United States after the “hanging chad” farce in Florida and a strange and unprecedented 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On September 11, 2001, homicidal maniacs claiming Islam as guidance hijacked commercial airliners and crashed into what they perceived as American symbols of power, the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Close to 2,300 Americans and an estimated 500 foreign nationals from 91 nations perished in the attacks.

In response, the U.S. went after the Taliban in Afghanistan with almost universal support. The Taliban were swiftly routed but victory proved elusive as a quagmire set in, reminiscent of Vietnam. Eight years later, the war continues as a corrupt Karzai regime hangs on to power.

Support for American policy quickly dried up as President Bush used the pretext of weapons of mass destruction and a manufactured Al-Qaida connection to attack Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March of 2003. The invasion, boasting technological “shock and awe,” seemed at first to be as easy as winning a video game but the occupation proved catastrophic. America’s moral authority came undone in waterboard torture pits and in the horror dungeons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

As of now, the Iraq war has alone caused almost 100,000 civilian deaths, euphemistically called “collateral damage.” Sectarian violence is a daily occurrence and the Iraqi government remains weak and dysfunctional. The toll the two wars have taken on the families of American soldiers killed and injured is incalculable.

In technology, the Internet gold rush that collapsed in 2000 regained some of its luster, as social networking became all the rage. MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2007) became household names. Web 2.0, the read/write Web, turned everyone (well, almost everyone) into a blogger and a “pundit.” How far the democratization of ideas and opinions go and what influence it has in speaking truth to power, however, remain to be seen. Apple revolutionized the music industry with its iPod products and leading universities of the world made many of their courses in various disciplines available online. Cloud computing went mainstream and software and hardware breakthroughs blurred the distinction between smartphones and PCs.

Amazon’s success with the Kindle, introduced in November of 2007, raised an intriguing question: Will eBooks replace physical books, and if so, when? “When” is difficult to say but it is clear that, where the technology is available, sale of eBooks is rising dramatically against the sale of ink-on-paper books. As Amazon Chief Jeff Bezos noted, however, the Gutenberg model has had a 500-year run, making the physical book probably the most successful technology ever.

Among many achievements in science, scientists mapped the human genome sequence and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider first sputtered and then came to life as two beams of protons collided head on at a combined energy of seven trillion electron volts, setting the stage for answering fundamental questions about our universe in the new decade.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected the first African American president of the United States. Americans were drawn to his platform of change and hope. The world breathed a sigh of relief and the nation’s stature in the world went up almost overnight. But a global economic meltdown, brought on by Wall Street charlatans, Ponzy schemers, unscrupulous bankers and hedge-fund hucksters, threatened to undermine his presidency from day one.

Massive stimulus money pumped into the economy seems mostly to have rescued the industry titans and their acolytes, however. Financial future of the average American appears bleak at this point, with job losses and home foreclosures not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crisis has spread worldwide and it will clearly be a while before the Great Recession is actually over.

Still, the election of Barack Obama to the highest office of the land was like light breaking forth after an unending night of darkness. Sadly, the president has committed more troops to Afghanistan, although withdrawal from Iraq is expected to take place during the middle of 2010. The new year will test the young president’s mettle, his ability to deliver on the message of hope and change that carried him to victory.

Perhaps the most significant global issue of the decade was climate change and our response to it. Most of us, with the exception of rabid right-wingers and congenital contrarians, recognize the existential threat that global warming poses to the earth. Yet consensus on how to mitigate this threat has fallen prey to nationalism. For the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases – China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan – national economy trumps the survival of the planet.

Still, the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December of 2009 raised the expectations of common and indigenous people around the world to soaring heights, a reflection, perhaps, of the hope they invested in Barack Obama.

But while it roared in like a lion, the Summit went out like a lamb. There were no lasting binding agreements. A limited deal was reached in which both developed and developing nations agreed to “list national actions and commitments” on cutting carbon emissions. Wealthy nations also offered billions in aid to help countries like Bangladesh and the island nation of Kiribati, threatened with the worst effects of climate change. Significantly, leaders also gave their assent to a 2 degree Celsius cap on global warming.

The real success of the Climate Summit is in the impetus it has given to green technology and clean energy. Entrepreneurs are racing to produce energy-efficient devices and systems, ranging from innovative fuel-cells and green building materials such as ultra-insulated windows and glass to roof-top gardening, clean-coal technology and high-efficiency solar and wind systems.

It is also not without irony, and some measure of justice, that Al Gore, who lost the muddled 2000 presidential election to George Bush, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to raising global awareness of man-made climate change.

So there you have it, a decade dominated by terror, bad governance, war, unregulated greed and financial terrorism, but also a decade in which sanity replaced insanity toward the end, in which Muslims overwhelmingly rejected Al-Qaida’s message of nihilism and asserted their message of moderation (the Nidal Hasans and the Abdulmutallabs reflected systemic failures), in which awareness of the earth’s fragility entered our consciousness and spurred us to action, and in which we recognized, as never before, that our prosperity and well-being depended on the status and education of women throughout the world.

We may have begun this decade in the winter of despair but perhaps it is not too far fetched to suggest that a spring of hope beckons as we end it.

Happy New Decade!

A Journalist's Despicable Behavior

Muntadar al-Zeidi may have found his five minutes of fame but what he did was despicable. By hurling shoes at George Bush, visiting Iraq for the last time as president, he shamed a culture known for extending hospitality even toward the despised.

Bush will probably go down as the worst president in U.S. history, displacing perennial bottom-dweller James Buchanan (1857-1861). His manufactured war has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis in the 5 1/2-year war. His Manichean worldview has brought untold sufferings to a vast section of humanity. And his fiscal ignorance and irresponsibility has contributed to the economic meltdown now sweeping the world. He is a disgraced person that the world cannot wait to see retire.

Still, to throw shoes at a visitor is an insult that speaks volumes for the thrower rather than the thrown. There are those who feel gleeful but there are also those who are shamed and outraged by al-Zeidi’s behavior. Iraqis need authentic leaders who can summon their best instincts to rebuild their tattered nation. This will not be accomplished by people succumbing to their basest instincts for personal revenge. George Bush can salvage some goodwill and dignity for himself by asking the Iraqi giovernment to pardon the misguided and stupid journalist.

Confessions of an Insider

Scott McClellan’s “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” is the buzz of the week. The former White House press secretary’s revelations, however, are not new. Seriously, is there anyone on earth who doesn’t yet know that George Bush is not inquisitive, that he doesn’t have an analytic bend of mind, that he stubbornly refuses to admit mistakes, that he is deceitfully self-delusional, that he gave free rein to the diabolical Dick Cheney to call the shots in major strategic decisions, that the Iraq war was a “solution” in search of a problem from day one of his presidency?

But even without any shock value, the book deserves attention. As the president’s long-time confidant, McClellan’s memoir offers a fascinating glimpse into the conflicting demands of loyalty and conscience and the dueling instincts of self-preservation and the urge to speak truth to power.

But first things first. Was McClellan motivated, to some extent at least, by money? Sure. Wanting to cash in while the opportunity lasts is an ancient human instinct. Just ask Bush memoirists Paul O’Neill, John Dilulio, Larry Wilkerson, Richard Clarke and others. Many more tell-alls are likely to appear after Bush leaves office but by then interest in his presidency will fade. If one had to make a bundle before it was too late, it had to be now, and McClellan used the opportunity.

As to the charge of hypocrisy that his conscience was fine towing the official line for nearly three years but that it began to weigh on him only after he resigned in 2006, there is also some truth to it. However, McClellan is no Archibald Cox, and to demand of him integrity that animates only the rarest among us is itself hypocritical.

The point, however, is that McClellan’s conscience, even if tainted, eventually caught up with him. “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary,” is how he sums up his telling, if belated, insight.

What also emerges from several published reports is that the act of writing the memoir was cathartic for McClellan. It liberated him from his own delusions. Putting pen to paper, or keystrokes to word processor, brought to light what lay buried in his mind.

The central question that the memoir raises is this: Why did Bush do what he did? What drove him to create, in the words of novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace “an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate”?

There is a key sentence in McClellan’s book that, I think, answers it. “The president promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do …” In other words, Bush Jr. was driven primarily by one goal: to outdo Bush Sr. That he wanted to outdo his father vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein is known but it also extended to his other presidential acts, in the way he dealt with his political adversaries and the illegal privileges he showered on his sycophants. (The presidency of George Bush should convince voters that they must give thumbs down to presidential dynasties in modern times).

At a personal level, there is no doubt that George Bush is a kind and compassionate man. When McClellan handed his resignation in April of 2006 as the White House press secretary, “tears were streaming down (Bush’s) both cheeks.” Those were genuine tears. But Bush is also a man with severely flawed instincts and judgments. Combine this with his overpowering need to prove his superiority at any cost over the old man, another president who also happened to be a domineering dad once, and you have a recipe for rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate.

“What Happened” will contribute to our understanding of why historians are already labeling George Bush’s presidency as among the worst in American history, alongside the presidencies of James Buchanan (1857-1861) and Warren Harding (1921-1923), a verdict that is likely to stand the test of time.

Certainly no profile in courage, Scott McClellan has nevertheless given us an honest account of his White House experience that revealed its meaning to him only upon later reflection, and for that we applaud him.