November 5, 2004

For four years many hoped that the course charted by President Bush - a muscular go-it-alone view of a world divided between the forces of darkness and those of light - would prove to be a blip. Come November 2, 2004, they wanted to believe, normal service would be resumed. The United States would return to the old way of doing business, in concert with allies and with respect for the international system the US itself had done so much to create. The norms of foreign policy pursued by every president from Roosevelt to Clinton, including the first George Bush, would be revived. Senator Kerry promised as much.

Now that fantasy will be shelved. The White House is not about to ditch the approach of the last four years. Why would it? Despite the mayhem and murder in Iraq, despite the death of more than 1,000 US soldiers and countless (and uncounted) Iraqis, despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction, despite Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration won the approval of the American people. If Bush had lost the neo-conservative project would have been buried forever. But he won, and the neo-cons will welcome that as sweet vindication.

So it will be full steam ahead. “There are real threats that have to be dealt with,” Danielle Pletka of the impeccably neo-con American Enterprise Institute told the Guardian yesterday. Iran would not go away - indeed, Ms Pletka warned, “force might be the only option” - nor would North Korea. “We can’t all pretend that the world would be a prettier place if only George W Bush was not the president.”

The UK’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) is publicly toying with the idea of funding a “public service publisher” (PSP) to complement the BBC’s role as a public service broadcaster. The idea of a PSP is to publicly fund an entity that publishes books, games, interactive material and other “published” items that are commissioned from British creators and that reflect and deliver British values.

1. Bin Laden has never been unclear about what makes him angry about the United States, and in this speech he emphasizes the importance of the completely one-sided American support for Israeli state terrorism against the Palestinian people (see also Juan Cole on this subject). If Americans really wanted to do something about terrorism other than strip-searching grandmothers in airports in places like Omaha, a reevaluation of the American support for Israel would be the best place to start.

2. Predictably, and reflecting the fact that the war on terror is really a propaganda war, the reporting on bin Laden’s speech completely missed the points he was carefully trying to make. MEMRI was caught red-handed misstating bin Laden’s words (only read MEMRI to find out what Zionists want you to think, and never read it thinking you will find truth), and this misstatement was picked up by the usual suspects to use as fodder for the Bush election campaign. Overall, coverage completely ignored the deep and justified criticisms of American politics and foreign policy leveled by bin Laden.