Too Fucking Macho
March 8th, 2007Democrats say we should leave Iraq by fall of next year; the military says we need to keep our “surge” of troops until next February; George W. Bush says we’ve got to stay the course.
I can’t believe it’s come to this, but let’s talk about something else as there’s precious little newness to say about Iraq right now. So let’s turn here.
President Bush was ready to challenge a widespread perception in Latin America that U.S. neglect has empowered leftist leader Hugo Chavez as he left Thursday on a five-nation tour of the region. Bush argues that strong democratic governments hold the promise of prosperity. He hopes his trip will resonate with the one in four impoverished Latin Americans, who live on less than $2 a day and wonder whether democracy will ever deliver them a better life.
“The trip is to remind people that we care,” Bush said in an interview Wednesday with CNN En Espanol. “I do worry about the fact that some say, `Well, the United States hasn’t paid enough attention to us,’ or `The United States really isn’t anything more than worried about terrorism.’ And when, in fact, the record has been a strong record.” But Bush, with just two years left in his presidency, has a weak hand. Anti-Americanism and Bush’s poor image, tainted by the war in Iraq, have only fueled Chavez’s influence in the region and beyond.
The president’s message: “Regardless of what Hugo Chavez says about us, we’re not the bogeyman,” said Russell Crandall, a former Western Hemisphere director at the National Security Council who is now at the Center for American Progress. Bush has packed a suitcase of strategies for nurturing trade, fighting drug-traffickers and curbing poverty and social inequality for his trip, which also will take him to Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil, where protests on Wednesday preceded his visit.
Protesters, most of them women from the Via Campesina farmworkers movement, briefly shut down an iron ore mine, invaded an ethanol distillery and took over the Rio de Janeiro offices of Brazil’s National Development Bank. Fresh graffiti reading “Get Out, Bush! Assassin!” in bright red letters popped up along busy highways near the locations in Sao Paulo where Bush will appear as he kicks off his Latin American tour.
Protest organizers denounced foreign investment in the vast sugarcane fields that are used to produce Brazil’s ethanol. Bush and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are expected to sign an accord to develop standards to help turn ethanol into an internationally traded commodity, and to promote sugar cane-based ethanol production in Central America and the Caribbean to meet rising international demand.
Beyond the obvious little things — like the War — the Latin public despises George Bush because he pays absolutely no attention to them and that goes for most Presidents. If you act like a good neighbor you’ll be treated like one.
And let me say: if Bush wanted to turn the Latin world away from Chavez, he’d lift the embargo on Cuba and start trading. Chavez would never know what hit him. But to paraphrase Richard Gere to Andy Garcia in Internal Affairs, “You know what they say about Presidencies? They’re too fucking macho. Don’t know when to back down, so they’re used up young.”