Posted by
InchDeep on Friday, October 10, 2008 4:00:26 PM
Poetic justice in US meltdown
Aijaz Zaka Syed www.arabnews.com
As a literature student, I was endlessly fascinated by the term
poetic justice. The ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle, believed that
virtue should be ultimately rewarded and vice punished in a literary
work, often by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the
character’s own conduct.
Since life and literature mirror each
other, I believe there’s some form of poetic justice at work in real
life as well. Just look around; there are myriad examples all around us
to prove that our world works on the principle of natural justice.
Call
Him what you will, but there’s someone out there who makes sure we reap
as we sow. It may take a while for them to manifest themselves but all
our actions do lead to equal and opposite reactions.
You don’t
have to be Isaac Newton to know that what goes up comes down. Watching
the world turn upside down as the global financial meltdown that
originated in the US hits one economic power after another, I can’t
help think of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Call me a hopeless
cynic but the more this financial plague spreads despite the desperate
global efforts the more I am convinced that the world is paying for the
neocon crimes against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Over
the past few weeks, from the Lehman Brothers to Merrill Lynch and the
AIG to Morgan Stanley, some of the mightiest icons have been brought
down from their hallowed perches on the Wall Street and dragged through
the main street. Things haven’t been so bad since the Great Depression
and Herbert Hoover.
With the lifetime savings of ordinary
Americans wiped out overnight, they are finally waking up to the mess
the Bush administration has made of the world’s most powerful economy —
and almost everything else. Like a deadly disease, the malaise in the
US markets has infected the whole of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
On Monday alone, $2,800 billion in global stocks just vanished into
thin air.
For the first time in years, the Saudi stock market,
the biggest in the region, shed 10 percent — the limit allowed by the
authorities. Even our own Dubai, the fastest growing city on the planet
described by the New York Times as the Boomtown this week, has begun
feeling the heat of the blazes on the US Wall Street. However, in the
end the hardest hit might be the Americans themselves. It’s no
coincidence that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s
popularity ratings have soared in perfect synchronization with the
steady annihilation of the US and global markets over the past couple
of weeks.
According to latest polls, more and more Americans —
nearly 60 percent of them — now believe that it’s Obama, not Bush’s
mate John McCain, who could heave the country out of the deepening
morass. And the Americans are angry, very angry with the folks who have
landed them in this mess. The initial, embarrassing failure of the
bailout deal in the House of Representatives was a backlash from the
angry Middle America. And the fact that the $700 billion bailout,
financed with their hard-earned money, has failed to stop the supernova
hasn’t gone unnoticed either.
As Madeleine Bunting puts in the
Guardian, while the Americans and the rest of the world were engaged in
the side show of the war on terror, the “real doomsday scenario that
poses a far greater threat to Western civilization (whatever that is)
was gathering pace right next to Ground Zero, in Wall Street.” Can you
blame the ordinary Americans then if they are mad at their leaders?
They have every reason to be. Eight years ago, when Bush took over from
Bill Clinton, the US was the world’s biggest economy with a huge budget
surplus. It was prosperous and at peace with itself. And America was
respected and admired despite some of its controversial policies in the
Middle East.
And look, where Bush’s America is today. It’s a
country that is universally loathed, economically and politically
bankrupt and psychologically battered! So much so America’s own allies
and friends are finding it difficult to stand shoulder to shoulder with
it. Who brought the leader of the free world here? The American people
have the answer.
The US, and with it the rest of the world, is
paying the price for the unjust, unreasonable and endless wars on Iraq
and Afghanistan. Even if you accept the 9/11 excuse for the
carpet-bombing and killing of thousands of innocents in Afghanistan,
how could anyone justify what has been visited on the Iraqi people over
the past six years? From the shame of Abu Ghraib to the total, wanton
destruction of the ancient Mesopotamia, not to mention the loss of a
million lives, the US leaders are guilty of the very crimes that they
used to accuse Saddam Hussein of perpetrating on his people.
Which
is why I think there’s a kind of poetic justice in what the Americans
and the West are currently going through at the hands of
with-us-or-against-us leader of the free world. The world is paying for
its failure to prevent the appalling crimes against humanity in Iraq
and Afghanistan. The international community stood and stared while
Afghanistan and Iraq were bombed back to the Stone Age in the name of
freedom and democracy. Even when everyone, including the UN inspectors,
was convinced Saddam’s Iraq had no WMD and was as much a threat to the
world peace as Comrade Castro’s Cuba is to Uncle Sam.
I have
great respect for American democracy and its Founding Fathers. But I
can’t help recall the fact that not only did the American people fail
to dissuade their commander-in-chief from launching a totally unjust
war but they rewarded him with another term in office. And today the
same US wars have contributed to the bankruptcy and meltdown of the
greatest economic superpower the world has ever seen. You shall reap as
you sow. What goes around comes around. If this isn’t natural justice,
what is?