Bonds That Bind

Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt highlighted the bond and relationship between the two countries during World War II. Abraham Lincoln and Prime Minister William Gladstone had a very high regard and respect for each other as America was convulsing to rid itself of slavery.

America, like Britain, has numerous political and economic differences with Europe. Britain has more historical differences with Europe, especially France. In fact, it is not sure it wants to adopt the new European Constitution, or even be part of the European Union. America looks down on “old Europe” while embracing the “new Europe.” Many in America resent Europe for not supporting the U.S. in Iraq. Newspaper editorials and stories, have lamented how America can’t depend on Europe even though America rebuilt Europe after World War II and defended it against Soviet aggression for 50 years. The feeling is mutual. Most “old Europeans” look down on America and Britain with disdain and contempt.

Since America and Britain are having so many differences with Europe at the dawn of the 21st century, doesn’t it make sense that they establish a more comprehensive bilateral transatlantic alliance? Isn’t a more robust bilateral transatlantic alliance preferable to trying to sustain and salvage the frazzled hostile multilateral transatlantic alliance? In fact, why not throw Australia and New Zealand into the mix since they are not really part of Europe or Asia. Both countries have more in common with America and Britain than they do with Asia or Europe. Australia, like Britain, has stood by America through all its conflicts, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Australia and New Zealand are America’s most logical alliance in Asia ─ after China.

American-British Alliance

The British no vote to joining the EU was the final nail in the EU coffin. The Europeans have Napoleonic law and economics, and the British, whom Napoleon did not conquer ─ like America ─ have common law and the free market. A new globalized Maginot Line has been drawn between Napoleonic Europe and the U.S.-British alliance. The U.S.-Britain coalition in Iraq is an alliance that has a long history, going back to the founding of America. When Tony Blair addressed a joint session of Congress in 2003, he reminded America how special that relationship is. Winston Churchill summed up the relationship best after America stopped the 1956 Anglo-French operation to seize control of the Suez canal. “We must never again allow our foreign policy to be decided in Washington ─ never.” The Iraq war has put the special relationship under strain because Blair failed to heed Churchill’s caveat, British soldiers killed by U.S. friendly fire, only added to the strain. The cross-Atlantic troubled U.S.-Britain relationship is a “special relationship” underpinned by much more than strategic interests. It is based on ties of culture, ideas, language and history.

This was highlighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and U.S. President George W. Bush when they toasted their countries’ tight bonds in the grandest White House dinner of Bush’s administration in May 2007. “Ours is a partnership always to be reckoned with in the defense of freedom and the spread of prosperity,” the queen said in a toast at the white-tie state dinner. Mr. Bush paid tribute to the queen’s commitment to the transatlantic alliance during her long reign. “We’re confident that the Anglo-American friendship will endure for centuries to come,” he said. “Our alliance is rooted in the beliefs that we share,” he added. Those beliefs date back to the first pilgrims that landed on America’s shores. The Queen toured Jamestown in Virginia to mark the 400th anniversary of the new world’s first permanent English settlement. “I would also like to take this opportunity, on the day that has seen the formal transfer of power to the devolved Northern Ireland government, to thank you and your predecessors for your contribution to bringing peace in Northern Ireland,” she said, noting the U.S. role in bringing about the historic Good Friday peace agreement in 1998.

French Crescent

One of the most remarkable features of un-integrated immigration in which lower class Muslim economic migrants seem to specialize is that they flee a home country which is an economic failure for a foreign one which has more successful social and cultural systems, yet they insist on bringing with them, standing by and even propagating the habits and practices of their failing homeland and publicly vaunting their moral superiority over that of their host state. It’s not surprising they get their mosques burned from time to time.

The race riots in America, Australia, Britain and France brought into focus the global scale of 21st century religious and ethnic racism, growing divide and the violence it breeds. Yet racism continues rolling on into the 21st century. Whether it’s in America, where popular radio talk show host Don Imus called Rutgers women’s basketball team, the national champions, “nappy-headed ho’s.” That was not his first on the air racist or sexist remark, and probably not his last, especially if he remains unemployed.

In France during their recent 2007 presidential election, farmers got more political attention ─ and subsidies ─ than the burning North African Muslims ghettoes in its major cities. The ambers of the last race riots a couple of years earlier, were warming up and ready to re-ignite. Police are being ambushed in the Paris outskirts by young banlieusards alienated by racial discrimination, poor housing and a rate of joblessness that hits 40 percent in some hoods. “With Sarko winning the presidential election….people will be killed” they warned. An urban guerilla war is on-going in the run-down neighborhoods that ring the nation’s major cities, much like the U.S. ghettoes of the 60s. The introduction of “ethnic statistics” after the 2005 riots is a forbidden taboo since the French Revolution, reconfirmed in 1978, French government officials are forbidden to collect information about a citizen’s ethnic or racial origins when conducting a census or other efforts to gather statistical information on the population. One of the main reasons being that the painful and still vivid memories of the Vichy regime of the second world war, when citizens’ “racial” and religious origin was stamped on identification documents and used in rounding up French Jews for delivery to the death camps. Any wonder North African-French Muslims are concerned and upset? They could wind up in concentration camps in a Catholic dominated Christian Europe.

Yeltsinize Mugabe

In the late 1980s Zimbabwe was the textbook example of a functioning African state. Yet today, after two decades of rule, Robert Mugabe has become a caricature of the African despot ─ in the footsteps and tradition of Uganda’s brutal Idi Amin. With the devastated economy left after Mugabes seizure of white-owned farms, he now plans to take control of the country’s two biggest diamond mines.

To his credit Zimbabwe boasts a very high literacy rate for Africa. But paradoxically this is working against him. The young electorate called the “Born Free” because they did not grow up under white rule, have learned the ideals of democracy and socialism yet they have also witnessed their president’s descent into dictatorship and they want change.

Mugabe is determined to anoint his successor so that he can escape the almost certain criminal prosecution he will face if an opposition candidate wins. The ghosts of the 20,000 Ndebe people slaughtered in the Gukurahundi crackdown in the 1980s by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, the starvation and brutality brought upon opposition supporters and their supporters in the media, the use of torture and the abuse of human rights all build a solid case against him. He knows he needs an exit strategy. And while he figures it out, the brutality and ban on opposition party and politicians within his own party is destined to bring him down. Anytime a country is hungry and broke, its leader gets busted. That is the time to sit down with that leader and grant him immunity from prosecution and let him and his family keep a portion of their plundered loot that belongs to the people. That is the deal Boris Yeltsin cut with Vladimir Putin and the Russian people when the Russian economy was in tatters. Isn’t it time Zimbabwe cut the same deal with Mugabe?

By the end of 2006, Zimbabwe had been run into the ground by Mugabe who has been running the country for twenty seven years. Exchange rates double weekly if not daily, inflation in the hyperinflation economy, reached 1,600 percent in January 2007 ─ the highest in the world estimated to reach 5,000 by the end of 2007. Doctors, nurses, teachers, electricity workers, civil servants and the military all threatened to strike and quit as they demanded pay raises of up to 1000 percent. Opposition leaders getting assaulted and seriously injured by the police for no reason is reminiscent of what happened in South Africa in the apartheid era. Calls for him to resign or retire when his term expires in March 2008, are on the rise, especially when he shocked his party stalwarts and the opposition by announcing that he was going to stand for another 6 year term that destroyed the economy. His hard core supporters are pushing him to stay in power until 2010. Is this any way to allow a country to be run and exploited, by its ageing dying exploiter? Why not grant him immunity from prosecution and have him retire quickly and quietly like Yeltsin did so millions no longer have to suffer?