The BBC’s affable North America Editor Justin Webb was never among those who thought that under George W. Bush the United States had said goodbye to its nobler ideals and become a rogue nation, contemptuous of international law. Never doubting America’s aptitude for self-renewal, he was perhaps more prepared than most for the pendulum to swing back toward the liberal principles with which President Barack Obama has identified himself.
Not that denigrating the US was Webb’s style even when the foreign policy of the Bush administration was inspiring widespread revulsion. Indeed, the impression has been of a broadcaster egregiously well disposed toward the United States. When the BBC was attacked for “anti-Americanism” over its coverage of the Iraq war, he rushed to line up with the corporation’s critics. He may even have contributed to creating the submissive BBC which, perhaps anxious not to be accused of undermining the US/Israeli “war on terror,” last week refused airtime to a charity appeal for Gaza and blundered into a public relations debacle.
Yet the extraordinary depth of Webb’s ardor for the US only now stands revealed with the appearance of his book on America, “Have a Nice Day.” Unless they happen to share his fervent partisanship, Webb’s readers might well feel he is less a public-service journalist than a propagandist, Washington’s man at the BBC, helping to ensure that the world’s biggest broadcasting organization never deviates from speaking about the US in the most generous terms.
To be fair, Webb does not ignore the case against America. He interviews an Egyptian who is far from sharing his sense that the US is the “indispensable nation,” a beacon of hope for the whole of mankind. The Egyptian fulminates that “for some reason Americans feel they should be loved and if you don’t love them then they are going to kill more of you, they are going to beat you to a pulp until you do love them.” Given the brutal record of the Bush administration, this outburst seems not entirely unreasonable, but Webb treats it with amused condescension. “Some folks,” he sighs, “just aren’t up for the message.”
Still, the emergence of Obama as US president surely furnishes compelling evidence that Webb is right to celebrate America’s ability to re-invent itself. Obama was not mouthing mere rhetoric when, in his acceptance speech, he asserted that America had confounded those who questioned whether it remains a country where “all things are possible” and the “dream of our founders is still alive.” If nothing else, his election has struck a mighty blow on behalf of black people and racial equality, not just in the United States but all over the world.
Nevertheless, history will record that even as Obama was about to assume power, the United States’ close ally, Israel, using devastating US fire-power, was able to create a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza without eliciting a single word of condemnation from the incoming American leader. Obama’s lofty moral eloquence has not extended to denouncing the Jewish state — for all that its actions have been obscenely at odds with his restatement of America’s founding ideals, its vaunted opposition to oppression.
Many will feel that Obama is inescapably mired in US imperialist realpolitik, though Webb is hardly likely to be among them. Webb endorses the opinion of Bush’s former speechwriter, David Frum, that America’s global vocation is essentially benign. It is, says Frum, to “support justice with power,” to enable the whole world to participate in the “pursuit of happiness.” He even applauds when this smug Machiavellian pours scorn on claims that “we are engaged in imposing ‘American values’ when we liberate people,” since this would mean “there are people on earth who value their own subjugation.” The reality is that the US is an imperial hyper-power with military bases in over 60 countries; at the same time, it spends mind-boggling sums ensuring that Israel, as a key extension of the American empire, maintains its status as the most militarized nation in the Middle East.
What is certain is that America under Obama will continue to be a warrior nation, while remaining massively involved in the international arms trade. The anti-American Egyptian quoted by Webb is unlikely to feel obliged to revise his opinion about the United States’ propensity for violence and self-righteousness.
The BBC’s North America editor is party to a PR exercise of unprecedented magnitude, a gigantic effort to promulgate the proposition that the US represents the apogee of human achievement. If the United States spends billions on defense, it also deploys a budget of astronomical proportions on self-promotion. The quixotic objective is to nurture a world population of Justin Webbs, who unhesitatingly assent to the self-evident superiority of the American way of life and turn a blind eye to moral delinquencies such as declaring pre-emptive war on the basis of cynical deception and plunging the lives of millions of people into chaos. It is a nice question how far the rise to prominence of Obama can be separated from institutionalized American cynicism. Certainly, it is striking how former acolytes of Bush, like the neoconservative warmonger Kenneth Adelman, have been happy to support Obama, plainly confident that he is not about to do anything to which they might take exception.
In the new president the US “military-industrial complex” could be said to have found a glamorous new ambassador. It might even be argued that Obama is effectively not so much renewing as “rebranding” his country at a time when the Washington power elite is painfully conscious of the harm done to the US image by the Bush administration. What Obama may accomplish as a statesman remains to be seen, but about his genius as a salesman there is already not the smallest doubt.
