- LOS ANGELES -- Is this the
horror that will finally undo George Bush's presidency? First Nicholas
Berg, now Paul Johnson: in two months and in two different countries, two
US civilians have been kidnapped and beheaded by their al-Qa'ida-affiliated
captors, becoming not only pawns in a deadly geopolitical game but also
symbols of the complicated feelings of revulsion unleashed by the Bush
administration's "war on terror".
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- It is hard not to think back to earlier acts of defiance
against the might of the United States and wonder if we are not seeing
a parallel erosion of presidential authority: the steady drip-drip of casualty
figures from Vietnam that proved the undoing of Lyndon Johnson's presidency
in 1968, or the corrosive effect of the Iran hostage crisis on Jimmy Carter
12 years later.
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- We have now witnessed four similar killings of Western
civilians in the conflicts unleashed by the attacks of 11 September 2001,
starting with Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in January 2002 and including the
Italian Fabrizio Quattrocchi in Iraq in April. Even in our jaded, news-saturated
age there is something about these cases that bespeaks almost bottomless
horror, in a way that the deaths of more than 800 US servicemen in Iraq
or the violence and death visited upon thousands of Iraqi civilians have
not.
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- The fact that the images of ritual slaughter have been
posted on the internet has only made the brutality more vivid, more palpable
- even to those who have not had the stomach or the inclination to watch.
This is a propaganda war, fought with images as much as with guns and knives.
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- With each new beheading, the political mood has shifted.
When the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted in Karachi
two-and-a-half years ago, it gave rise to a sense of national, even international
solidarity. There was nothing divisive or controversial about the mourning
that greeted news of his death. Indeed, his family has gone on to set up
a foundation in his name to promote cross-cultural understanding that enjoys
universal admiration.
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- The case of Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old from Pennsylvania
abducted and killed in Iraq just last month, was very different. There
was the question of how exactly he had come to grief, with his family alleging
he had been in US custody and that the FBI somehow put him in the path
of danger on his release. And there was the anger of his father, Michael
Berg, who said unequivocally: "My son died for the sins of George
Bush and Donald Rumsfeld."
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- Mr Berg Snr was at an anti-war demonstration in Washington
two weeks ago in which he continued to denounce the administration for
its "callous behaviour" which, he said, had "in effect tied
him [his son] to the track until it was no longer possible to escape that
speeding hate train".
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- It would be wrong to believe that the rest of the United
States shares Michael Berg's outlook. Rather, his anger has underscored
the deep polarisation in American politics between those who have come
to loathe the Bush administration and those determined to defend its every
action. And it remains to be seen whether Mr Johnson's death provokes anger
against the administration or rather cries for revenge against his butchers.
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- Still, the overall mood is slipping away from the President.
Two recent polls show that a majority believe the war against Saddam Hussein
was not worth it. The Abu Ghraib torture scandal remains incendiary. And
the recent traumatic events in Saudi Arabia - the siege of a residential
compound in the oil town of al-Khobar last month, the shootings of Americans
and other Westerners, and now the grisly fate of Mr Johnson - have raised
anxious questions about the direction of US foreign policy and its ostensible
goal of diminishing the terrorist threat.
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- Yesterday, a Washington Post article was headlined: "Is
al-Qa'ida winning in Saudi Arabia?" It was just such questions about
America's enemies that led President Johnson to his "Cronkite moment"
in 1968 - his realisation that he could no longer count on the support
of the country's favourite television news anchor, Walter Cronkite, and
that he had therefore lost the sympathy of the electorate as a whole.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=533087
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