ABSTRACT
In Operation “Desert Storm,” the George Bush administration was given one of history’s greatest victories. Noriega was a drug-trafficker, Bush asserted, although this is yet to be proven in court. And he was an arms smuggler, although this could never have been much of a revelation to Bush, inasmuch as Noriega was smuggling arms during the time he was on the Bush-Reagan payroll. Democracy in Kuwait seemed a kind of taboo to the Bush administration. All during the languid collapse of Soviet power, the Bush administration, like the simple-minded protagonist, Chauncey Gardner, in Jerzy Kosinski’s great novel, Being There, just “liked to watch.” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as President Bush has insisted, can help to stabilize the East. The traditional dominance of the United States in NATO and the UN might have been prestigious and comfortable, but there is some question as to whether current conditions suit institutions fashioned toward old threats and cold war patterns of power.
