So, here we are at last, the big ones, my choices for
winners and losers of the decade on the global stage.
While these selections are slightly less subjective than,
say, the Golden Globe nominations (which are, I believe, selected by three
drunken expat Latvian critics in a bar in West Hollywood), they do represent
just the views of one man. If you agree with those views, please post your
congratulations below ... or go ahead and add a few other names. If you disagree,
just remember, there will be other lists -- only I decide whether to include you
among the global losers of tomorrow (alongside, say, the Tiger Woods of 10
years from now when he is running Tiger's "Just Do It" Mini-Golf Course in
Melanoma City, Florida) or the global winners of the future (alongside, say,
President Timberlake in 2030 or so).
The Losers
The People of Iraq: George W. Bush was our Washington loser
of the decade, but all he lost was his reputation such as it was. He's still
rich and will probably never pay for a round of golf again. But somewhere
between 100,000 and 800,000 Iraqis are dead as a consequence of the war, the
country is shattered, its government held together with chewing gum and bailing
wire and the random killing continues. Oh, and there was absolutely no
justification for going in and breaking up the place from the get-go. This
isn't a tragedy ... it's a crime, as I suspect international courts will conclude
in the years to come.
The People of Afghanistan and Pakistan: These countries are
no playgrounds, they are home to plenty of bad actors and, as Barack Obama has
demonstrated, no U.S. president, regardless of party, could stay disengaged
from the festering political sore on the planet that is AfPak. But while the pursuit
of al Qaeda and the Taliban is justified, the wars that continue to percolate
here will kill countless thousands, impoverish hundreds of thousands more and
at the same time, support for terrorists and other enemies of civilization will
grow. That there are no good choices here is a cliché ... that there are going to
be no winners is a related tragic reality.
The British Government (Lifetime Achievement Award): Well,
let's book at the worst problems the world has faced during the past decade --
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine...what do these diverse countries
have in common? They were all cooked up or stirred up by those fertile minds at
the British Foreign Office and their colleagues elsewhere up and down
Whitehall, either as they were dismantling their empire or fiddling with the
region after one war or another. Thanks guys for your creativity...and for the
foresight you showed by actually bequeathing your handwork to yet another
remnant of your empire as you shuffled off the world stage so you could focus
on counterbalancing your past contributions to global culture by producing
Simon Cowell and the likes of Susan Boyle.
The U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Dollar, and American
Capitalism: It was a tough decade for the pillars of U.S. society. We should
have seen it coming when the decade began with the Supreme Court fiddling with
an election and when a central theme of the Bush years became undercutting the
Constitution. Thanks to the U.S. government's similar callous disregard for the
laws of economics and fiscal responsibility the dollar began a downward spiral
that many experts see as a semi-permanent feature of our future.
Democracy: Oh, yes, we know that Churchill called it the
"worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried"... but
as my grandma would have said, "there's democracy and then there's democracy."
In other words, some forms of democracy are worse than others, and among those
that that have flourished during the past decade are Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe,
and, yes folks, Honduras -- where leaders took advantage of the common
misperception that voting equals democracy.
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