My Say
Getting George Bush On Board
At a meeting of some Pacific Islands leaders at Honolulu in February, it was decided to write to President George W. Bush with a
At a meeting of some Pacific Islands leaders at Honolulu in February, it was decided to write to President George W. Bush with a plea for greater attention to their region. President Leo Falcam, of the Federated States of Micronesia, as the new head of the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders’ Standing Committee, explained: “We’ll ask him to think the ‘Pacific Way.’” Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, a founder of the triennial conference, is said to have snorted something to the effect that what should be expected from Mr. Bush was a fat lot of sweet nothing. Perhaps, Mara was recalling a travesty of years gone by when that other President George Bush, Mr. George W. Bush’s father, invited island leaders to meet him in Honolulu as an excuse for using federal funds for an electioneering trip.
Very little, if anything, emerged for the islands from that occasion, except, only quite recently, a trade and investment promotion office of so far little proven value.
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Since he took over the White House in January, the world has been waiting to learn what it is that is on Mr. Bush Junior’s mind. But on one matter, Pacific Islands can be assured. Since one of Mr. Bush’s very first acts was to renew the anti-missile race, there is at least one part of Oceania that he will hold on to at all cost. It is the U.S. missile range at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands.
If the Honolulu conference — as usual a rather hollow event — had gumption it would not have attempted to justify its being with the dispatching of, in all probability, a futile plea to Mr. Bush. What it lamentably failed to do was to fire off to the White House a salvo of missiles in the form of a letter, protesting in the strongest possible terms against official U.S. climate change policy.
The very latest research, much of it by U.S. scientists who are as appalled by their findings as anybody else, shows that the consequences of climate change may impact far more quickly and horribly than previously calculated. Of what greater magnitude of disaster could a country suffer than to simply disappear beneath the waves?
At Honolulu, the January waffle of lunches and dinners took no note of a threat to the security of the Pacific Islands so towering that it is beyond belief that people who spent their days there acclaiming themselves as leaders ignored it.
One speaker there, the chief American military man in the region, lectured participants about threats in the form of money laundering, drug trafficking, and organized crime. But what is the real threat to the Pacific Islands? The debacle of the climate change talks in The Hague last November demonstrates that it is the climate change policies of the U.S., culpable as generator of about 25 percent pollution, that thousands of scientists worldwide now agree is raising the world’s average temperature with consequences of a calamity previously restricted to the pages of science fiction.
Acknowledgement is due to the many Americans, and to such states as California and Arizona, that have trail blazed with important environmental ideas and enterprises. It is only at the federal level that Pacific Islands regretfully need to behold the U.S., along with such up and coming polluters as China and India, as the enemy. Those well acquainted with Mr. Bush Junior portray him as a creature of the captains of U.S. industry, beginning with the oil industry. No wonder Mara’s cynical view of the value of the epistle to George W. Bush.
