Potemkin World… or the President in the Zone (TomDispatch)

[pinto]

Potemkin World… or the President in the Zone

"The great motorcade," wrote Canadian correspondent Don Murray, "swept through the streets of the city… The crowds … but there were no crowds. George W. Bush's imperial procession through Europe took place in a hermetically sealed environment. In Brussels it was, at times, eerie. The procession containing the great, armour-plated limousine (flown in from Washington) rolled through streets denuded of human beings except for riot police. Whole areas of the Belgian capital were sealed off before the American president passed."

Murray doesn't mention the 19 American escort vehicles in that procession with the President's car (known to insiders as "the beast"), or the 200 secret service agents, or the 15 sniffer dogs, or the Blackhawk helicopter, or the 5 cooks, or the 50 White House aides, all of which added up to only part of the President's vast traveling entourage. Nor does he mention the huge press contingent tailing along inside the president's security "bubble," many of them evidently with their passports not in their own possession but in the hands of White House officials, or the more than 10,000 policemen and the various frogmen the Germans mustered for the President's brief visit to the depopulated German town of Mainz to shake hands with Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder.

This image of cities emptied of normal life (like those atomically depopulated ones of 1950s sci-fi films) is not exactly something Americans would have carried away from last week's enthusiastic TV news reports about the bonhomie between European and American leaders, as our President went on his four-day "charm offensive" to repair first-term damage to the transatlantic alliance. But two letters came into the Tomdispatch e-mailbox -- one from a young chemist in Germany, the other from a middle-aged engineer in Baghdad -- that reminded me of how differently many in the rest of the world view the offshore bubbles we continually set up, whether in Belgium, Germany, or the Green Zone in Baghdad. (Both letters are reproduced at the end of this dispatch.)

Here's one of the strangest things about our President: He travels often enough, but in some sense he never goes anywhere.

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[teryang]

1. The bubble image is just right n/t

[ginnyinWI]

2. like a hamster in a plastic ball--

He travels, but never touches anything real.

What a hoax! What a flop! Where is the outrage from the repubs? Is this what they bargained for? What is * so deathly afraid of? This is Europe, after all, not Baghdad. Our senators go to Baghdad with far less security! He even pulled this stuff when he went to Great Britain some time ago--but the queen didn't give him all of the security he demanded--it was simply over the top.
John Kerry went to all of those Middle East countries in January, and I heard nothing about security troops, cleared streets, and armored cars! Oh yeah,that's right, he's got something * doesn't have: a backbone.