The Cho In The White House

Americans rushed to unite in horror and mourning in response to the masskillings in Blacksburg in a way we haven't seen since, perhaps, the attacks of9/11. Where I live, in Washington, D.C., residents are already sporting theirVirginia Tech ribbons and sweatshirts, the way so many Americans once donnedthose "I [heart] New York" caps and T-shirts. While media coverage hasbeen 24/7 and fast-paced, if not downright hysterical -- as is now the norm onall such American-gothic occasions from OJ's car chase on -- the framing andcontextualizing of the massacre/suicide at Virginia Tech has been narrow indeed.

As a former diplomat, educated to see the world through others' eyes, Icouldn't help thinking about how the rest of our small planet might be taking inthe Blacksburg tragedy. Despite the negligible coverage of overseas opinionabout this event in the mainstream media, there did appear one comprehensiveoverview of how foreigners reacted to the killings -- a Molly Moore piece in theWashingtonPost.

"Nowhere, perhaps," Moore wrote, "were foreign reactions tothe Virginia shooting more impassioned than in Iraq, where many residents blamethe United States for the daily killings in their schools, streets and markets.'It is a little incident if we compare it with the disasters that have happenedin Iraq,' said Ranya Riyad, 19, a college student in Baghdad. ‘We are dyingevery day.'"

Given my own twenty-plus years in the Foreign Service, on occasions like thisI find myself looking at my own country from a non-American perspective. I mustconfess that, when I first saw psychopathic mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui'sphotographs of himself savagely pointing a gun at the camera, I was reminded notonly of the violent images in our popular culture, but also of George W. Bushand his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the thrust of his wholeforeign policy.

Indeed, for others on our globe, mass murder in Iraq, scenes of degradationfrom Abu Ghraib, CIA extraordinary rendition expeditions, and our prison atGuantanamo have already become synonymous with the U.S. government and thePresident; so, it would not be surprising if Cho's actions and Bush's foreignpolicy were linked in the minds of people outside the United States. I seeseveral reasons why, for non-Americans, a mad student and our commander-in-chief could appear to be two sides of the same all-American coin.

First, as his own writings and evidence from his Virginia Tech classmatesattest, Cho felt unloved. A thread running through his psychological profile isthat he believed the world was after him. Many abroad will remember how, in thewake of the Twin Towers tragedy, the Bush administration immediately beganobsessing about "why they hate us" (whoever "they" mightspecifically be). Despite the sympathy the President, as the representative ofthe American people, received from every corner of the Earth -- similar in someways to the fruitless support efforts teachers and doctors gave Cho for hismental problems -- Bush, responding only to the hate he saw under every nook andcranny, chose to react with what many overseas considered disproportionateviolence.

To begin with, there was the invasion of Afghanistan. Foreigners (and perhapssome Americans) might think of it as comparable, though on a far larger scale,to Cho's first foray into killing, his early morning murder of two people, agirl he apparently felt had slighted him and a young man who evidently happenedon the scene. In each case, there was then a pause while elaborate propagandawas mustered, organized, and sent off to the public to justify the acts to come.In Cho's case, what followed was his final rampage when the deranged Englishmajor killed 30 people in cold blood; in the President's, what followed, ofcourse, was the invasion of Iraq where the casualty figures, high as they are,are not yet fully in.

The Bush propaganda campaign of 2002-2003 to convince the American peoplethat the Butcher of Baghdad was a WMD demon reached its apotheosis in a made-forFOX News "shock and awe" spectacular over Baghdad (which was, to saythe least, not well received abroad). This brutal sound-and-light show -- meantto give Americans the sense of getting back at those who "hated" theU.S. by hitting them hard and mercilessly -- seems, when I put on my overseaseyeglasses, eerily reminiscent of Cho's videos of himself as a mean twenty-firstcentury gunslinger, ready to shoot all those whom he dreamt did him wrong.

As someone who lived and served outside my own beloved country for so manyyears, a second link between Cho's actions and George W. Bush's policiesappeared quite evident to me. The Blacksburg murders caused enormous grief andsadness throughout a community Cho felt had never accepted him. Distraughtstudents have been offered counseling by the university, so shaken are some bywhat they experienced. The results of Bush's preemptive military strikes havebeen no less disruptive and unnerving, but of course on a regional, if notglobal stage. Tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people have lost theirlives due to his rash wars -- and his administration has shown little pity forrefugees from this destruction seeking shelter as best they could elsewhere.(Iraqi refugees have essentially been all but barredfrom the United States.)

As Cho disrupted a small, defenseless college town in Virginia that welcomedhim, Bush has dislocated a whole society that was not threatening the UnitedStates. Seen from an overseas perspective, there is, as with Cho and his"enemy," something megalomaniacal as well as delusional about thePresident's identification of a vast Soviet-style Islamofascist foe that theU.S. Armed Forces are supposed to face down in the Global War on Terror.

Consider as well a third disturbing analogy that may not come immediately tomost American minds. Like Virginia Tech, Iraq could be considered a repositoryof culture and knowledge. Indeed, Saddam Hussein may have been a cruel despot,but Mesopotamia, as every American high school student should know, is widelyconsidered by historians "the cradle of civilization," the first"university" of humankind, if you will.

George W. Bush, reflecting an attitude not unlike Cho's toward a center oflearning, showed not the slightest concern or respect for the traditions of acountry whose achievements have so enriched the history of humankind. Indeed,when the Baghdad National Museum was pillaged(along with the National Library and the Library of Korans) soon after theAmerican troops took the capital, the American "liberators" simplystood by; while the Secretary of Defense, reflecting on the catastrophe, offeredthe now-infamous comment, "Stuff happens."

Finally, Cho's suicidal assault on a college community might bring to mindthe thought that Bush's assault on Iraq has been no less suicidal -- not forhimself personally but for the United States as a whole. Bush's militarism and "bring'em on" mentality helped create an atmosphere conducive to violencethat Americans inflict not only on others, but also upon themselves, leading towhat might be seen abroad as a kind of perpetual national suicidal condition,examples of which appear all too frequently, including in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Bluntly put, overseas the U.S. government (and, by association, the countryas well) -- thanks in large part to Bush and his foreign policy -- is now widelyconsidered the Cho of our world, despite the often risible efforts of KarenHughes, the administration's Image Czarina, to improve America's internationalstanding through what she calls thediplomacy of deeds. The fact of the matter is that the President's deedshave led other countries to see our government, in its aggressive unilateralism,as unreliable, if not deranged; obsessed beyond all reason with putative enemiesand globe-spanning organizations of terrorists that despise us; ready to respondwith unjustified violence to any perceived slight; unwilling to listen to, oraccept, advice; and unconcerned with the consequences of what it does, even whenthis results in widespread death and destruction in one of the birthplaces ofcivilization, where Bush and his top officials now pride themselves on theirlatest accomplishment, a military "surge" that only seems to furtherencourage mass murder.

Regrettably, I fear that, after more than six years of George W. Bush,Baghdad and Blacksburg are, to many on our planet, not that far apart. Woe tothe diplomat who has to explain us to the world today.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, served in London, Prague,Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. He left the Foreign Service in March 2003 toexpress his opposition to President Bush's war plans for Iraq. He now compilesthe "Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review," available free byrequesting it at the addresshere.   Copyright 2007 John Brown. Courtesy, TomDispatch.com