A Nobel Prize for Al Gore: Will American's Get It?

Over the last few years I have had lots of discussion with US friends about the rights or wrongs of the USA's system of democracy. It elected George Bush as president in preference to Al Gore.

My view has been that this could be a good thing for America and the world. It would inoculate Americans against the disease of carelessness with respect to their democracy and constitution. They would be motivated to avoid future errors if this was one. This could be effected in two ways. First by Americans being truly democratic and atually voting - hardly half the potential voting population voted in the Bush Gore election. Second those that did vote would perhaps learn to use their vote more advisedly.

Americans should forgive foreigners. We take the Presidency far more seriously than they do. It matters to us more. It protects America but not foreigners from America The constitution is constructed to produce a Head of State with little power to harm the people. This is symbolised by the built edifices in the centre of Washington DC. The Presidents residence is the smallest. It is not only dwarfed by the capitol building, owned by the legislature, but more significantly by the Jefferson memorial on the other side of the Park from the Oval office. This serves to remind Presidents of their unimportance relative to the people. The constitution Jefferson's helped to draft was designed to ensure that the American Presidency was and would remain relatively weak relative to the power of the people. To these designed ends it works beautifully. Americans comes close to electing a constitutional monarch with little in fact no effective domestic power independent of the legislature and a short term of office unrelated to their own longevity. Electoral mistakes with presidents time out.

Unfortunately for foreigners the Constitution works too well to achieve one if its other ends. It is designed to ensure that in times of threat to the American people's freedom their leader the President can mount an effective well focused defense. The President is constitutionally commander and Chief of their armed forces and determine the higher level strategy for their use and the constitution provides a clear chain of command leading back to a President with all the executive authority required to achieve any desired end. So while the American presidency enhance the freedom of the citizen it also produces a very authorative and powerfully effective presidency to defend American's freedom if it is ever necessary to do so. The American Presidency is thus highly focused and constitutionally and politically very powerful when it comes to dealing with foreigners. Foreign affairs do not powerfully engage most Americans and when they do they generally have little truck with those their President deems as their enemies.

This is America's and the worlds Achilles heal. The USA citizen is indeed free and the constitution caps this with a President able to act as the “defender of the free”. Unfortunately this is the free within the USA and has not always meant Presidents have been "defender of freedom". Often they have been. Western Europe and North East Asia have every reason to be grateful for this at least twice in the 20th Century. However an unattended unconsidered consequence of this asymetry in power between the domestic and foreign arenas is the temptation for presidents to indulge in operations that are very little to do with defending freedom but everything to do with defending American commercial interests at its expense. The USA has established and supported more dictators, human rights abusers and terrorist groups than one would ever like to enumerate. Presidents have done this with little interest shown in their actions by the majority of American people for whom foreign affairs lie right at the edge of their peripheral vision.

This lack of interest by American voters has allowed some presidents to use their responsibilities for dealing with foreigners and as head of the nation's armed forces to do so in a very VERY powerful way. This has sometimes meant that the US nation has dealt very aggressively with those foreigners the executive deems as threatening what ever the American President chooses to define as the freedom of the American people. It was intended that the President could be effective to defending American's freedom at a time when the USA was a relatively very small, though well off, country protected by its geography from any real threat from others. However the power that flows from the freedom of US citizens to think and act as they will is unprecedented in history and highly effective and creating and sustaining wealth. Us business is well guaranteed against interference from within continental United States and has a presidency that very often be willing to stretch the definition of American freedom and its interests outwith anything I am sure was intended by the founding fathers.

The release of the American people into the highly resilient social, political and commercial freedom the described system has created has produced the most creative concentration of human intellectual and commercial effort in history. It has successfully used ideas knowledge and insight to make the USA the richest nation on the planet by far. This puts the US President powerfully in charge of awesome resources which he can deploy as he will outside the United States for good or ill with little expectation of great domestic censure outside the political informed elite in Washington.

Most Americans are Americans because they themselves, and or foreigners, mainly but not always foreign governments, have rejected them or their parents or their grandparent or great grandparents. Dealing roughly with such foreigners especially those they are told might threaten their freedom is thus unsurprisingly not something the average American voter see as a problem but it has often become a huge inexplicable problem for people elsewhere in the world who perhaps thought that this powerfully free and rich people would defend what little freedom they might have.

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” and the wealth and freedom generated by the US system has created American presidents who outside their own country are demigods wielding as close as one can get to absolute power. Some American presidents have without doubt been corrupted by it.

Gore was a man who if elected might not have been. However to be fair to all he has never actually been tested in the office. He was not given it and so was denied access to the absolute power that may have been able to corrupt him. However in being so deprived he then chose to act in a very powerfully way indeed in the interests of mankind.

Our planet has now recognized this in the support given to him in being nominated to the Swedish, no I should say Norwegian Academia of Sciences, for the Nobel Peace Prize. This might justly be described as a decision as well crafted in its potential impact as Jefferrson et als constitution. It give out all the right message hopefully in time to the planet's people about what needs to be done. One hopes that the message gets through to the people with the most power to make it effective in the VERY necessary short to medium term, the American citizen with the capacity to vote. Let us hope they choose to act appropriately.

British humour is full of irony and self deprecation. These are qualities not so evident in Americans.

The event of November the 11th made it clear to the world and America that despite its past geographic invulnerability this no longer holds good. The USA cannot avoid being part of the global village. The isolationism of the Munro Doctrine is no longer an option. A very powerful, internationally protective, Presidency may have been redundant it is no longer.

The US executive' s response to these pressures has been interesting. It has concentrated power in the hand of the executive not just for dealing with dangerous foreigners in a manner much against the spirit of the US Constitution but also done so with respect to the rights of its own citizens. It has enhanced the power of the state against people. In doing so it denies the whole purpose, thrust and conception of the USA as a separate distinct and rightly proud nation.

Habeas corpus was thrown to the winds and arrest and detention without trial has been thrust aside not only at Guantanimo Bay but also through the Patriot Act. This can now deny protection even to US citizens against false arrest and detention. This effectively undermines everything that Americans have fought and died to establish. In addition, and most insidiously in terms of the long term freedom of American citizen's, it has used its administrative authority to centralize under Presidential authority the machinery of government dealing with what is now called homeland security.

This is in direct contradiction to the all important constitutional concept of the separation of powers. And it is a separation maintained by most states,commercial corporations and the American constitution not just to protect others but to protect the leadership of their own central authority. Such separation ensures power can never be accumulated locally within government for it to be pursued for its own ends maybe against the will of the President himself.

Two organization that one should both rightly admire and fear have disappeared in this process the FBI and the CIA. They have been amalgamated with others into the Directorate of Homeland Security. This is hardly the American Way. As we said above irony is not one of the greater dimensions of American humour but it is throughout the British Commonwealth being shared by the Australians Brits and Canadians. It seems it is now intelligently shared with that great American institution of the cold war the former CIA.

I got lost in Virginia trying to get to Georgetown. I ended up very wrongly on the Georgetown Turnpike. I was going entirely in the wrong direction. I did however arrive at Langely at the entrance to what was previously the HQ of the CIA. I found it was now adverted as “The George Bush Intelligence Center”.

How could an executive headed by his son object to such a name and now the world has given Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize. Lets hope American's get it. The planet needs Americans to stand up for what their forefathers fought and died for, the individual against the power of the state and each citizens duty to fight to support the commons that Al Gore and the Nobel Committee have so clearly defined for us.