We Canadians have always been a little naive
about our politicians. Above all else, we want to trust them.
Recent revelations at the Gomery Inquiry about where out tax dollars went have
greatly raised our level of sophistication about them. Canada will never
be quite the same again. Still, we'll get over it. The lies
our politicians told were not of catastrophic consequences.
Lies told by George Bush and Tony Blair
were. At issue is the now infamous "Downing Street Memo", the minutes of
a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials
reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. The memo,
which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign,
and whose authenticity has not been denied, confirms that the Bush
administration had cooked up a case for a war it wanted well before the
Americans invaded Iraq. Knowing full well that Saddam did not have WMDs
in dangerous quantities, the Bush Administration said he did. Knowing
full well that the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda were at best tenuous, the
Bush Administration said they were firm and dangerous. As Paul Krugman
puts it in today's NYTimes:
Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo noted,
"the case was thin" and Saddam's "W.M.D. capability was less than that of
Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick
victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a
demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the
world.
But there was of course another reason for invading Iraq. It
contains a lot of oil and sits in the middle of a large region which contains
much of the world's oil resources. To keep domestic consumers happy and
to feed a huge military apparatus, Americans need an awful lot of oil, and
because a lot of people outside of the US do not like Americans, they need to
make sure they have control of over the oil producing regions.
Compared to the lies Bush told, the Gomery lies seem trivial.
Gomery may result in a few fines and a few jail sentences and, for a time, a
disenchanted voting public. Bush's lies have resulted in the death of
about a million civilians, many of them women and children, the death and
mutilation of many soldiers, the destruction of a functioning society (even if
we didn't like it how it was run), and the rise of a level of hostilities
between the Islamic world and the west that has not been seen since the
Crusades. America has indeed become "the Great Satan" and has taken a
lot of the western world with it. As lies go, Bush's were
catastrophic.
And the lies continue. Appearing before American soldiers
this past Sunday in one of Saddam's former palaces, Condoleezza Rice said,
"This war came to us, not the other way around."
If you want to read the Downing Street Memo, go to http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/index.html .
Ed
