John le Carr�
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness,
but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the
Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the
Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could
have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms
that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically
eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests
is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town
square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but
it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would
still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected
in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich;
its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft of
unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be
telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN
resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The
Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are
told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around
$360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the
pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of
Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long,
please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American
taxpayer's pocket? At what cost - because most of those 88 per cent are
thoroughly decent and humane people - in Iraqi lives?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger
from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations
conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that
one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on
the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled.
It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The
carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow
conspirators nicely into the next election.
Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are
with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would
love to see Saddam's downfall - just not on Bush's terms and not by his
methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is
perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an
arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God
appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God
appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and
anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b)
anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.
God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men
are equal in His sight, if not in one another's, the Bush family numbers one
President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida
and the ex-Governor of Texas.
Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior
executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior
executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive
of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior
executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her.
And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of
God's work.
In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the
ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them,
somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that "somebody" was Saddam.
Hence Bush Jr's cry: "That man tried to kill my Daddy." But it's still not
personal, this war. It's still necessary. It's still God's work. It's still
about bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.
To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute
Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends,
family and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won't tell us
is the truth about why we're going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis
of Evil - but oil, money and people's lives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit
on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps
him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn't, won't.
If Saddam didn't have the oil, he could torture his citizens to
his heart's content. Other leaders do it every day - think Saudi Arabia,
think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.
Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its
neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction, if he's still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the
stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes' notice. What is
at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic
imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America's need to demonstrate
its military power to all of us - to Europe and Russia and China, and poor
mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules
America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair's part in all
this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He
can't. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I
fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can't get out.
It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked
himself against the ropes, neither of Britain's opposition leaders can lay a
glove on him. But that's Britain's tragedy, as it is America's: as our
Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply
shrugs and looks the other way. Blair's best chance of personal survival
must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably
emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired.
But what happens when the world's greatest cowboy rides back into town
without a tyrant's head to wave at the boys?
Blair's worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will
drag us into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever
been there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no more
democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By
doing so, Blair will have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle
East for decades to come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable
retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East.
Welcome to the party of the ethical foreign policy.
There is a middle way, but it's a tough one: Bush dives in
without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special
relationship.
I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect's
sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about
terror are shared by all sane men. What he can't explain is how he
reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq.
We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special
relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the
public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at
the altar.
"But will we win, Daddy?"
"Of course, child. It will all be over while you're still in
bed."
"Why?"
"Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will get terribly impatient
and may decide not to vote for him."
"But will people be killed, Daddy?"
"Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."
"Can I watch it on television?"
"Only if Mr Bush says you can."
"And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do
anything horrid any more?"
"Hush child, and go to sleep."
Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local
supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic". It
was gone by the time he'd finished shopping.
xponent
More Rhetoric Please Sir Maru
rob
________________________________
You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
the universe is laughing behind your back.
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