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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:
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 |
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