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