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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-543296,00.html
The Times, UK January 15, 2003
The Times, UK - January 15, 2003: 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.
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The author has also contributed to an openDemocracy
debate on Iraq at www.openDemocracy.net
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