[Peace-discuss] UK on Bush

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-543296,00.html 

The Times, London 
January 15, 2003 
John le Carré 

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 percent 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 percent 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 taxpayers' 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 Americas 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 Jrs 
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 were 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, wont. 

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 its 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 prefects' 
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.