- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- "But will people be killed, Daddy?"
-
- "Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."
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- "Can I watch it on television?"
-
- "Only if Mr Bush says you can."
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- "And afterwards, will everything be normal again?
Nobody will do anything horrid any more?"
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- "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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- Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Ltd
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