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The
United States of America has gone mad
BY
JOHN LE CARRE
Taken from The Times, 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 U.S. 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
favoring 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 USD. 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 Center. 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.
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.
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.
Baghdad
represents no clear and present danger to its
neighbors, and none to the US or Britain. 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.
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 phony 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.
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. 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.
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