Unanswered Questions: Thinking For Ourselves
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UQ Wire: The United States of America has gone mad
January 15, 2003
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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, writer of numerous best-selling spy novels, has also contributed to an openDemocracy debate on Iraq at www.openDemocracy.net
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expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more
information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must
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