Gore Vidal: Iran next, then who?

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T

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 18:45:32 -0800 (PST)

Gore Vidal: Iran next, then who?

 

 

 

Gore Vidal: Iran next, then who?

 

George Bush's apparent desire to create a state of perpetual war

spells disaster

 

23 January 2005

 

Last week, courtesy of Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker, we learned

that a long-held prediction of mine had come true. American forces

have been operating inside Iran, thus extending yet further the

President's " war on terror " .

 

There is no war, other than the one the President unilaterally is

waging against a weak Congress and weak countries with oil. It's true

that Congress has given the President certain unusual powers, but as

only Congress has the constitutional power to declare war, he is not,

as he keeps yapping, a wartime president. Hence his conviction that he

can lock anyone up, foreigner or native, and send them off to

Guantanamo without due process of law.

 

This is simply a Bush war. It has nothing to do with the American

people. And we were not in danger from weapons of mass destruction.

The danger is an Administration that has fallen in love with war

because of the special powers war gives the Administration to rid

itself of the Bill of Rights and lock up dissenters. We've had some

scary times in the past but nothing to compare with this. So what do

we have to look forward to?

 

A disaster, in short. Iran/Persia represents a brilliant culture, one

of the greatest the planet has ever known. They do have atomic

weapons, and that is why our rulers are pretending that they are

longing to blow us up - because we have liberty and freedom and

democracy and are so prosperous. (None of these things do we actually

have, but this is the official line that we are asked to believe.)

 

The Iranians have a lot of oil, of course, and a lot of enemies among

the neocons, who have pretty much taken over the Pentagon. The

President doesn't seem to understand what is happening, but if he does

he's seriously culpable. So here we are, in the middle of the

unfinished Iraq tragedy, and the President, in his inaugural address,

is serenely declaring war on the rest of the world. Instead of talking

about how the hell we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we are talking

about going into Iran.

 

Here we are headed for absolute disaster, yet the American public has

no weapons left, legally. If an American citizen were really in

trouble - I ask in all seriousness - to whom would he turn? He can't

go to his Congressman, because he's helping out GM or whoever paid for

his election. He can't turn to the executive branch, because they now

run concentration camps and don't like dissent. The courts are pretty

expensive and the higher courts are, shall we say, not on our side.

 

No one has explained why, if Saddam Hussein had all these weapons -

which he did not have - why he would have wanted to blow us up. We

know why Osama bin Laden hit us. He sent us a lot of unpleasant

letters and wrote a long list of things saying why, for religious

reasons. He is a religious zealot. And he was doing a religious job.

We're doing a job for the oil and gas business. They're the people who

are making a lot of money out of all this. Heaven knows how it will

end, but we, the American people, are going to be the losers.

 

Symbolically, it's interesting that regions of the US are rejecting

Darwin and evolution. I can see why. We have a substantial minority in

the US that hasn't advanced much beyond the baboon. These ignorant

folk are full of hatred, which is why they are currently rejecting

evolution and going back to the stone age with torture, killing

innocent people, attacking countries that have done us no harm. This

is insupportable.

 

In a recent TV programme that we lucky Americans were shown of

previous inaugural addresses, our former President Franklin D

Roosevelt spoke of Social Security, something he invented for us. Yet

his successor, Harry Truman, starts talking about a terrible enemy. In

effect, he is starting the Cold War. Roosevelt had made certain

arrangements with Stalin and the USSR, which could have kept the world

quite peaceful and avoided the Cold War, but Truman was having none of

it. He had been convinced by certain people who had made a lot of

money out of the war that we should be forever armed, in order to wage

perpetual war for perpetual peace.

 

So there we are, on top of the world, militarily and economically. We

have the atomic bomb, and here is Harry Truman saying in 1948 that

we've got to watch out there - there's this godless nation intent on

world conquest.

 

But the Russians didn't want anything very much then, except to

recover the 20 million people they had lost in the Second World War.

They weren't going anywhere at that time, but we saw to it that over

time they became frightened and heavily armed. We made them active

enemies, and we've been creating enemies ever since. Now we are going

to take on one billion Muslims. Brilliant. One billion people who will

really deeply and truly hate us. And it will take several generations

for us to bring them around, if possible.

 

George Bush doesn't compare with previous presidents. He doesn't come

from any established system that we've ever tried before. He wasn't

elected the first time and perhaps not truly the second time.

Certainly, he was not elected on any issues, like the morality of the

war or the wisdom of the war, or the techniques that we used in waging

that war.

 

I would have thought that, at the moment since about 56 per cent of

the people think we should never have gone to war with Iraq and those

numbers were indeed rising as we approached the election, we would

have voted against this President. Instead of talking about the war,

we were talking about abortion and homosexual marriage. What great

topics to be discussing for a great people on the march with atomic

weapons! There was so much else to talk about, but neither Bush nor

John Kerry were going to do so because they both approved of the war,

and their advisers - or certainly Kerry's - had told them to do so. No

wonder people don't care to vote. They seldom have much to vote for.

But often a lot to vote against.

 

There was a huge, unrepresented anti-war party at the last election.

We, as a people, have generally believed in minding our own business,

not in attacking other countries - " enough to do at home " and all

that. But we now have a government that is not remotely a democracy

but we're trying to export it elsewhere. I suppose that on the ground

democracy is a nice word. We treat it like ketchup. Put it on

everything. We're bringing it to Iraq, we say.

 

The result, once more, is perpetual war for perpetual peace. The

spirit of Harry Truman marches on. After war with Iran, who's next?

Russia? Or someone else? God help us if we make China angry. There are

a great many more of them than of us.

 

This war will end in our defeat, and that is why I want us to get out

of it as soon as possible. I want us to try and bring the troops home

and try and invent a more realistic education system because I am

convinced that democracy, too, may one day come to the US, and I want

us to be alive to celebrate it.

 

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=603697