The United States Of America Has Gone Mad.- Published 1-15-2003

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The United States Of America Has Gone Mad

By John le Carré

Published 1-15-2003

 

 

 

The Times - UK

 

 

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.

 

Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Ltd