London Times
January 15, 2003
The United States of America has gone mad
John le Carré
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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Another good article in the same vein...
Subject: Speech by British playwright Harold Pinter
Turin Honorary Doctorate - November 27th 2002
I am deeply honoured to receive this degree from such a great university.
Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and
its after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man
unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean.
But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive. However, I found
that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more
pervasive public nightmare the nightmare of American hysteria,
ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful
nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest
of the world. "If you are not with us you are against us" President Bush
has said. He has also said "We will not allow the world's worst weapons
to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders". Quite right. Look
in the mirror chum. That's you.
The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass
destruction" and is prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more
of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from
international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to
allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public
declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.
The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York
are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are
American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.
The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.
The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British
sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never
referred to.
The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is
never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies
are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears,
mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.
The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by
the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United
States are never referred to.
The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the
United States are never referred to.
The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer
referred to.
The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in
world unrest, is hardly referred to.
But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history
this is.
People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows,
they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice,
they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of
mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back.
The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act
of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state
terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts
of the world.
In Britain the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous. How will or can public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's
contemptible and shameful subservience to the United States. Apparently a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system was
recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of school children travel on the London Underground every day. If there is
a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the
Prime Minister does not travel on the underground himself.
The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder
of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from
their dictator.
The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which can lead only
to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to
catastrophe.
It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting at the seams
to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this not just to take control
of Iraqi oil but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are
horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.
Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander
Herzen's definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London ecently) "We are not the doctors. We are the disease".
Harold Pinter
