This is an interesting article that I got via email and wanted to share with you all. What do you think?
> The Times (UK)
> January 15, 2003
>
> The United States of America has gone mad
>
> By John le Carre
>
> 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.
>
> The author has also contributed to an openDemocracy
> debate on Iraq at
www.openDemocracy.net >>
>
>
0010764.1608220741.1622235530.006.0....g.topica .com
>
> #############################################
> this is e-drum, a listserv providing information of interests to
> black writers and diverse supporters worldwide. e-drum is
> moderated by kalamu ya salaam (kalamu@aol.com).
> ----------------------------------
> to subscribe to e-drum send a blank email to:
>
e-drum-subscribe@topica.com
> ---------------------------------------------
> to read past messages or search the archives, go to:
>
http://www.topica.com/lists/e-drum