The United States of America has gone mad (Times article by John le Carré)

Among the most interesting things (I agree with it 99.9 %) that
I've come across recently. I found out about it through the
'secularismo' yahoo group.

- Joel

***
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-543296,00.html

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.

***

Begin forwarded message:

From: "xxx xxx" <xxx_xxx@...>
Date: Wed Jan 15, 2003 10:47:18 Asia/Calcutta
To: <secularismo@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [secularismo] [rn] Times of London: "The United States
of America has gone mad" Em nome de Deus
Reply-To: secularismo@yahoogroups.com
X-Apparently-To: secularismo@yahoogroups.com

January 15, 2003

Times of London

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.

***