The United States of America Has Gone Mad
By
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.
* *
* * *
Source: The Times
(UK), January 15, 2003. The author has also contributed to
an openDemocracy
debate on Iraq at
www.openDemocracy.net
| John le Carré, nom de
plume, of David John Moore Cornwell, born in Poole,
Dorset in 1931, was educated at Sherborne
School, at the University of Berne (where he studied German
literature for a year) and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he
graduated with a first class honors degree in modern languages.
He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a
member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving
first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and
subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing
novels in 1961.The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, his
third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He has written
and published eighteen titles. His
books have won prizes including the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize, the Malaparte Prize in Italy and the Nikos Kasanzakis
Prize. Six of his books have been filmed,
three made into television series and three more - THE TAILOR OF
PANAMA, THE NIGHT MANAGER and OUR GAME - are about to go into
film production. David Cornwell is an Honorary Fellow of Lincoln
College, Oxford, and has Honorary Doctorates at Exeter
University, Bath University, The University of Southampton and
The University of St. Andrews. He lives in Cornwall. |
 |
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 10 December 2011
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