Bush and Lies and Drugs and Videos

When aggression walks where diplomacy belongs, everyone is a loser

The first notion that something sinister was happening was when the team led by George W. Bush stunned the world by snatching an election result from Al Gore's Democrats with less votes and with serious questions raised as to the legality of the process, especially in Florida. A strange process, to say the least.

Soon after, September 11^th occurred, the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century, complete with the Pentagon aircraft collision. Another strange process, to say the least.

Then there was Afghanistan, on the crest of the wave. With world public opinion still reeling from September 11th and with the emotions boiling, the analysts had no time to digest the (contradictory) facts and few people objected when the Taliban were attacked and crushed.  

That was the simplistic approach, a plotted history for simpletons and most people fell for it. Afghanistan is a good example of how blind interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state coupled with the thirst for revenge, instead of a steady and balanced campaign of negotiation and trade-offs, backed up by diplomacy, can cause a disaster.

Afghanistan, formerly the fiefdom of the Taliban, whose policy of imposing Pashtun lore and fundamentalist law on its people isolated the government almost completely, is now the fiefdom of the drugs barons. It is not that the Taliban disappeared; a few thousand were tortured to death by the Northern Alliance practically under the noses of their new western friends (who created the Taliban) and a few thousand others are incarcerated (and some
have been tortured) in a US-controlled concentration camp in Cuba. However, some 35,000 ex-Taliban melted into the mountains together with their weapons.

Afghanistan is a disaster zone. The authority wielded by Hamid Karzai extends to the limits of suburban Kabul, the capital. There are reports of attacks against foreign troops almost on a daily basis, with the cultivation of heroin is reaching record proportions. Ever increasing quantities of this narcotic, which has the most serious social consequences, have been seized on the Russian border with the Central Asian Republics, on its way to the cities of Russia and the rest of Europe.

The pretext for this "crusade" was Osama bin Laden -.or was it? In 1998, Mullah Mohammad Omar stated to the Pakistani daily Dawn that he knew the Americans would attack because he had refused to accept a billion-dollar bribe to allow a US-based firm to construct a gas pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan three years before September 11th.

The pretext for the attack against Iraq was that Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction, capable of reaching the USA, the UK or their allies within 45 minutes. After the UNMOVIC team ran out of steam despite unbearable pressure from Washington to find the WMD and after the IAEA declared that the "active nuclear program" was a figment of the imagination, the Pentagon declared that the WMD indeed existed and insinuated that the USA knew where they were.

After two months in Iraq, how many of these weapons have been found? Oh sorry, Iraq is a big country. Or maybe, as Secretary of State Colin Powell said, the WMD are being driven around the countryside, "in vehicles", complete with the delivery systems, warheads, launching ramps and all. Or maybe, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, the WMD was destroyed by the Iraqis before the attack, in which case, where was a causus belli?

Or maybe, the Bush administration was and is lying. These people have been lying to the United Nations, lying to its partners in the international community, lying to the Russian Federation, lying to its institutions, lying to its people. These people have been lying through their teeth, because the regime knew that the Ba'ath government of President Saddam Hussein constituted a danger neither to the USA, nor to the UK, nor to their allies, nor to anyone else.

If Iraq had had WMDs, the USA would never have attacked. Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the WMD theory was the only one on which everyone agreed upon, a sort of bureaucratic justification for a war which had been planned long before Bush won his "election". As in Afghanistan, there was an ulterior motive for the attack, namely oil and Iraq's enviable strategic position.

This attack was more than a monumental violation of international law; it was a violation of the integrity of the human race, a violation of the norms of decency and a violation of the fabric of confidence which human beings need to feel between themselves and their governments.

This attack was a set-up, a frame-up, right from the beginning. A great example was "The Saving of Jessica Lynch". In went the Marines, machine-guns blazing, doors were kicked in, the right mixture of F-words were yelled into black holes, grenades were thrown. When they finally entered the ward where Jessica Lynch was chatting happily to her Iraqi doctors, everyone suddenly realized that there had been no fighting: the Iraqi army had withdrawn hours before, in a coordinated fall-back planned months in advance among top level military decision makers on both sides.

Bush and lies and drugs and videos in Rumsfeld's words: "We thought – and think - that the Iraqis have - had - biochemical weapons and they had a program to develop nuclear weapons - but they didn't have these weapons".

Come again, Mr. Secretary?