Kerry, please

Poll underlines collective responsibility of US citizens to the world community
An opinion poll carried out in 35 countries, which showed beyond all doubt that world public opinion favours John Kerry over George W. Bush, underlines the collective responsibility of US citizens who wish for their country to be brought back in line with the international community.

True, those voting on November 2nd will not be the international community, but US citizens and true, nobody can tell them which way to vote. However, given that the USA is part of the international community, and given the foreign policy record of George W. Bush and his regime, it is also true that the citizens of the United States of America have a collective responsibility to themselves but also to the world, when they cast their votes. George Bush has not focused his policy on the USA but abroad. Now he has to face the consequences of his actions.

George W. Bush has perhaps done more damage to US/world relations in just four years in office than all the previous scandals in Washington during both Republican and Democratic administrations put together.

Not only did he make the blatant mistake of arrogantly deriding the United Nations Organization, which the USA hosts (how many hosts insult their guests?), he also broke the UN Charter and broke the Geneva Convention by launching a criminal, murderous attack against innocent civilians in Iraq.

No this was not about international terrorism because if it had been, he would have used this as the excuse. Remember, through all the lies and mistruths and half-truths, what they said? Not that Iraq was involved in international terrorism (because it was not) but that Iraq was an immediate threat to the USA and its allies and had Weapons of Mass Destruction "in Baghdad and Tikrit and north, south, east and west of there" (Rumsfeld).

In the event, with satellites that can take photographs of a matchbox, these men knew that they were lying through their teeth and furthermore, thinking the US citizens are stupid, started to tailor together the excuses as time went on, forging public opinion, making clowns out of their people. How many
of our readers in the USA now beleive that Iraq and international terrorism are one and the same thing? They are now, only because the war launched by Bush ousted the only man holding Al Qaeda away from Baghdad, and that man was Saddam Hussein. Did anyone in the USA tell the people that Saddam hated bin Laden?

It is Bush who has turned Iraq into a question of international terrorism, just as his father set in motion the time bomb which is Islamist fundamentalism by arming and financing the Mujaheddin movement in Afghanistan which turned into the Taleban. Ask 3.000 New Yorkers the consequences of that.

No, George W. Bush does not make the world a safer place, he makes it a far more dangerous place. He rules over an administration which is dominated lock, stock and barrel by the pro-Zionist faction, which is controlled by a moneyed elite which thinks nothing of blowing away two hundred thousand
million dollars of the US workers' salaries, only to lie in their faces about the causes of wars which were waged, which in turn has claimed a thousand US lives and countless injuries, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead and wounded.

Bush likes to poise as a military leader but can a man who dodged the draft be respected by the military and who anyway can be proud of a military force which allows its soldiers to stick automatic weapons in the faces of terrified 6-year-olds and yell: "Get ya f....' hands up! NOW!" Who can be proud of a regime which keeps Guantanamo bay like a concentration camp, complete with torture? Who can be proud of Abu Ghraib, the prison where innocent people were forced to perform acts of sodomy and suck each others' penises, the prison where Iraqi women were raped by US security guards? Who can be proud of a military force which one year on has not subdued Iraq and which is forced to make pacts with armed rebels because it cannot defeat them? And anyway, how can this man appear as a military leader with his own military record?

This is the outward image that George W. Bush has given the United States of America and this is the reason why George Bush was the only international leader to be forced to run out the back of Number 10 Downing Street, in the home of his closest ally, because he was too scared to walk out the front
door. This is the reason why hardly a member of the US administration dare step off an aircraft in most countries of the world. This is the reason why Colin Powell did not turn up at Athens alongside most other world statesmen.

Is this the God-fearing government that the good people of the United States respect? One responsible for mass murder, the slaughter of civilians, not just a handful, but tens of thousands of them? A regime which hands out contracts without tender? A regime associated with acts of torture, not in one country but in two continents? A regime associated with lies, more lies
and yet more lies, a regime which squanders hundreds of billions of dollars which could be used on welfare programmes in the USA?

Is this a reason to vote for George W. Bush? The man whose regime has already made noises about continuing its illegal wars against other nations?

On the home front, of course it is not for a foreigner to speak. It is up to the people of the United States of America to decide whether George Bush has created more jobs or lost a million of them, whether his welfare schemes have got any better or if they ever existed in the first place, if he has provided for pensioners, if he has taken care of the veterans.

The people of the United States of America have a serious and important collective responsibility towards their fellow citizens of the world in the international community, who want to welcome them back to live together again as friends, but not with George Bush as President. Never.