Abstract

© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 31 July 2003, Friday, 2 October 2009

PNAC

90 days after Bush declared the war over, and another US soldier is killed in Iraq, and two injured. It is a daily occurrence. Meanwhile the Secretary of Defense, brave man that he is, calls US soldiers in Iraq complaining cissies. They have a right to complain, and particularly about this evil cabal that has taken over the US government without any approval from the electorate. These emotionless and ruthless men have planned the whole power takeover and the war long ago.

Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of other right-wing men—most involved in the oil business—created the Project for the New American Century, a lobby group demanding “regime change” in Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton, they called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a letter to Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote that “we should establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests [sic] in the Gulf—and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power”.

The signatories of one or both letters included Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld’s Pentagon deputy, John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s under-secretary at the State Department… They also included… Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation oil industry consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan—where Unocal tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across Afghan territory—and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed a special Bush official for… Iraq.

The Independent 18 Jan 2003

Donald Rumsfeld, in the words of a PNAC document, Rebuilding America´s Defences, said they were waiting for a “catastrophic and catalysing event like a new Pearl Harbour” that would mobilise public opinion and put theories into practice. On 9/11 they got what they needed. Strange coincidence! The US has been attacked from abroad on only these two occasions, so 9/11 really is “a new Pearl Harbour”. These ease with which the operation was conducted with no apparent knowledge from the security agencies is staggering, and in itself damning. The ease with which these same people usurped the US with their electoral gerrymandering is also damning of US democracy, and the complacent attitude that many US citizens have towards it, even though they like to bragg to the world about it.

One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs… An alternative conception… is that the public must be barred from managing their own affairs. It is the prevailing conception.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky refers to the prevailing theory among the ruling caste of western countries that they “should not succumb to ‘democratic dogmatisms’ about men being the best judges of their own interests. Because they’re not”. He tells us that it is the ruling caste itself who think it is the best judge of public interests. In the US presidential election, voters made the popular choice of Al Gore, but Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, decided they got it wrong. There has been scarcely a murmur of protest.

We are told, no intelligence agency foresaw the attacks on New York or Washington. There were no warnings of the subsequent attacks in Kenya, Bali or Morocco. Intelligence linking Saddam to anthrax attacks in the United States were wrong. Supposed Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons programmes have proved wildly inaccurate. Documents detailing Saddam’s search for nuclear materials in Africa were forged. Since 9/11, events show that Western intelligence agencies either cannot penetrate the networks of Moslem ultra-radicalism or cannot understand them.

Lunatics, Neo-Cons and the Costs of War

They do not want to understand or even know about the fact that the country that has played the greatest role in advancing global Islamic militancy was not in Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, and has been censored from a recent report. Saudi Arabia is an important ally of the US. Yet, Saudi kings have used their oil wealth to repress tolerant types of Islam in their own country. They have suppressed human rights in Arabia as brutally as the Taliban, and have consistently supported the export of Wahhabi Islam, a severe, fundamentalist brand of a generally tolerant and syncretistic religion. Saudi money maintains 90 per cent of Arabic language publications, and has financed Jihad camps in Afghanistan. 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi citizens. Bush ignores all this because the US needs Saudi oil.

In particular, The US administration are ignoring Saudi financed Wahhabi propaganda that is stirring up Islamic militancy at the grass roots. One can only conclude that the US does not want to win the hearts and minds of Islamic people. And they can be won. It is Christian fundamentalism that paints Islam as evil, just as Moslem fundamentalism paints the west as evil. Moslem martyrs are more fooled by their fundamentalist leaders than US rednecks are:

Suicide is forbidden in Islam, and the body of such a person is not allowed to be buried in a consecrated graveyard.

Sir Gulam Noon

US Neo-Conservative propaganda needs the “evil axis”. It is therefore content to let it grow. A presumed enemy keeps people from criticising the regime for its plain inadequacies and unfairness. Like the fundamentalist Moslems, the fundamentalist Christians and Jews of the US believe God is directing them to victory. Does Bush know how many Moslems there are, and how deeply felt their religion is? Violent extremists are already active in 95 countries, and reformists of all sorts are being swept away or silenced. Jason Burke is convinced that the network will grow and become more ruthless. Imams in Saudi Arabia, are calling for the murder of intellectuals and Westernised Moslems. The Republican cabal would love to do the same sort of thing in the US. All our lives are now endangered, but not only by Moslem terrists. We are ruled by lunatics.

The United Nations is an institution with a chance of restraining the globalisation of greed going on at present, and controlling the dangerous wish of its most powerful member for world domination. It took the attack on the World Trade Center to force the US to pay its arrears of UN dues of $850 million. Then Bush and Blair stood out from the rest of the nations to stab the UN in the back over Iraq. The safety of the world is the worse for this treachery.

Not that the US has a great record of assisting the UN in its endeavours to keep the world regulated to some degree. It joined with the apartheid regime of South Africa in helping the brutal and ignorant chief Jonathan Savimbi in rebellion against the government of Angola for years. Does that make the US a rogue state? What about the supposed help it offers in places like Rwanda where genocide was being undertaken. Washington, as in other instances, sends in its troops with absurd code names who find themselves utterly unprepared and are withdrawn suddenly and with no cover, leaving the situation worse than it was and others to pay for the damage. The US has rarely, since WWII, arguably even then, gone out of its way to help anyone. It has concern for its own interests only, and for all the US rednecks getting outraged, they are not necessarily your interests either.

The Bush administration gloats in triumphalism that they easily defeated a country so poor that the US war budget was far bigger than Iraq’s GDP. Yet most US states are now hit by a faltering economy and the diversion of funds to war and tax cuts. They have the worst budget crisis in 50 years, with a knock-on effect on schools, hospitals and other public services. It is so bad that parents at one small Oregon elementary school are selling their own blood plasma to save a teacher’s job. Catherine Burns, a parent at the Family School in Eugene, reflected:

It’s a bizarre and poignant place we’ve come to, when we’re reduced to donating our bodily fluids to support our schools. It’s dennitely our last stand.

An anti-Bush grassroots group, “Moveon.org’ brought the story to public attention in a television advertising campaign. The story seemed too outlandish to be believed. A respected radio programme called it as “satire”, but had to acknowledge it was the best type of satire—reality!

Dirty Dossier

Lies, duplicity and deception is not only practised by the US administration. Its UK poodle, Tony Blair is very fond of them too. Like the Bush cabal, he has contempt for the public. Before the war, Blair, interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, said he had not got his message across, and he “honestly” believed “people should think carefully”. The Great Leader plainly considers his constituency is made up of idiots. That is his, and his spin doctor’s, failing. The people of Britain had thought about it very carefully and had rejected his arguments totally. He simply refuses to accept it as if by ignoring it, it will go away. He will be the one who has to go. The British public are supported in their skepticism by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who on 28 April, derided Blair for maintaining his schoolboy fiction of the global danger of Iraqi WMDs while failing to uncover them, even though the UK and US claimed Saddam had them ready to use.

Blair’s machinations in trying to keep his deceptions from the public via what they like to call spin, another word for lies, has led to the suicide of a leading UK scientific expert on WMDs. In his 5 February Security Council presentation, Colin Powell relied on secret “sources”, except for one:

I would call my colleagues”, attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed yesterday which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.

The document cited by Powell, and claimed by the UK government to be an “intelligence” document, was dubbed by the press the “Dirty Dossier”, nothing more than a piece of propaganda assembled neither by intelligence staff, nor by Middle East experts, but under the direction of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s press spokesmen Alistair Cambell.

Evidently Dr Kelly, the UK expert who felt obliged to kill himself, told at least two BBC reporters of this, one of whom even has it taped, explicitly mentioning Campbell. Yet the Blair government revealed the whistle blower’s name, while denying his story was true and deliberately diverting the attention of the media and the public on to the poor man and the quality of BBC reporting. Yet, key sections of the document were plagiarized from published articles and a student paper, some of which information was more than 12 years old. Eager to help incriminate Iraq, and sensationalize government claims, the authors of this fraudulent document changed words in the article they plagiarized from Oxford-based graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi, for example substituting “spying” for “monitoring”, and “terrorist organizations” for “opposition groups”. Our Chirstian leaders cannot see that this is dishonest. How can it be? They have God on their side!

Dr Kelly’s suicide happened while Blair enjoyed the ovations of the US Congress with a cringingly sycophantic speech, that naturally went down well in that company. A few honest words would have been more salutary.

Why Did We Go To War?

So, why did we go to war? That is where the lies and deception become clear. The immediate US case after 9/11 was that Saddam had links with al-Qaida, but US intelligence officials told The New York Times, “we just don’t think it’s there”. A whole raft of different excuses for the war has been floated, so that the public can take their choice, but every one sinks in the water.

Staff Sergeant Chris Muir was a bomb disposal expert. He died in an explosion in southern Iraq. In the event of his death, Mr Muir had asked that, at his funeral, his father should read the poem Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep with its haunting last line: “I am not there. I did not die”. During the service, his commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Mike Dolamore, sald of him:

He was a man who lived and died doing the right thing.

What is the right thing for a Prime Minister to do if it turns out that a decision to go to war was based on a misconception? He presented the reasons for fighting the war unambiguously. The text that matters is the motion the Prime Minister put down in the House of Commons on 18 March, just before hostilities began. It asked members of Parliament to support the decision of Her Majesty’s Government:

That the United Kingdom should use all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Besides this the motion simply cited various United Nations Security Council resolutions in support. After a long and tense debate, the motion was carried in the teeth of substantial dissent in the Prime Minister’s own party, though with full support from the Tory opposition. As early as mid-April, Foreign Office officials did not refute MPs’ and journalists’ impression that the WMDs would never be found. The reason was well known. Scott Ritter, chief UN arms inspector at the time, insists that Iraq was “fundamentally disarmed” by December 1998, with 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction eliminated.

I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapon´s inspector in Iraq for the UN to both the scope of Iraq´s weapons of mass destruction programmes and the effectiveness of UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.

The remaining 5-10% could have offered no global danger, and, if they still existed, would have been found by Hans Blix and his team. But, simply failing to account adequately for all the weapons known to have been held by Saddam in 1991 was sufficient reason for the war, the FO now believed. Geoff Hoon, British Defence Minister, interviewed in The Spectator 1 May 2003—it was essential to find WMDs to justify the war.

That was the reason we gave, which I stand by, for taking military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime. We are confident WMDs are there. We now have to find them… Bear in mind that we also committed ourselves to stay within international law, as we interpreted it in the UK, and the threat posed by WMD was the reason for taking action.

Lance Corporal Barry Stephen was killed trying to fight off Iraqi Fedayeen on 24 March. The 31-year-old soldier, a member of the 1st Battalion Black Watch, endured a hail of bullets to reach the machine-gun on the vehicle in which his platoon had been travelling, but he died when a grenade exploded nearby. Corporal Stephen showed great courage. On 19 May, Andreas Whittam-Smith highlighted these and other deaths of UK soldiers in the UK Independent, asking, “Did we send troops out on a lethal wild-goose chase?” Now, 90 days have passed without a sight of them. Where are the chemical and biological weapons which he was sent to Iraq to eradicate and which could be used “within 45 minutes” according to government ministers? Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary, said on 21 February 2003 of Saddam’s WMDs:

Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them.

Asked about the failure to find such battle ready weapons on 14 May 2003, Straw now thought…

It’s not crucially important.

We had at least 10 kids following us today. They are sweet little kids. They haven’t got a clue what’s going on.

But do we in Britain have any more of a clue of what is going on, seeing that no weapons of mass destruction have been found? Have US readers any idea either?

• Were the intelligence agencies inept?
• Were the findings of the United Nations arms inspectors misunderstood?
• Did ministers deliberately ignore the limitations of their intelligence briefings and harden up the results beyond what the facts would bear?
• Or were Bush Blair driven by a policy they do not care to admit?

The answer is obvious. The reason was simply to take over Iraq for its oil and its strategic value. Peter Kilfoyle, a UK defence minister who preferred to resign from the mendacious Blair government commented:

It shows the real reasons for this war—the superpower flexing its muscles and looking for resources. In this case petroleum.

Washington is carving up the Iraq reconstruction pie, so far worth around $70 billion but all together amounting to hundreds of billions, with all the juiciest slices goung to US corporations often closely connected with the Bush administration. Iraqis, of course, have no say in this but it will be paid for with their oil! The Iraqi response was that Saddam’s clique had robbed the Iraqis of their oil money, and now the US and UK were doing the same. The feeling was that the UN should look after the oil revenues for the Iraqi people until an Iraqi government was set up. If the UK and the US want to call themselves occupying powers then they have strict responsibilities and obligations in international law.

90 days on with no WMDs, or even WMD programs, as it is now diluted to, have been found. Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw is now doubtful of them and rests on the moral argument that mass graves discovered of dead Iraqis justified regime change as cause enough for the war. Regime change was not a British war aim. It will not do as a post factum justification, however much we may have subsequently learnt about the murderous tyranny of Saddam Hussein. For in his speech on 18 March, the Prime Minister stated:

I have never put the justification for action as regime change. We have to act within the terms set out in resolution 1441—that is our legal base.

Here he cites another reason nevertheless. If mass murder is reason enough for invading foreign countries then the US would be top of the list, but, if indirect responsibility is admitted too, then the US should have invaded itself for maintaining Saddam and many other brutal dictators in power over the half century since WWII. Pot Pol could never have done what he did if the US adminsitration of Nixon had not invaded the stable regime of Sihanouk in Cambodia. Too many Americans are happy to ignore all of these historical facts to keep a self-rightous image of the US.

Now UK ministers, though not Mr Blair himself, say that the task which British troops died trying to carry out was almost impossible. Jack Straw the Foreign Secretary said that Iraq’s remaining anthrax supplies might have had a volume equlvalent to just a third of a petrol tanker. John Reid, Leader of the House of Commons, compared the search for weapons of mass destruction with looking for a bank robber’s stolen money. So what would these two say to Mavis Allbutt whose son Colin, a corporal in the Queen’s Royal Lancers, was killed in Iraq? That the son whom Mrs Allbutt described at the funeral as having been “a gift from God” died looking for something that could not be found?

The question the Prime Minister and his colleagues face will not go away unless weapons of mass destruction are discovered. It was on their orders that some of our servicemen were killed, that their wives became widows, their children fatherless, and now a conscientious weapons expert has committed suicide. The Government cannot just say “sorry” and move on. If responsibility means anything, it means sincere contrition when your deeds lead to the unnecessary deaths of others.

Doing the right thing requires two responses.

1. Admitting why the error was made. The media anyway will dig and dig until it discovers the truth, but an honest admission of error, backed by an enquiry, is better.
2. If it turns out that the invasion of Iraq was like the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War—lives of brave soldiers given for a hopeless cause, then the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary should resign.

It would be the right thing to do, and it is not a heavy price to pay. They are still alive!

No-Fly Zones, Sanctions and War

Look at what the US and the UK have done in Iraq in the years before the war. First everyone should never forget that the CIA installed the Ba’ath Party in Baghdad. From it Saddam Hussein emerged. “That was my favourite coup”, said the CIA man in charge. Why do so many Americans ignore these things, so well known in the rest of the world? During the 18 months to January 1999, from official US figures, American aircraft flew 36,000 sorties over Iraq, including 24,000 combat missions. Since 1991, and especially in the last four years, they were unrelenting. The Wall Street Journal, considered by many the voice of the America, reported a US official as saying, “We’re down to the last outhouse”. Plainly enough, if anything remained from 1991, it had been flattened by illegal bombing. “Illegal?” you ask. Under the United Nations Charter and the conventions of war and international law, the attacks are piracy. The US and British governments claim a UN mandate for the “no-fly zones” under UN Security Council Resolution 688, after the first Gulf War. This is a lie. No Security Council resolution mentions “no-fly zones”. Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was Secretary General of the United Nations in 1992 when Resolution 688 was passed, said:

The issue of no-fly zones was not raised and therefore not debated: not a word. They offer no legitimacy to countries sending their aircraft to attack Iraq.

So, the lying started a long, long time before the war. Along with the no-fly bombing campaign was the imposition of sanctions against Iraq. As long ago as May 1996, the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on 60 Minutes that a half a million dead Iraqi children was a “price” that was “worth it”. With sanctions continuing, not to mention the “no-fly Zones”, another half million Arab kids must have died before the war started. So, a former US Secretary of State admits the US and UK killed a million Iraqis even before the war! That has to be much more effective at killing them than Saddam. Denis Halliday, a Deputy Under Secretary of the UN, called the US and British-driven embargo “genocidal”.

So, to the war. The illegal war against Iraq was never about the victims of Saddam whose corpses are now being used as an excuse for war by duplicitous politicians. How many were killed in this war? The coalition of two are not trying hard to count them. How many people did the US military kill in Vietnam? Was it more or less than Saddam killed. What value system should be used to compare the two totals?

On 18 May 2003, The LA Times reported that 1,700 civilians died as the US took Baghdad. Another 8,000 were injured, and several hundred other civilian deaths went undocumented because of destruction of hospital records in the conflict. As many as 1,000 people are still missing, according to Islamic burial societies and humanitarian groups. US propaganda has led the world to believe that the precision bombing campaign was so good that few civilians were hurt. Iraqi doctors are meticulous in recording deaths because the Saddam regime was meticulously bureaucratic about such things, so the doctors did it instinctively, though not in the quadruplicate required.

The US military authorities kept meticulous records on its own dead and wounded, but have offered no estimate of casualties on the Iraqi side. Dick Cheney arranged for the government statistician who tried to calculate accurately the Arab deaths in Gulf War I to be fired. She later repeated her calculations for an academic publication. It was more than 200,000. We are not likely to get any truthful assessments of this campaign either. Better to leave US citizens thinking that precision bombing does not kill people.

2003 was the twenty eighth anniversary of the defeat of the US in that war by peasants supplied by bicycle in Vietnam. Really the Americans won in that they left a legacy that would continue. For ten years they sprayed the country with defoliants containing the dioxin which causes genetic damage as well as being an immediate poison. Now, in the third generation after the war, the kids are still being born deformed. Have our Christian leaders no thoughts on that wickedness? American administrations just deny responsibility.

Nor is anyone talking about the residues left in Iraq by the weapons, like the depleted uranium used in the first Gulf war and which seemed to cause such trouble for allied soldiers who were there. Professor Doug Rokke, the US army physicist in charge of cleaning up depleted uranium in Kuwait said:

I am like most people in southern Iraq. I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. What we’re seeing now, respiratory problems, kidney problems, cancers are the direct result.

The US´s use of depleted uranium in 1991 led to babies being born without brains, and it remains active for 4½ billion years. Of course the soldiers are just cissies, according to their employers. John Simpson is the veteran BBC TV foreign reporter who was injured by US “friendly fire” during the war in Iraq. He was still walking with a stick over a month later because of a piece of shrapnel in his hip. The volume of the explosion right next to him which killed his interpreter deafened him in one ear. Simpson joked (or was it a joke) to Kay Guest that he kept hearing “Kill Tony Blair” in his deaf ear, but “Everyone hears that, don’t they?” Speaking seriously about the incident which was partly captured on film, he said:

The Americans never showed the shot of the spot of blood which splashed on to the camera lens. They just edited it out.

Who are the Terrorists?

Why did Osama bin Laden attack America? The Bush administration quickly had pat answers. El Qaida is a “barbaric enemy that hates what we stand for, hates our freedoms, hates our openness”, according to Bush’s politically simplistic views. He would defend these freedoms against some putative threat against them. Yet, Bin Laden had explained precisely why he hated America. It is the presence of infidels—non-Moslems, meaning Christian American soldiers—in the Islamic holy land of Saudi Arabia.

We, in the World Islamic Front for holy war (jihad) against Jews and Crusaders, have… issued a crystal clear edict (fatwa) calling on the nation to carry on jihad aimed at liberating Islamic holy sites… and all Islamic lands.

Osama bin Laden, ABC News, 1998

It suits the Bush administration’s crude propaganda to stir up national indignation by saying that Bin Laden just hates America—something that no American can understand, because they simply do not know what their governments have been doing in their name. Plenty of people in the world hate America but they do not “just” hate it, and they do not hate it for its freedoms. They hate it for its governments’ hypocrisy in foreign affairs. It is not American freedom Bin Laden objects to, it is American foreign policy. Freedom for Americans is taken to mean servitude and oppression under American puppet governments for everyone else. No American administration wants to address real issues in foreign policy, and most American voters haven’t a clue what “foreign” means except that it is unpleasant.

Bush, in fact, is the precise Christian equivalent of Bin Laden. Both are religious fundamentalists with the delusion that they are chosen by and acting for God. Bin Laden wants a holy war, and Bush wants a holy war too. Neither considers that the very term holy war is an oxymoron.

Bush had a separate agenda against Iraq and wanted to tie it in with the 9/11 attacks, so claimed Saddam was behind Bin Laden’s terrorism. Yet everyone, including Bush—despite his inability to retain important details—knew that Bin Laden and Saddam were actually antagonistic towards each other. Bin Laden wanted to fight against Saddam when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Saddam, though he went through some Islamic motions for public consumption, is a non-religious man leading a secular party. Bush has even jeered at Saddam as being non-religious. Saddam had been sponsored by the US, just as it had sponsored Al Qaida and the Taliban, as part of its global strategy against communism and Islamic fundamentalists, like the Iranian Mullahs. The US has a long history of creating monsters that it later has to deal with at considerable expense and trouble.

Moreover, Bush himself is either pig-boy simple, or he takes the US public to be. Regarding the production of anthrax, a biological weapon Americans are now familiar with, Bush said in a congressional briefing (2001):

It’s hard for Americans to imagine how evil the people are who are doing this… We’re a kind nation, we’re a compassionate nation, we’re a nation of strong values and we value life.

He added a few weeks later, in a radio address to the nation:

Anyone who would try to infect other people with anthrax is guilty of an act of terror.

The US had signed an international treaty banning the development of biological weapons, but by Christmas 2001, Bush was having to admit that the US had been developing anthrax for use in biological weapons for years. The Washington Post and The New York Times pointed the finger at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground which had perfected dry anthrax powder. Curiously, it was this anthrax powder and not any that any foreign terrorist could obtain that had been used to kill innocent Americans opening their mail.

So, the President of the US did not know, it seems, that the Pentagon had secretly been developing biological WMDs! Since the Bush administration had provided for the US germ warfare program to be expanded, the President’s comprehension again has to be questioned. What Bush has done, though again, most Americans have not noticed, is that he has admitted his own US administration rules a rogue state that develops WMDs contrary to international agreements. An American would rather support mendacious government leaders than seem unpatriotic when they use patriotism to drive through their own agendas. Who then are the terrorists now?

Why We Are Scared of the US

America watchers have been used to reckoning the country from the generous, idealistic, self-critical, inquiring and aspirational Americans who used to fill its senior positions. A slow trend rightwards over forty years suddenly became a lurch rightwards. Now, the country is led by rednecks and deadheads, and the nation is reduced to such paranoia that it cares no more about its own basic freedoms, principles of justice or capacity for productive co-existence with other nations. Guantanamo Bay with its kangaroo justice will haunt them forever by demonstrating to the world that America is hypocritical about freedom and justice. These are “bad men”, President Bush tells us, so who needs laws? Who needs impartial judges, and why should anyone have a right to defence when everyone knows they are “bad men”?

Neo-con America and its right-wing European allies like Tony Blair’s government are divided by a vast chasm from the rest of the world. The barbarian invasions always came from the east until we discovered America, said Philip Guadella. Now we are dominated and disempowered by New World barbarians seeking to humiliate, threaten, bully, crush and destroy the will and spirit of people they do not like. So says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the UK Independent. People planning havoc and mayhem are no more evil than governments, even of democratic states, that do the same, particularly as the death tolls they can inflict is beyond Bin Laden’s dreams. The wild west coalition does not understand or want to understand that suspicion and hatred of the US is now spreading even in countries that were happy to be US allies in the Cold War.

This distrust is found across Europe, too, among internationalists that reject the Bush/Blair vision of the world. An American historian, Paul Kennedy, was shocked that a Dutchman should have been “scared” of the US. It is a measure of the complacency of ordinary Americans that they cannot recognise that untrammelled power is fearful—not just for those looking at the strutting of the US from outside, but it ought to be fearful for the people of the US themselves. Too many Americans have lost the plot, or never knew it. When people feel obliged to support posturing leaders, they soon find themselves with no other choice. Criticism is the guardian of democracy, and when it is abandoned, then democracy itself can soon follow. All too many Americans just do not get it. Our hopes are with those that do.

Even British Tories, the British traditional Parliamentary right, can see this. Tory MP Andrew Tyrie writes (Axis of Anarchy, Foreign Policy Centre):

Bush and Blair are making the world a less safe place. The US is in danger of over-reaching itself. Out of a curious mixture of a new vulnerability and a complacent and misgulded sense of supremacy, a dangerous American foreign policy is being forged and a more reliable and orderly foreign policy discarded.

Too many Americans cannot get that justice is useless unless it applies to everyone. They do not get that wanting to understand the terrorists of 9/11 or elsewhere is not wanting to excuse them. It is wanting to know why they are doing it. It is not an explanation to keep chirping, as Bush does to his rehearsed chorus of cheering GIs, that they want to destroy the American Way of Life, or American Values. That is self-evident. The why is why they want to do that.

The “globalised” world can bring benefit to everyone, but not when the privileged nation uses it to force its values, standards, economy and culture on to others. At the end of the War, the USA rebuilt Europe and Japan as bastions of capitalism against the USSR. It had to do it by example not by force, for fear of driving the people it was trying to win into the arms of the enemy. It worked brilliantly well, but the US did not seem to notice how they did it. Elsewhere, all over the world it tried force, and usually lost, notably in Vietnam. As Nero Bush and Caligula Blair turn to old fashioned imperialism, the world is left wondering what is going on.

Well, what it is is that the US has become an Israeli puppet. Israel’s provocations and intransigence against the Palestinians means that the Moslems of the world have to be seen as the new “evil axis” to replace communism. There is no reason at all why the USA should not be friendly with Moslem countries, but it is friendly only with a few oil-rich Arab countries like Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, it has to be pro-Israel, and therfore necessarily anti-Moslem. For the Israeli flea to control the US elephant, it just whispers in its ear! That’s where it lives.

George Bush, with a silly smile on his face, says “these guys are on the run”, but blameless American citizens are today unsafe outside of the USA and Europe. Britain has become the second most reviled country in the world. All white people, all Jews are now vulnerable. The situation now is much, much harder to turn round now than it was before 9/11, but the best chance of doing it is to solve the Palestine problem. Only a real and fair settlement between Israel and Palestine will cut away the basis of Moslem fanaticism. That means the US will have to rid itself of its controlling fleas.

There is a calendar on the web called AMERICAN PEACE. http://americanpeace.eccmei.net http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=19164 http://www.newint.org Recent US bombings (ie the 21 since 1945) listed on homepage, with plenty of links. New Internationalist mag. Amy Goodman’s "Democracy NOW! http://www.democracynow.org The Federation of American Scientists has a page called “Military Analysis Network’ at: Http://www.fas.org/man You can link to their home page from here for their “site map.’ Another is: The Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org their home page, under “Issues’ you will find headings: "Missile defense’ and “Nuclear weapons’

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