I haven't been following the threads on the USA/Iraq conflict so this
may have already been psoted somewher on the 'Cat. Be that as it may,
it's still worth another airing here.
This was sent to me by a friend a week or so ago.


Sorry if it is a little long.



The United States of America Has Gone Mad
by John le Carre

The Times, UK - January 15, 2003 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 am 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
has still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel
or America could hurl at him at five minute's 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. 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.




It's basically what I have beleived from the start but have not been
able to put across in a discussion.


Cheers

Bugsy