Pygmies in Seven-League Boots
FEB 8 2003
John Maxwell
“At some point we may be the only ones left. That’s OK with me. We are America”.
Mr Bush, like me, was once a practising alcoholic. I decided, 14 years ago, that I had done quite enough for the distilling industry and joined a 12-step programme which helped to deprogram some of my obsessive compulsive behaviours; Mr Bush woke up one morning with the Mother of All Hangovers, became a born-again Christian and quit cold turkey.
Alcoholics tend to be perfectionists and/or people who have an obsession to set the world to rights. Programmes like Alcoholics Anonymous help you to cure yourself of delusions.
I believe that Mr Bush might have been helped by a 12-step programme. For one thing, you begin to realise that the world turns whether you are helping it to move or not, and that it will continue to turn after you have gone, just as surely as it did before you arrived.
But, having been elevated to the presidency of the mightiest power in the history of the world, Mr Bush, seems to have forgotten that his position depended on the fraudulent disfranchisement of half a million black voters and the unprecedented and improper intervention of the US Supreme Court in an issue reserved by the US constitution for settlement at the state level.
These facts allow certain foolish people to contend that Mr Bush is not the President of the United States, that he is not the Commander in Chief of the greatest destructive force ever assembled by mankind. (Go on! Make his Day!)
Mr Bush knows who he is and what he is about. He doesn’t play it by the book, he says, he is a ‘gut-player’.
Like most alcoholics.
Having seized the reigns of power, Mr Bush is quite clear in what he calls his ‘resolve’ aka ‘cojones’ or testicular fortitude. ‘Don’t mess with me, I’m a dangerous hombre.’
In Texas, as Governor, Bush signed more than 150 death warrants, including at least nine for people who were probably innocent. When he was informed of this, Bush said that if it were proved “We’ll give them a pardon. It’s only right.”
And he would not stay the death penalty for morons or juveniles or people who clearly had not been properly defended.
They had been found guilty, he said, and that was that.
Now, as Chief Magistrate of the Known Universe, , President Bush obviously takes his responsibilities just as seriously. And if the United Nations doesn’t understand that, too bad.
According to Bob Woodward’s bestseller, ‘Bush at War’ –which I have not read – Bush decided very quickly after the September 11 2001 atrocities that Iraq was somehow involved. And when the anthrax murders occurred, he and his administration immediately pointed the finger at Iraq, no matter that it is now clear that the culprit was an American scientist operating out of a US military facility.
Since then the official and media concentration on Iraq has proceeded apace, despite the discrediting of the only report linking the suicide bombers to Iraq and despite the CIA saying there was no evidence that Iraq is involved in terrorism.
In Bush terms, that was not relevant. He judged Iraq and found it wanting, and the appropriate penalties must follow. His monomania seems to have so clouded the issue that many Americans now confuse Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden. A neat trick.
Mr Bush has made some accommodations to public opinion. He sent Mr Powell, the only member of his administration with any credibility, to make the case for “terminating” Iraq “with extreme prejudice” – the CIA euphemism for murder.
Mr Powell who, as a diplomat is ordinarily expected to lie for his country, made the ultimate sacrifice: he made a fool of himself for his president.
It is now admitted that a large part of Powell’s “evidence” was plagiarised by the British government from an academic study by one Ibrahim al-Marashi . Mr al-Marashi is very upset that more than half of the so-called the British evidence quoted by Powell is copied word for word from his work.
Did he expect royalties?
Mr Powell refused to answer when questioned as to why the Americans had not ‘taken out’ a so-called poison factory which he alleged was controlled by friends of Saddam Hussein. The factory is actually in a part of Iraq walled off by the US from the Iraqi government.
The Iraquis have been accused of not cooperating with the inspections, much as a rapist might urge his victim to show a little more enthusiasm.
Official sources complain that Iraq threw out the UNSCOM team of inspectors, in 1998 when in fact they were withdrawn by the UN on American instructions.
And it is expected that a country, starved by sanctions, which must seek permission (often refused) to buy even chlorine for its water supplies, is likely to be able to produce weapons of mass destruction after its armaments industry was either destroyed in the Gulf War or by UNSCOM inspectors. It is a commonplace that it is impossible to prove a negative, to prove oneself innocent. How can Iraq? It has the world’s second largest reserves of oil. That is guilt beyond any possibility, any scintilla, of reasonable doubt.
It does not matter now what the Iraquis do. They will attract thunderbolts from on high, directed by the Anglo-American yuppie conquerors Bush and Blair – moral pygmies in uranium lined seven league boots – who talk a great deal about the rule of law, even as they take urgent steps to extinguish that rule of law in their own countries and abroad.
Iraq is said to be a danger to its neighbours, when it has in fact been to war with just two of them, first, to settle Iranian Islamic extremist attempts to overthrow the Iraqi government in 1988; and second (having sought and apparently got US permission) to punish Kuwait for its stealing of Iraqi oil, among other crimes.;
As Mr Bush has made clear, his world is black and white. “You are with us, or you are with the terrorists” In the past week his Minister of Gratuitous Offense, Field Marshal von Rumsfeld, bracketed Germany with Cuba and Libya as being wholeheartedly against war. What the Americans do not appear to realise is that while they may have the support of several Prime Ministers and Presidents, they do not have the support of the people, including their own, Even Mexico, whose president was supposed to be a confidant of Mr Bush, says he too, opposes the war.
The US government has made it clear to the rest of us that we have nothing to lose in the campaign for globalisation by force. As Mr Bush said in September 2001
“At some point we may be the only ones left. That’s OK with me. We are America”.
That is why on Wednesday – before the Reggae Boyz match versus the United States – I intend to join others who shall be standing outside the National Stadium in peaceful protest against this unjust war, and again on Saturday next, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I shall be standing with others who oppose this brutal charade, in front of the US Embassy on Trafalgar Road as part of a worldwide protest If you wish to take part please phone 1-396-8494 or email jamaicansagainstwar@yahoo.co.uk
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Copyright© 2003 John Maxwell
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