Gore Vidal, once described asthe United States' last small-r Republican, found himself in thelead-up to the war with Iraq railing against what he calls theBush-Cheney junta. America, he said, had made meddling in the affairsof other nations its "reason for being."
He went further, maintainingthat without a constant perception of threat, the world's lastsuper-power can't function. It is, he said, a law of nature thatthere's no action without reaction and the United States hadSeptember 11th coming!
Gore Vidal even went so far as to suggest that theattacks may well have been a gift to the Bush administration - a giftwhich allowed the United States to go after Osama bin Laden and afterSaddam Hussein, the two men it perceived as obstacles to the superpower's imperial ambition.
So, given his extremely dark interpretation ofAmerica's foreign policy, how does Gore Vidal see Americaitself?
If you believe him, it's atruly unappealing place where the State is constantly waging war notonly against foreign nations, but against its own citizens, where thepolice run wild abusing civil liberties, and where the Bill of Rightsis a fading memories of what could have been.
Earlier in the year, Gore Vidal spoke to MonicaAttard on Sunday Profile. from the Australian BroadcastingCorp.
GOREVIDAL: We have never had an administrationthat set out deliberately to rid us of the Bill of Rights. With USAPatriot Act Number One, which passed 45 days after 9/11, and nowthere's a current sequel to it, which has not yet been given toCongress, but it's been leaked, you can be arrested without a charge,put before a military tribunal without recourse to due process of lawto a lawyer, you can be deprived of your citizenship and you can bedeported, this is a born American, and there's some lovely languagein it, you can be deported to a region or a country that has nogovernment.
I mean it is a dictatorship.
MONICAATTARD: Now, Mr Vidal, this dictatorship,as you call it, did it have September 11 coming?
GOREVIDAL: Well, yes, it activated a lot ofthings that had been in the works.
Example, after the bombing in Oklahoma City thecountry was duly shocked by what McVeigh and a group of what theycall themselves patriots may or may not have done, we still don'tknow much about it, nothing was ever really investigated, butsuddenly Oklahoma City they blew up a public building. Immediately,Clinton assigns a terrorist act bill, which really goes out to manyof the rights of due process of law and so on, habeas corpus, whichwe expect under our system. They were, if not annulled, they werenudged toward obedience on the part of the citizens.
Then comes 9/11, and a few weeks afterwardsthere's a 342-page USA Patriot Act, which is enormous detail. Well,it certainly wasn't thought up in 30 days since 9/11, as a responseto a terrorist attack. It had been prepared and it was sent toCongress. Congress was then so overwhelmed by the media and thehorror that had befallen us by wicked Arabs or whoever it was who didit, they passed it without reading it.
Now we're stuck with the damn thing. Congress, atlast, are sitting down and realising what they wrought, and they'rereviewing some of the aspects of it, which are violentlyanti-democratic, if one can use that phrase.
MONICAATTARD: Mr Vidal, do you think that theUnited States brought the devastation of September 11 upon itselfthough? Do you think it was as simple as a payback?
GOREVIDAL: Well, nothing is, of that nature,is ever terribly simple. No nation ever begins anything in a state ofinnocence. Nations have pasts. They've done good things and badthings and have acquired enemies, allies, indifference. There aremany things we could have done, should have done, did not do, andthere were many things that we did in other parts of the world whichcaused resentment.
The President is a born again Christian. Thatmeans he's a Protestant from the south and believes in rapture andwants to be a sunbeam for Jesus. Well, he's going to let in, soWashington says, I can't believe that he'll do it, but he will letin, in theory anyway, Christian evangelicals into the Muslim world.
I don't know if you've ever seen an AmericanChristian evangelical but run, no matter what you yourself may be inthe way of religion, I mean these are very, very primitive people andthey're absolutist and they know that God has chosen them to converteveryone else. To have a bunch of them loose in the Middle East, Isay, is asking for even more trouble than what we've got.
MONICAATTARD: But given the United States'reaction to September 11, the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq, therolling back of American civil liberties, who in your view representsthe more dangerous evil? Is it Osama bin Laden or George W.Bush?
GOREVIDAL: Well, it's Bush we have to dealwith. Bin Laden is a gangster that should have been treated not aslike a war with the country. Osama bin Laden is not a country. He issomething like the mafia. He's head of a bunch of religious zealots.He's a thug. He's a terrorist indeed.
Now, how do you handle that normally in a normalcountry? What you do is you call out the police, you get to Interpolif he's international, you turn to other countries to help you findhim and his allies, and you might even go to the United Nations ifyou were not eager to supersede it yourself. That's what should havebeen done. Instead Bush pretends it's a war. Well you can't have awar without a country. Terrorism &endash; you can't have a waragainst terrorism. It's an abstract noun. You can't fight an abstractnoun.
MONICAATTARD: But you'd have to argue, wouldn'tyou Mr Vidal, that attempts had been made to flush him out,particularly under the Clinton administration, and yet all of thoseattempts have failed. He's a very elusive character.
GOREVIDAL: Well, he's, literally elusive, theycan't find him, but then again, we don't know if they're looking forhim. When our generals first arrived in Afghanistan, a country whichhad nothing to do with 9/11, the Taliban as such had nothing to dowith it, they were a bunch of chaotic people that we had put incharge of the country at the time of the wars with the Soviets andthey were becoming crazier and crazier but, in the interests ofestablishing a pipeline to get oil from the Caspian Sea down toKarachi in Pakistan, we decided to go in there and replace theTaliban, and using Osama bin Laden, who had been in and out ofAfghanistan, as an excuse. As soon as our general on the spot gotthere, he gave an interview, I'm sure he got into a lot of trouble,somebody said 'well, when do you think you're going to get Osama binLaden?' He said 'we're not looking for him, that's not what this isabout', and then he had to come back with a statement like 'we'reagainst al-Qaeda', and then he had to explain what that was. But whatit was really about was UNOCAL, Union Oil of California, which had acontract to put a pipeline from Turkmenistan down throughAfghanistan, down through Pakistan to the port of Karachi, where theoil would then be sold to China. We'd already made a deal.
MONICAATTARD: So is it possible then thatSeptember 11 was potentially pre-emptive strike in response to whatthe Arab world might have interpreted, correctly or otherwise, tohave been a possible US threat to Afghani strategic interests, oilinterests?
GOREVIDAL: I think that it is now fact, onedoesn't know in a world of so much rumour and this Laden got wordthat in October, Clinton had a plan to hit his camps up in the hillsin the eastern part of Afghanistan and to attack Afghanistan maybewith a full invasion. This was Clinton, who was our kindly LiberalPresident.
Osama bin Laden gets wind of that and the nextthing we know we've got 9/11, which is a pre-emptive strike againstus. That, I think, is current wisdom around Washington, not incertain circles obviously, where he must be forever a mad demon, I'msure he is a mad demon, but if he knew an attack was coming inOctober and he hit in September, one sort of sees the logic ofthat.
MONICAATTARD: Now, you also talk of the UnitedStates' need to always manufacture an enemy. If it's not terroristsit's its own people, paedophiles, drug lords, etcetera. Do youbelieve that it was necessary for the United States to have oneindividual to focus anger upon after September 11, that is, Osama binLaden?
GOREVIDAL: We've always done it. Wepersonalise everything because that is the style of the country,that's the style of the media. But you immediately focus on anindividual of great good and beauty, or of great evil and ugliness,and you just go on and on about them and you never go on about whatthe battle's really about, because we want to talk about good andevil, which gets back to President Bush's deep religiosity.
He keeps talking in theological terms about goodand evil. Politicians ought not to do that, particularly politiciansfor the United States &endash; a country in which we built, what Ithought, was a big solid wall between the Church and the State,between religion and politics, and he's been breaking that wall downtoo. I mean, there's a good deal to object to.
MONICAATTARD: Do you think that the UnitedStates, Britain and Australia had any justification for what they'vedone in Iraq?
GOREVIDAL: Not really, no. I think it couldhave been done quite differently. First of all, Saddam Hussein was ofno danger to the United States or England or Australia. He might beof danger to a next-door neighbour, but he didn't even show much signof that.
The last war we had with him was 1991. Well hehadn't done anything between '91 and now.
MONICAATTARD: But do you accept that the peopleof Iraq would never have risen up themselves, that they weren'tcapable of such an uprising?
GOREVIDAL: Don't you think that's theirproblem? That's not your problem and that's not my problem. There aremany bad regimes on Earth, we can list several hundred. At the momentI would put the Bush regime as one of them, but I don't want anybodyto attack the United States and send Bush back to Texas.
MONICAATTARD: Can you not conceive of any good,planned or coincidental, to come from this militarycampaign?
GOREVIDAL: Well, the first law of physics isthere is no action without reaction. So for all I know they willdiscover a cure for cancer because of what they did in the desert.That, we can say, is a good result.
What we have done is we have torn up the oldblueprint that came into being around 1950, in which we were incommand of Germany and Japan and we were restoring them to theirformer glory really, and we had established NATO to help Europe, wehad the United Nations to arbitrate, we had Bretton Woods, which wasgoing to take care of the world finances, in our favour, but it wasfavourable for just about everybody.
That world has been totally destroyed in the lasttwo years. There is nothing left of it. We don't honour any of ourarrangements with the Kyoto accords or the environment. We tried tokill the United Nations several times by not paying our dues, byignoring its orders. We have changed the world's balance and I amamazed that you people &endash; "you people" is a generic word foreverybody else on Earth &endash; haven't done anything about it, andhaven't brought it to attention. This is radical. This is the mostradical regime since the '30s.
MONICAATTARD: You mentioned that the UnitedStates has, essentially, usurped the United Nations, or is attemptingto. Another casualty of the war is the relationship between Europeand the United States, always tense, but now it appears to beirretrievably damaged. Is that how you see it? You lived in Europe,you still live in Europe for part of the time, what do you make ofthat relationship?
GOREVIDAL: I don't think it's irretrievable.This administration will vanish without a trace one day. I just don'twant it to vanish in a nuclear cloud of some suicide bomber, becauseI see that they're making all kinds of trouble for themselves thatthey don't understand the extent of it. I don't want war and I don'twant anything violent to happen.
MONICAATTARD: But what do you make of thedescriptions of…
GOREVIDAL: Europe has moved onto anothersphere and there are those, I know, rather good economists whomaintain that with the creation of the euro, that removes the powerof the dollar, and it's only the power of the dollar that we've beenable to build up this vast military because we could print as many aswe want and it's a sovereign currency and it's considered safe. Soany time there's war being threatened, they buy American securities,American Treasury buy them, so that's how we finance our nuclearweapons and so on.
Well, Saddam Hussein threatened, it was his firstthreat that, I think, got to us, that he was going to shift over tothe euro and not the dollar, which meant that people with euros couldbuy Iraqi oil, which they can't do much of now and then, but theywill one day, and that would destroy the power of the dollar todetermine world values, particularly the value of oil, and this wasenough to give our people a great headache.
MONICAATTARD: So do you think then, if thatscenario's correct, that France and Germany would have had just asmuch incentive to indulge in decision making for the wrong reasons asWashington?
GOREVIDAL: Well, they would, they did, theyembraced the euro. They don't love the United States. I think thatshould be quite clear. Nor is there any reason why one country shouldlove another anyway.
President Washington, who was a great statesman,has said that nations should not have special friends or specialenemies, nations should only have interests and that to me is goodstatesmanship.
MONICAATTARD: But that's precisely whatWashington's doing isn't it, acting on its interests?
GOREVIDAL: It isn't. It's invented intereststhat it doesn't have. It pretends that Saddam Hussein had somethingto do with 9/11 and he was going to do it again if we didn't go inand smash him. He had no plans and we went in and smashed him anyway.Why? Because he has the second largest oil reserves onEarth.
MONICAATTARD: Mr Vidal, if we look at theso-called Coalition forces, you've got George Bush, you've got JohnHoward of Australia, they appear at least to have behaved asexpected, that is to say we're not really surprised by their actions.When you look at Tony Blair, a British Labour leader steadfastlysupporting George Bush on this issue of Iraq, what do you make ofthat? Why do you think he did it?
GOREVIDAL: I think there's something verycreepy going on, and I'm giving you an opinion.
Bush was an alcoholic, and he became AA, and partof AA is you find Jesus or God or something, and that helps you findthe strength to cease to be an alcoholic, which he did. He found God,a very primitive sort of fundamental Protestantism &endash; believesin Armageddon, believes in the end of the world, believes that thisworld is nothing and only the next matters.
Tony Blair is equally religious, obviously in amore sophisticated way, but he's in a funny position. He's PrimeMinister of England. He is responsible, in a sense, for the Church ofEngland. He appoints bishops for the sovereigns to install. Well, itis said that he's become Roman Catholic.
Now, the two boys can see themselves as crusadersfighting for Jesus against the infidel, against the heathen, againstMuslims. This, to me, is perfectly loony. It is nothing that youwould do or I would do, or most people would do, since this kind ofreligious zeal went out of the western world quite some time ago. Itdid not go out of the Middle Eastern world but we could live withthat. It isn't going to hurt us unless we make them veryangry.
So I think they see themselves as two Christiancrusaders.
MONICAATTARD: Do you think that Tony Blair'szeal will eventually see him falling in behind Washington ifWashington makes a decision to extend this war and go after Syria? Hesays he won't, but do you think that's possible?
GOREVIDAL: Well, I'm sure he says that, butwhat he will do is a different thing. I think he's got himself inpretty deep and I don't think he's worked out enough of an exit toget out of it because they are going to go into Syria.
MONICAATTARD: You believe that?
GOREVIDAL: I know that, and also Iran has beenmarked too. I hope it isn't going to happen, I hope that the Americanpeople will wake up and stop the junta.
MONICAATTARD: How do you know that they're goingto go into Syria or Iran? Why do you say you know that?
GOREVIDAL: I have connections in Washingtonand I know that this is a decision that has been made. Things do gowrong and things don't happen.
MONICAATTARD: So, but you don't think thatWashington is just sabre-rattling? Isn't it possible that having justdemonstrated having this capacity and willingness to act in terms ofIraq, that the Bush administration can actually achieve its aimsthrough fear and threat?
GOREVIDAL: It has no aims other than more oiland gas because Cheney had a study done about a year ago, that by theyear 2020 the entire world would be practically out of fossil fuels.They're going to grab all of it and the biggest supply is in theCaspian area and all those countries whose names end in 'stan'.That's what our eye is on.
MONICAATTARD: You describe a three-stage processthat you observed the US Government employing against its enemies,abroad and at home. First there's harassment, then there'sdemonisation, then there's attack. Is Syria now at the harassmentstage?
GOREVIDAL: You should read the New York Timesthis morning. There were four major stories about the crimes ofSyria, how it was really in with they found the terrorists there, andso it means that Iraq had been supporting terrorism and this andthat, mostly stories are made up or totally distorted. But the NewYork Times is a voice of the regime and a voice with really a sort ofdesire for war and expansion in that part of the world.
MONICAATTARD: And so on your account then, theterrorist link would just be extended add infinitum, and all of thison the back of one event, September 11, which looks, on this account,as though it might have been a gift for Bush &endash; a trulymassive, widely-perceived direct external threat needed in order tosecure American global and oil interests.
GOREVIDAL: That is one way of looking atit.
MONICAATTARD: You believe there's no plan todeliver democracy via regime change throughout the MiddleEast?
GOREVIDAL: I don't believe it's our businessto make the regime changes in the Middle East, particularly whenwe're under no threat from anybody.
MONICAATTARD: But is there a plan? Is theAmerican administration interested at all in delivering democracy tothe Middle East?
GOREVIDAL: Are you crazy? We don't have ithere, for God's sake. Why would we export it? We talk a lot aboutit.
Our founding fathers feared two things &endash;one was majority rule, or democracy, and the other is tyranny, whichthey called monarchy in those days, that's all.
MONICAATTARD: In relation to this idea that theUnited States is not, you know, the slightest bit interested indelivering democracy to the Middle East. Clearly much of the Arabworld is deeply sceptical about what the United States is actually upto, but Saudi Arabia seems to stand apart from the rest. Why are theyso taken by Washington?
GOREVIDAL: Well, first of all they're occupiedby American troops which were brought in at the time of Iraq one, andthen didn't go home. Secondly, deals were made that they are there toprotect the Royal Family, which is generally in cahoots with our oilcompanies, and to protect them from the people if the people shouldsuddenly turn ugly in a country like that. They're in an awfulposition. I would not like to be one of them for anything, but we arethere.
Gore Vidal, speaking to Monica Attard on Sunday Profile, earlierin the year. Wednesday, 24 December , 2003 18:10:00
© 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation