America has entered one of its periods ofhistorical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse thanMcCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long termpotentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama binLaden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthytimes, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world arebeing systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US mediaand vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debatethat should be ringing out in every town square is confined to theloftier columns of the East Coast press.
The imminent war was planned years before binLaden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden,the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky mattersas how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shamelessfavouring of the
already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for theworld's poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogatedinternational treaties. They might also have to be telling us whythey support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that underthe carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americanswant the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised byanother $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generationof nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy.Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting isa lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost inAmerican lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer's pocket? Atwhat cost &emdash; because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughlydecent and humane people &emdash; in Iraqi lives?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflectingAmerica's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the greatpublic relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. Arecent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam wasresponsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But theAmerican public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeatenand kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestratedneurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely intothe next election.
Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him.Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm deadagainst Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall &emdash; justnot on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the bannerof such outrageous hypocrisy.
The religious cant that will send American troopsinto battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surrealwar-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particularpolitical opinions. God appointed America to save the world in anyway that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus ofAmerica's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess withthat 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, theBush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head ofthe 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 oilcompany, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none ofthese trifling associations affects the integrity of God's work.
In 1993, while ex-President George Bush wasvisiting the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks forliberating them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that"somebody" was Saddam. Hence Bush Jr's cry: "That man tried to killmy Daddy." But it's still not personal, this war. It's stillnecessary. It's still God's work. It's still about bringing freedomand democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.
To be a member of the team you must also believein Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help fromhis friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. WhatBush won't tell us is the truth about why we're going to war. What isat stake is not an Axis of Evil &emdash; but oil, money and people'slives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfieldin the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive apiece of the cake.
And who doesn't, won't.
If Saddam didn't have the oil, he could torturehis citizens to his heart's content. Other leaders do it every day&emdash; think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, thinkSyria, think Egypt.
Baghdad represents no clear and present danger toits neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam's weapons ofmass destruction, if he's still got them, will be peanuts bycomparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at fiveminutes' notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military orterrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What isat stake is America's need to demonstrate its military power to allof us &emdash; to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad littleNorth Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America athome, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair'spart in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, hecould 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 acorner, and he can't get out.
It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blairhas talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain's oppositionleaders can lay a glove on him. But that's Britain's tragedy, as itis America's: as our Governments spin, lie and lose theircredibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.Blair's best chance of personal survival must be that, at theeleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN willforce Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But whathappens when the world's greatest cowboy rides back into town withouta tyrant's head to wave at the boys?
Blair's worst chance is that, with or without theUN, he will drag usinto a war that, if the will to negotiateenergetically had ever been there, could have been avoided; a warthat has been no more democratically debated in Britain than it hasin America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will have set back ourrelations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to come. Hewill have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great domesticunrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the partyof the ethical foreign policy.
There is a middle way, but it's a tough one: Bushdives in without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye tothe special relationship.
I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend hishead prefect's sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His veryreal anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can'texplain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with aterritorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place,to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our shareof the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding inWashington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.
"But will we win, Daddy?"
"Of course, child. It will all be over whileyou're still in bed."
"Why?"
"Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will getterribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him."
"But will people be killed, Daddy?"
"Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."
"Can I watch it on television?"
"Only if Mr Bush says you can."
"And afterwards, will everything be normal again?Nobody will do anything horrid any more?"
"Hush child, and go to sleep."
Last Friday a friend of mine in California droveto his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace isalso Patriotic". It was gone by the time he'd finished shopping.
John LeCarré
January 15, 2003
The author has also contributed to anopenDemocracy debate on Iraq at www.openDemocracy.net