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CounterPunch
September
14 / 15, 2002
Bush Across the Rubicon
The
Mantra That Means This Time It's Serious
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
How small he looked in the high-backed chair.
You had to sit in the auditorium of the UN General Assembly yesterday
to realize that George Bush Jr threatening war in what was built
as a house of peace could appear such a little man. But then
again Julius Caesar was a little man and so was Napoleon Bonaparte.
So were other more modern, less mentionable world leaders. Come
to think of it so was General Douglas MacArthur, who had his
own axis of evil, which took him all the way to the Yalu river.
But yesterday, two-thirds of the way
through his virtual declaration of war, there came a little,
dangerous, telltale code, which suggested that President Bush
really does intend to send his tanks across the Tigris river.
"The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people,''
he said. In the press gallery, nobody stirred. Below us, not
a diplomat shifted in his seat. The speech had already rambled
on for 20 minutes but the speechwriters must have known what
this meant when they cobbled it together.
Before President Reagan bombed Libya
in 1985, he announced that America "had no quarrel with
the Libyan people.'' Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the
Father told the world that the United States "had no quarrel
with the Iraqi people''. Last year Bush the Son, about the strike
at the Taliban and al-Qa'ida, told us he "had no quarrel
with the people of Afghanistan". And now that frightening
mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr Bush said absolutely
none with the Iraqi people. So it's flak jackets on.
Perhaps it was the right place to understand
just how far the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq might
take us. The green marble fittings, the backcloth wall of burnished
gold and the symbol of that dangerous world shielded by the UN's
palm trees gave Mr Bush the furnishings of an emperor, albeit
a diminutive one. Just a day earlier, he told us, America had
commemorated an attack that had "brought grief to my country''.
But he didn't mention Osama bin Laden,
not once. It was Saddam Hussein to whom we had to be reintroduced
he used Saddam's name seven times in his address, with countless
references to the "Iraqi regime".
Riding that veil of American tears which
bin Laden's killers had created, it was also clear that the Bush
plans for the Middle East were on a far greater scale than the
mere overthrow of the Iraqi leader who once regarded himself
as America's best friend in the Gulf. There must be a democratic
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai vigorously nodded his approval
and there must be democracy in Palestine; and this would lead
to "reforms throughout the Muslim world". Reforms?
In Saudi Arabia? In Jordan? In Iran? We were not told.
The Bush theme, of course, was an all
too familiar one, of Saddamite evil, lashed with the usual caveats,
conditional clauses and historical distortions. We all know Saddam
Hussein is a vicious, cruel dictator we knew that when he was
our friend but the President insisted on telling us again. Saddam
had repeatedly flouted UN Security Council resolutions; no mention
here, of course, of Israel's flouting of resolutions 242 and
338 demanding an end to the occupation of Palestinian land.
Mr Bush spoke of the tens of thousands
of opponents of Saddam Hussein who had been arrested and imprisoned
and summarily executed and tortured "all of these horrors
concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state".
But there was no mention, unfortunately,
that all these beatings and burnings and electric shocks and
mutilations and rapes were being merrily perpetrated when America
was on very good terms with Iraq before 1990, when the Pentagon
was sending intelligence information to Saddam to help him kill
more Iranians.
Indeed one of the most telling aspects
of the Bush speech was that all the sins of which he specifically
accused the Iraqis a good proportion of which are undoubtedly
true began in the crucial year of 1991. There was no reference
to Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions when the Americans were
helping him. There were a few reminders by Mr Bush of the gas
attacks against Iran without mentioning that this very same Iran
is now supposed to be part of the "axis of evil".
Then there were the little grammatical
problems, the slight of hand historians use when they cannot
find the evidence to prove that Richard III really did kill the
princes in the tower. If it wasn't for the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq
"would likely'' have possessed a nuclear weapon by 1993.
Iraq "retains the physical infrastructure need to build''
a nuclear weapon which is not the same thing as actually building
it. The phrase "should Iraq acquire fissile material'' doesn't
mean it has. And being told that Iraq's enthusiasm for nuclear
scientists "leaves little doubt'' about its appetite for
nuclear weapons isn't quite the same having it proved.
Maybe this supposition is true but is
that the evidence upon which America will go to war? The UN for
this was the emperor's message to the delegates sitting before
him could take it or leave it, join America in war or end up
like that old donkey, the League of Nations. Believe it or not,
Mr Bush actually mentioned the League, dismissing it as a talking
shop without adding that the US had refused to join.
But it was clear how Mr Bush would sell
his war on the back of 11 September. "Our greatest fear
is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions
when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to
kill on a massive scale,'' he said. And there you have it. Osama
bin Laden equals Saddam Hussein and who knows Iran or Syria or
anyone else. What was the name of that river which Julius Caesar
crossed? Was it not called the Rubicon? Yesterday, Mr Bush may
have crossed the very same river.
Today's
Features
Paul de Rooij
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James C. Faris
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at 100:
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Gary Leupp
Presidential
Honesty on Iraq
Tarif Abboushi
A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
and Addiction
Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
in Philly
New
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to Subscribers:
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Out of the Headlines;
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Groups Target Blacks Brave Enough to Talk About Justice in the
Middle East; Intimidation
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Famed Newport Folkfest Dissing of Electric Dylan Not True. The Catcalls were for Peter
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Shrike
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September
12, 2002
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary
of Occupation
James C.
Faris
Riefenstahl
at 100:
The Fascist Aesthetic
Gary Leupp
Presidential
Honesty on Iraq
Tarif Abboushi
A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
and Addiction
Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
in Philly
September
11, 2002
Anis Shivani
How to
Survive in Ashcroft's America
Pierre Tristam
Abusing
the Sorrows of 9/11
David Krieger
Resisting
Bush's
"Relentless War"
Jerre Skog
9/11 One
Year Later:
Remember the Others, Too
Dave Marsh
Illegal
Music?
A Sampler's Delight
Norm Dixon
How the
Warmongers Have Exploited 9/11
September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
Israeli Chief of Staff Calls Palestinians a "Cancerous Demographic
Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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