The United States of America has gone mad

Opinion

January 15, 2003

The United States of America has gone mad
John le Carré

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'm 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's still 
got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America 
could hurl at him at five minutes' 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.

"But will we win, Daddy?"

"Of course, child. It will all be over while you're still in bed."

"Why?"

"Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will get terribly 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 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.

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The author has also contributed to an openDemocracy debate on Iraq at 
www.openDemocracy.net