The _resident's Coalition of the Witless is coming
apart at the seams, just as his campaign for
*election* is coming apart at the seams...
There are very dangerous days...
Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald: The French
Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, was straight
up in his assessment of the first year. "The war in
Iraq was a mistake, I would even say, a blunder. We
cannot fail to see that there are two centres that
feed terrorism today: the first is the Middle East
crisis, the second is Iraq." Right behind him was the
European Commission President, Romano Prodi. "It
happens in Iraq as elsewhere - Istanbul, Moscow,
Madrid. The terrorism that the war in Iraq was
supposed to stop is infinitely more powerful today
than it was a year ago." There have been at least as
many terrorist operations in the past year as there
were in the previous 12 months, and that is with an
estimated two-thirds of al-Qaeda's known leadership
dead or behind bars.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/21/1079823239710.html
The Bush doctrine has been turned on its head
March 22, 2004
The invasion of Iraq has frustrated the fight against
terrorism, writes Paul McGeough in Baghdad.
It is late at night and there is gunfire out in the
city, but Baghdad is eerily quiet for the first
anniversary of the start of the war.
The loudest noise came from Washington: George Bush's
troubled plea for unity in the face of world
terrorism. Disagreements "among old and valued
friends", he said disingenuously, "belong to the
past".
Bush is working to corral his postwar coalition in
Iraq. But, as it frays at the edges, British diplomats
are working up a new attempt to legitimise the Iraq
campaign with a proper United Nations mandate.
Consider:
The Spanish are pulling out unless the UN takes over,
and President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland says he
was "taken for a ride" by the US on Saddam Hussein's
supposed weapons of mass destruction.
The Koreans have baulked at moving 3000 troops to
Kirkuk in the north of Iraq, because they fear for
their security; and when the Japanese arrived in the
south - to protect the Iraqi people - they promptly
wrote a cheque for $US95 million ($126 million) for
the local tribes to protect them from the Iraqi
people.
Honduras is sticking with its plan to withdraw 300
soldiers in July, and when Bush recently met the Dutch
Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende pointedly refused
to say how long he would leave his 1300 troops in
Iraq.
Small beer, perhaps. But it is all symptomatic of
rising anger and tension among the old and valued
friends at the insistence of Bush - who may well be
judged by history to have been the ventriloquist's
doll for the ideologues around him - that his very
necessary war on terrorism did not need to be swamped
by war and its uncertain aftermath in Iraq.
But the old friends just get bolshier. The French
Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, was straight
up in his assessment of the first year. "The war in
Iraq was a mistake, I would even say, a blunder. We
cannot fail to see that there are two centres that
feed terrorism today: the first is the Middle East
crisis, the second is Iraq."
Right behind him was the European Commission
President, Romano Prodi. "It happens in Iraq as
elsewhere - Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid. The terrorism
that the war in Iraq was supposed to stop is
infinitely more powerful today than it was a year
ago."
There have been at least as many terrorist operations
in the past year as there were in the previous 12
months, and that is with an estimated two-thirds of
al-Qaeda's known leadership dead or behind bars.
The arch villain - Osama bin Laden - remains free and
his terrorist organisation has morphed into something
even more dangerous than what existed before the
September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
Previously, bin Laden's lieutenants went out into the
world, buying into terrorist plots they thought to be
worthwhile investments. Subsequently, the Bush
Administration, with echoes from Tony Blair and John
Howard, has enhanced the myth that it is all - and
only - bin Laden's work.
What seems to have happened is more insidious.
The notion of a bin Laden chain of command has been
superseded by a sort of McDonald's of terrorism,
franchise cells and groups that want to be like
al-Qaeda, carrying a torch for the man in the cave
without ever receiving direct orders. The word simply
goes out in the Arab media and it is absorbed - war
against the US. And when they strike, they pack the
punch by claiming that it was done in the name of
al-Qaeda.
The CIA director, George Tenet, told the US Senate as
much this month when he said: "A serious threat will
remain for the foreseeable future, with or without
al-Qaeda in the picture."
And Blair's special representative for Iraq, Jeremy
Greenstock, almost as though he was surprised by the
outcome, applied the Tenet dictum to Iraq when he
warned of the damage to the country and its people
from terrorism. "Something new has grown in this area.
It has happened in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in
Colombia, in the Middle East peace process and now
it's threatening Western Europe - it's already
happened in Madrid.
"Iraq is a now a theatre where they're trying to
maximise this damage."
Between them, it is an admission that the war in Iraq
has helped al-Qaeda and its followers.
The hotel from which I write, The Palestine, was
crowded with the first of the foreign fighters to
arrive in Iraq in the first week of war last year.
They have long since fanned out around the country and
they are thought to number several hundred, working
with the desperate and the nationalist in Iraq to
capitalise on Arab anger as they challenge the Western
invasion of a Muslim country and, at the same time,
attempt to split the Bush coalition.
In Iraq and elsewhere, they have turned the Bush
doctrine on its head. Just as Bush went after the
terrorists and those who harboured them, and
threatened those who would not support him, the
terrorist attacks in Iraq and beyond have been against
those who have helped Bush.
The protest marches around the world this weekend and
the fraying at the edges of the Iraq coalition,
especially the outcome of the Spanish election, raise
a dire question: is terrorism winning over democracy?
Superficially, maybe.
But something more fundamental is happening, something
very democratic: leaders are being held to account,
because the Bush case for war in Iraq has been proved
to be a lie that was supported by Blair and Howard.
We were told the war was to get rid of Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction - they did not exist. It
was to save us from the link between Saddam and
al-Qaeda - there was none. This was to be a quick war
- the soldiers were to be welcomed with songs and
flowers, but they will be stuck here for years to come
and it might be a civil war that gives birth to the
new Iraq - not Bush's liberation.
Some good has come of it all - Saddam is gone and
Libya has come into line. Syria is nervous. But North
Korea and Iran still play nuclear hardball, and the
Palestine-Israel stalemate continues to pollute daily
life right across the Middle East. And US military
resources and world attention have been distracted
almost totally from the fight against terrorism.
The goal of freedom for all is fine, even if Bush came
to it for the Iraqis 13 years too late and only after
the rest of his spurious case for war fell apart. And
it is not enough to drape the country in the flag; to
insist that "we must support the troops" by not
debating why they are here; and to have the aimless
ra-ra of the State of the Union address. That is the
sort of theatre Saddam engaged in.
Enough has leaked from the White House to confirm that
the war was a decision made before it was justified.
This weekend there was more evidence - Richard Clarke,
Bush's counter-terrorism co-ordinator in September,
2001, told American 60 Minutes that within 24 hours of
the attacks the Administration was convinced that
al-Qaeda was responsible, but the Defence Secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, had complained that "there aren't any
good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good
targets in Iraq".
Rumsfeld obsesses about uncertainty. As explained to
The Atlantic Monthly by one of his deputies, Douglas
Feith: "the need to deal strategically with
uncertainty; the inability to predict the future; the
limits on our knowledge and the limits on our
intelligence". That's a windy way of saying that the
end justifies the means.
But people are not as stupid as the White House would
like. Just as Spanish voters saw what their government
was doing - using the Madrid bombing for an
election-eve smash at ETA, the Basque separatists,
when everything pointed to al-Qaeda - the brutalised
people of Iraq are the same.
They are indeed grateful to be rid of Saddam, but they
loathe this occupation; they deeply resent the
security crisis it has visited on them; and they feel
humiliated by it. And they openly mock the superpower
that said: "It'll all come right."
The US in Iraq is still demonstrating what it cannot
do, not what it can do. Already it is retreating to
the safety of its "hard" bases and talking up the
competence of Iraq's incompetent new security and
emergency services - which have had less training than
the security staff at your local Target store - so
that it can foist the mess on them when sovereignty is
handed over on June 30.
But the US is so entrenched in Iraq that it is hard to
see it being able to devote its full resources to
fighting terrorism any time soon.