The Mexican, Carlos Fuentes is one of the great
writers of our time. He spoke out early on in the Bush
abomination, and here he is speaking out close to the
end of the Bush abomination.
Carlos Fuentes, Le Monde: Since God has no channel to answer Bush's absurdities in words, He does it through acts. One year after having declared the end of major military operations in Iraq - "Mission Accomplished" -, Bush confronts the brutal and naked reality of the war he on his own initiative needlessly unleashed. Chaos reigns in Iraq. The Bush government was not prepared for the war after the war: the violent peace in an occupied and resistant country...
The policies aimed at deterrence and containment have
been abandoned. The barbarous principle of preemptive
attack has been instituted. The competent authority
(the UN Security Council) has been treated with
contempt. The United States has snapped its fingers at
the principle of war as the last recourse by
unleashing its Shakespearean dogs without any legal
authority whatsoever. The requirement of a just motive
has been sidestepped in favor of the oil motive and
the contractual largesse showered on friends of
Bush...
How to exit this disaster? By eating one's hat. The
despised UN offers a new way, uncertain, but unique.
France's foreign policy, elaborated by Jacques Chirac
and put into motion by Dominique de Villepin, proposed
a political way out that is legal and rational. The
United States alone cannot assure a political
transition in Iraq. This task reverts to the UN and
consists in establishing a technocratic provisional
government that replaces the present puppet Council,
convokes a Constitutional Assembly, and allows the
real forces in Iraq, religious and secular, tribal and
nationalist, to express themselves.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://truthout.org/docs_04/052304H.shtml
The Adventures of Bush the Crackpot
By Carlos Fuentes
Le Monde
Wednesday 19 May 2004
"April is the cruelest month." Here we are; May 1st,
just a little over a year ago on the bridge of an
aircraft carrier close to the California coast, George
W. Bush, dressed up as an aviator declared: "Mission
Accomplished." One year later, the famous opening of
T.S. Eliot's Wasteland applies. The month of April
just past has been the cruelest of a "selected
presidency" (to use Susan Sontag's expression) that
owes its election more to the Supreme Court than to
voters.
While he was governor of Texas, Bush, according to
Richard A. Clarke in his best-seller Against All
Enemies, declared: "God wants me to be President."
Guided by the Almighty from the Highest Heavens, Bush
has recently confirmed his Messianism by asserting
that he does not obey his father, former president
George H. W. Bush, but the Most High: God in person.
Since God has no channel to answer Bush's
absurdities in words, He does it through acts. One
year after having declared the end of major military
operations in Iraq - "Mission Accomplished" -, Bush
confronts the brutal and naked reality of the war he
on his own initiative needlessly unleashed. Chaos
reigns in Iraq. The Bush government was not prepared
for the war after the war: the violent peace in an
occupied and resistant country.
The North American proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer,
aggravated the initial mistakes. He dismissed 30,000
officials of the Saddam regime, for the most part
members of the official Baath party. So from then on,
as long as it was not replaced, the bureaucracy ceased
to function, with chaotic consequences for the
country's administration.
That was May 16, 2003. On May 22, 2003, Bremer
proceeded to dissolve the Iraqi army, persuaded that
the "coalition" forces dominated by the United States
were going to impose the post-war order he expected.
Result: a half-million unemployed Iraqis, armed and
ready to fight, should the opportunity arise, on the
side of forces recruited against the occupier.
Bremer committed another colossal mistake when he
divided the Shi'ite majority's clerics who had opposed
Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime.
Such is the summary picture of post-war Iraq: a
North American occupation force confronts a tribal and
religious insurrection. The technological air war, the
master card in the Bush offensive, turned into what we
Mexicans, Central Americans, Vietnamese, Algerians,
Central Europeans and all people who have suffered the
rigor and disgrace of a foreign occupation know well:
the street by street, house by house fighting, with
growing losses for the invader. Today, gangs occupy
whole neighborhoods of Baghdad.
The invaders believed themselves to be liberators,
but the occupied people do not want "to be seen as a
United States' ally", according to the Polish Defense
Minister. This benefits chaos, as those Iraqis who
don't join the guerillas also don't fight against
them. Under such conditions, the North American
political plan has lost all credit.
A man without any local political support, Ahmed
Chalabi, a pure United States' marionette, was called
back from exile. The real forces on the ground -
Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds - didn't put off their
demonstration that there would be no new government in
Iraq without them. Impotent and pushed to the side,
Chalabi has also ended up turning against the United
States. The occupation itself has become untenable.
The United States can do nothing now but eat its hat;
in other words: admit it made a mistake.
Unbridled arrogance, "hubris" in Greek, is
expensive. "Take it or leave it," Bush declared as he
launched the war against Iraq. "With us or against us.
It doesn't matter. The United States can and will act
alone." A half-century earlier another rabid
imperialist, John Foster Dulles, had said: "The United
States doesn't have friends. It has interests." Today,
Advisor Condoleezza Rice echoes him. To hear her tell
it, the United States looks after its own interests
and not those of an "illusory international
community." This pride finds expression in acts that
are deadly for the "illusory" international community.
The policies aimed at deterrence and containment
have been abandoned. The barbarous principle of
preemptive attack has been instituted. The competent
authority (the UN Security Council) has been treated
with contempt. The United States has snapped its
fingers at the principle of war as the last recourse
by unleashing its Shakespearean dogs without any legal
authority whatsoever. The requirement of a just motive
has been sidestepped in favor of the oil motive and
the contractual largesse showered on friends of Bush.
One reason after another for going to war has melted
away. Saddam didn't have, had not had, and would never
have weapons of mass destruction. These, as the
disconcerting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
has admitted, were invoked to go to war for
"bureaucratic reasons". Once that pretext was
uncovered, a second was invented: to overthrow the
infamous Saddam Hussein, the United States' own
Frankenstein monster. However, why Saddam and not some
other of the dozens of big and little tyrants in our
world: Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the Burmese military junta,
the Korean despot Kim Jong-Il, the brutal Khadafi,
specialist in the art of bringing down airplanes full
of civilians and Washington's favorite son today as
Saddam was yesterday... ?
It's an oil war in which strategic appetites
prevailed over every other consideration.
Unsurprisingly, Bechtel, George Schulz's company,
obtained the first construction contract in Iraq.
An unjust and unnecessary war has lead to a long and
costly post-war: close to 800 Americans dead in
battle; 4,000-11,000 Iraqi civilians killed, a
monstrous regimen of humiliation and torture practiced
by United States' citizens in the prisons that were
once Saddam Hussein's deadly jails. I shall evoke
Kurtz words in Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "The
horror...the horror."
How to exit this disaster? By eating one's hat. The
despised UN offers a new way, uncertain, but unique.
France's foreign policy, elaborated by Jacques Chirac
and put into motion by Dominique de Villepin, proposed
a political way out that is legal and rational. The
United States alone cannot assure a political
transition in Iraq. This task reverts to the UN and
consists in establishing a technocratic provisional
government that replaces the present puppet Council,
convokes a Constitutional Assembly, and allows the
real forces in Iraq, religious and secular, tribal and
nationalist, to express themselves.
The Iraqi National Conference proposed by Chirac is
realistic. It doesn't exclude the occupying powers.
However, it does demand of the United States a high
level of that "humility" G. W. Bush made his 2000
electoral slogan. The task is not easy. The unity of
Iraq is at stake. In order to save it, the UN as well
as the United States must return to the path of
international law, so manhandled today, and
acknowledge that while there may be military
unilateralism, on the legal and economic fronts, there
can be no salvation without multilateralism.
This was the message delivered with vigorous clarity
by Mexico's former President, Ernesto Zedillo, at
Harvard in 2003. This was the message of former
Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to the
French National Assembly: terrorism can be vanquished
only by a global cooperation sensitive to the wounds
that serve as its growth medium. This was the message
of Dominique de Villepin, for whom "only respect for
the law gives strength legitimacy and legitimacy
strength ". This was Harry Truman's message when he
founded the UN in San Francisco: "We must all
acknowledge that however great our power, we must deny
ourselves the freedom of doing whatever we want." This
was the Bill Clinton's message in 1999: "Let us
abandon the illusion that we may forever reserve for
ourselves that which we refuse to others."
And-referring to Pascal's timeless wisdom -
incapable of making what is right, strong; let us make
whatever is strong, right.
By attacking a tyrant who had no connections to
al-Qaeda or bin Laden, Bush put the struggle against
the terrorists off for later and gave them the
opportunity to grow stronger and to strike Morocco and
Spain. He easily conquered a weakened Iraq, brought to
its knees by the sanctions and embargo stemming from
the Gulf War. Moreover, he allowed Islamic
fundamentalists to gain strength even as he pushed
them towards the mosques. Because US-backed
authoritarian regimes had monopolized local political
power, the fundamentalists had few competitors.
The greatest paradox of all is that the North
American victory has found expression in a weakening
of the United States both inside and outside Iraq. Its
most solid alliances have been cracked, its policy has
been rejected by a great majority of the world and it
will have to pay an enormous economic bill for the
adventures of George W. Bush, the Crackpot.
North American military expenditures have risen to
350 billion dollars a year, some 36 % of world
military expenses, and more than that of the sum of
nine next highest nations on the list. Nonetheless,
such sums are insufficient to subjugate and govern one
country, Iraq, let alone to open new possible and
probable fronts.
Who is paying for the war? A class-based economic
policy, according to economist Paul Krugman. A
right-wing Keynesianism that converts a surplus into a
deficit through an increase in military expenditures,
tax reduction, protectionism, and the rescue of
failing companies.
Unilateralism damages the United States politically
and economically. It hurts the standard of living
since the country is too dependent on foreign energy
and capital. The society's internal demands are too
great to allow endless expenditures for military
domination.
The Democratic candidate, John Kerry, tackles these
subjects belatedly and slowly only. The Massachusetts
senator represents above all a major opportunity for
North American diplomacy: to provide the United States
with the credibility Bush's mistaken policies have
lost it. Who will be able to believe Bush again the
next time he cries: "Wolf!"
-------
Carlos Fuentes is a writer.
Carmen Val Julian translated the original (Mexico)
Spanish into French.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language
correspondent Leslie Thatcher.