[A-List] Robert Fisk on US imperialism

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Robert Fisk: The mantra that means this time it's serious
The Independent, 13 September 2002

How small he looked in the high-backed chair. You had to sit in the
auditorium of the UN General Assembly yesterday to realise that George
Bush Jnr - 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.