Yep, that article doesn't open for me either anymore, but here is the full text:
John le Carre
TimesOnline UK | Opinion
Wednesday 15 January 2003
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.
