A rchive Date
[ 11-10-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Calgary/Bill_Kaufmann/2004/10/11/664387.html
Dubya shameless
Serving up apple-pie opiate
By Bill Kaufmann - Calgary Sun
Mon, October 11, 2004
Those with a shred of shame wouldn't even show their faces in public, let alone peddle them across the country. But there they are - smiling garishly while soaking up the mindless adulation of pre-selected crowds. Life is great.
It's a high-fiving G. W. Bush and Dick Cheney frolic!
Celebrated amidst balloons and placards are the U.S. bombers that pound Iraqi cities, destroying them to "liberate" them for the third time, but who's counting?
Even U.S. stooges like Iraq's interim president Gazi Yawar made the admission that some of the bombings amount to collective punishment - just another war crime.
Children are pulled from the aftermath, crushed to a pulp.
There are orphans aplenty, but no WMD.
Bush kisses babies and pumps it up for family values.
Cockpit video from a U.S. F-16 depicts the pilot gleefully - "oh, dude" - obliterating a number of apparently unarmed civilians in Fallujah.
Onstage, Bush calls Iraqi guerrillas "the exact opposite of Americans - we value life and human dignity."
In Baghdad, a car bomb that kills and maims U.S. troops also incinerates three unfortunate Iraqis in a passing car "so badly mangled it took the wailing relatives more than a day to extract the corpses," reports Newsweek's Rod Nordland.
"Freedom is on the march," proclaims Bush, when he's not whimpering about how "hard" his job is.
It's hard work turning the most secular country in the Mideast into a terrorist playground and civil war hell while pretending every day it's a success.
Harder still was going cap-in-hand to the UN last month, pleading for help once scorned while masking the begging with more tough-guy talk guaranteed to deepen the alienation.
A silver irony of the Bush failure in Iraq is that rampant insecurity prevents journalists from travelling the country and revealing just how miserable things really are.
For Bush, ignorance is bliss, but not all is enchantment.
Wall Street Journal reporter Farna Fasshi, a prisoner in her Baghdad digs has seen enough to issue a well-known e-mail.
"The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed into this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle," she wrote.
Back in the homeland last week, Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld admits there was never any "strong, hard evidence" linking Saddam to al-Qaida - a whole new tune.
As to why his other assurance, on WMDs, didn't pan out, Rumsfeld offers "I'm not in a position to say." Of course he's not - he's the secretary of defence.
Barely a day goes by without more lies and incompetence being confirmed - often by Bush's own people - including former Baghdad viceroy Paul Bremer, who now argues the occupation was botched from the start.
"There was planning, but planning for a situation that didn't arise," says Bremer, whose White House bosses were endlessly warned, advised and informed of the likely outcome.
We're told last week by Bush's experts any WMD Saddam might have had a decade ago were primarily to deter Iran.
That Saddam fought Iran was thus finally verified; American soldiers - you're dying to defend the ayatollahs.
At the same time, triggermen for boy blunder Bush are honing a sweeping indictment of John Kerry's Iraq policy.
Standup comedians everywhere await the mother-lode.
Meanwhile on the Guantanamo file, a senior insider says virtually no vital information has been gleaned from inmates - the vast majority innocent of any terrorist ties.
Hopefully, all that wasted torture and America's gutted image were worth the trouble.
For cowboy Bush, riding herd on this goat rodeo, all that matters is that the flock remain united in fear and ignorance.
Strategic confusion has its uses, as in "as long as we're bombing someone, anyone over there, we can feel safer," tempered by "we're bringing them freedom and liberty."
Though his own commission concludes Saddam was a disarmed, waning threat, Bush can still smirk like a champ and tell his assembled appeasers he's made them so much safer.
Tuning in to a Bush campaign rally is pure escapism - a trip to the cinema peopled with shiny, happy extras where a dyslexic reality is an apple-pie opiate.
In the real world, Marine reservist Jeffrey Lucey, 23, hung himself last June 22 at his Massachusetts home - tortured by memories he claimed included the execution of Iraqi prisoners and American troops gunning down fleeing civilians.
For Bush, it's still not "hard work" showing his face in public.
Email: bill.kaufmann@calgarysun.com Letters to the editor should be sent to: callet@calgarysun.com Home Page
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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