From The Madison Capital Times, 8/18/03:
http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/guest/54958.php
Bush's lie tactics to make case for Iraq war are Orwellian
By David Rozelle
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of
the indefensible."
- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
Our time is still George Orwell's time.
The year may be 2003, but never in history has the clock ticked more
Orwellian than it ticks at this moment in America.
Exploded, like excuses on Judgment Day, are the lies, distortions and
innuendoes that George W. Bush used to stampede us into war with Iraq.
There were no Iraqi nuclear weapons.
There were no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
No Mephistophelean bargain had been struck in the desert between
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
In "defense of the indefensible," George W. Bush lied to us.
Oil?
What oil?
Even Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Thomas Friedman have gone
"1984" on us.
Bush finds himself stripped all but naked to his final falsehoods:
that the war was a "good war" because Saddam Hussein was a bad man.
That we conquered, devastated, occupied and spilled the blood of
thousands of human beings to rescue not only Iraq, but to save our
America.
And the estimable Friedman concurs.
In the Aug. 3 edition of The New York Times, Friedman argues, with a
straight face, that the United States had sent a "message" to the
Middle East that we are "not going to sit back and let them incubate
suicide bombers and religious totalitarians."
Has it not struck him yet that the war appears to have had precisely
the opposite effect?
Has it not occurred to him that by that Strangelovian twist of logic,
a Paul Wolfowitz or Donald Rumsfeld might propose shattering South
Korea to stop North Korea from amassing nuclear weapons?
No one among us doubts Saddam's malevolence.
None of us disputes his "evil."
But why, we should ask ourselves as a nation, why him?
Why choose to end - by violent, bankrupting intervention - Saddam
Hussein's evil in particular?
The world is much larger than Friedman's Middle East, and the wider
world is awash in monstrous evil, too.
No oil, but monstrous evil.
A few weeks ago, Amnesty International, the global human rights
organization, made available to its members - and undoubtedly to
journalists like Friedman - a map on which it pinpointed "major human
crises in the world."
Iraq was one.
But only one among 16.
The map crisscrossed the planet from Nepal to Guatemala, Burundi to
Indonesia, North Korea to Algeria, Liberia to the Philippines, to name
just half of the bloodthirsty regimes fingered by Amnesty
International.
Among the crimes against humanity being committed by these
governments, according to the organization, are these: unlawful
killings, disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrests, prisoners of
conscience, ill treatment in prison camps, secret detention,
extrajudicial executions, mistreatment of children in custody, rape,
etc.
Sound familiar?
And these 16 malodorous regimes represent only the worst cases.
Burma and Zimbabwe, for example, aren't even on the "short" list.
So, again, why attack Iraq?
Or is the melancholy truth, as Friedman also propounds, that in order
to get the American public to make Iraq a "war of choice - but a good
choice," Bush had to lie to make Iraq a "war of necessity"?
"People in democracies," the widely read columnist calmly asserts,
"don't like to fight wars of choice."
Kudos, Thomas Friedman.
Neither Paul Wolfowitz nor Hermann Goering nor Machiavelli himself
could have phrased that awful axiom more succinctly - or cynically.
In waging this war, the Bush administration has given us its answer to
a question that points at the heart of democratic governance:
What is a president supposed to do when his nation's citizens might
not sanction what he thinks is right?
Lie is the answer from this administration, and from a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist.
Defend the indefensible.
Lie to us for our own good.
But that's not the end of it.
When all is said and done, once that Orwellian tack has been taken by
the leader of a democratic nation, how are we to know he isn't also
lying when he tells us what he thinks is good?
Thomas Friedman sure as hell won't help.
All we can know for certain at this point about this government is
that oil's good if you're from Texas.
So are money and power and snakeskin boots.
That's no lie.
Meanwhile, George Orwell turns in his grave with the tens of thousands
of lives needlessly lost - and still being lost - during The Liar's
War of 2003.
____________________________________________________
"These lies are like their father that begets them, gross
as a mountain, open, palpable."
Henry IV, Part 1, act 2, sc. 4
Harry
.
|
