I love George Bush. Or at least I would love him, if he were a satirical comic rather than a global super-statesman. These days, when he comes on TV and says something, anything, our household breaks out in spontaneous laughter. Like the other night, when he popped up at a press conference, casual in shirtsleeves, to explain that the London bombings proved that Iraq was a center for terrorism.
This statement is funny on so many levels that I can barely decide where to begin. There’s the obvious point, of course, that it only became a “center for terrorism” at the point when George decided he was going to make it one, by invading it. Now the occupation of Iraq is seen around the Muslim world as a symbol of anti-Arab foreign policy, with the insurgents constantly making their violent protests against this being the only thing that stops US-UK forces from making a sharp exit.
No use pointing out that Saddam seemed anti-Arab enough anyway, what with the torture and genocide of his people, and his invasions of Iran and Kuwait. No use pointing out that suicide bombers in Iraq target Muslims, or that intervention in Kosovo and non-intervention in Darfur belie an anti-Muslim policy. No use either pointing out that Palestine is still the issue, and that if we turned our attention there, we’d find Israel and Palestine need all the help we can give.
This battle is not about truth or justice. It’s about fake propaganda on both sides, and which side’s lies and distortions are the ones to capture the greatest number of “hearts and minds”.
Bush’s statement is acknowledgment of what Tony Blair denied — that the English bombers were likely to have been motivated by Iraq. But the fact remains that watching Muslims blowing up other Muslims in Baghdad and deciding it would be heroic to do a similar thing in London, is not that bright.
Mind you, no part of this situation is amenable to logic. For while I fully believe in my statement that the insurgents are the only thing keeping the troops in Iraq, I also know that if they’d been hailed as the liberators of their imaginings, Bush and Blair would both be scrambling like the provocative fools they are to buy up the country in the service of neo-liberal globalization.
That’s part of the trouble with this script. Everyone is making it up as they go along.
It’s easy to see this is what Al-Qaeda is doing, with its panto villains popping up after atrocities, in order to imply a spurious ownership (though the sad fact is that this lame strategy works perfectly well). It’s easy to see that this is what Bush is doing too, with his tales of WMD, and his sad little pre-war corporate carve-up of Iraq.
And it’s easy to see what Blair is doing too. His own corruption is almost innocent in comparison to the other players in this great game. He believed that no matter why it was that Bush was making war against Iraq, all would come right as long as his own little motives were honorable.
He took his country to war on a false prospectus, claiming that he wanted to disarm a terror state with WMD, when what he really wanted was to be the little guy who took on the dictator and liberated the oppressed. Not a bad fantasy, but one that was never going to be achieved by tagging along with an army so hopelessly enmired in realpolitik.
Now, Blair won’t admit that he was wrong to do so. With this display of stubborn, moral cowardice, he continues to travel down the dark and twisted road that guarantees him a place in history as an idiot who wasn’t even useful.
