Look out, world
July 6th, 2003
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has reaped a whirlwind of anger in the British Parliament as well as among ordinary Britons for lying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But US President George W. Bush has managed to avoid the same fate and even retain his popularity among Americans.
In Britain, the bases for Blair’s going to war in Iraq have been subjected to public inquiry, during which members of his own Labour Party have accused him of leading Britain to war through disinformation. In the United States, the half-hearted congressional hearings on whether Bush manipulated intelligence data to justify war have been held behind closed doors under tight control by members of Bush’s own Republican Party.
Not even the Democratic Party opposition has dared raise in Congress charges that Bush may have lied in bringing the US to war. The Republicans, in whose ranks there is absolutely no sign of the rebellion evident in the British Labour Party, have adopted a “go-slow” approach, in an effort to preempt a media and public outcry.
No such outcry seems forthcoming. Despite the distinct possibility that he indeed used intelligence data selectively, and quite possibly embellished or even manufactured them to justify the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s job approval ratings are at a comfortable 56 percent. Some 52 percent of Americans also tend to support Bush by saying that he might have “stretched the truth” but did not make false statements when he and his officials presented “evidence” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the United States.
At most, the public opinion surveys taken in recent weeks reveal “growing discomfort” over the failure of US and British forces to find the WMDs-consisting of chemical, biological, and even nuclear weaponry-Bush and company had claimed Saddam had stockpiled and was prepared to use.
Some analysts predict that Bush, who is up for reelection in 2004, will win a second term, not only because of public support, but also because of the vast amounts of campaign funds he has managed to raise from corporate and other sources.
Prime Minister Blair’s future is not as secure. Described by Nelson Mandela early this year as “Bush’s foreign minister,” Blair has had to face increasingly angry questions from Parliament, including members of his own Labour Party, over his having “embellished the evidence to the point of misleading Parliament and the public at a vital timer relating to peace and war.”
Clare Short and Robin Cook, two of Blair’s former Cabinet members who resigned in protest over his war policy, have also testified before one of two Parliamentary committees looking into the issue. Short bluntly accused Blair of duping the British public to swing public opinion in favor of war, while Cook declared that “Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy, we [the British government] used intelligence to justify a policy on which we had already settled.”
Cook’s remark applies equally to Bush, however. It is evident not only from the fact that no WMDs (which Blair said last September, 2002, could be launched within 45 minutes of an order to use them) have been found in Iraq. It is also evident from the statements of the US’ own intelligence services-and even those of superhawk Donald Rumsfeld.
The US Defense Secretary said last week, “I don’t know anybody in government or any intelligence agency who suggested that the Iraqis have nuclear weapons.” That statement is itself an outright lie (CIA director George Tenet claimed last October that Iraq had nuclear weapons; Vice President Dick Cheney made a similar claim early this year). But it also indicates that the United States government has no proof that Iraq ever had nuclear weapons.
Bush and company in fact led the trans-Atlantic US-British government chorus alleging Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMDs. Blair was at best only a second voice. And yet it’s Blair who’s getting the flak while Bush appears to be well on his way to reelection. While there have been demands for public hearings and even the impeachment of Bush in the United States, these have been very limited. For the most part the American public appears to accept Bush’s claim that “revisionist historians” are undermining the correctness of the US invasion of Iraq.
The key to the difference in US and British reactions lies in the character of the British and American publics. Despite their long history of conquest and colonial rule, the British seem more ready to question the morality of their government’s policies. Part of the reason is the relative pluralism of views in the British media, compared to the appalling unanimity of opinion one finds in the US press. (A number of studies, including by US media watch groups, have established not only that unanimity, but also a concerted effort to achieve it by the US media in collaboration with government.) Even more critically, there is little among the British public of the “my-country-right or wrong” chauvinism and accompanying messianism evident among most Americans.
Bush and company’s rhetoric about liberating oppressed peoples and bringing them the blessings of democracy resonates across classes in the United States, where the general consensus is that the United States, being the best of all possible worlds, has the right-even the responsibility-to refashion the world in its own image.
This view is the underlying assumption even in the complaints by US soldiers now in Iraq. One soldier interviewed by the Washington Post, for example, demanded that US soldiers be returned home-but not because there is anything fundamentally wrong with invading another country and overthrowing a sovereign state, but because “we will not change the culture they have in Iraq, in Baghdad. Baghdad is so corrupted…”
The assumption is that this other culture, perceived as corrupt and benighted, needs changing, and therefore does not invite respect. This assumption has informed the methods the US occupation forces have been using to enforce their will on Iraq. These methods have included humiliating house to house searches, patting down suspected “terrorists” including women, and generally ignoring the values of another culture, about which the US soldiery have only the vaguest idea. The result has been to blame the “corrupted” culture of the victims themselves, rather than to question the morality and plain rationality of invading another country, killing its citizens, and destroying its infrastructure.
The same assumption that the United States knows best underlies the views of the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff on what he claims is “one of the central moral questions for our time,” which he identifies as “when to intervene militarily on humanitarian grounds.”
Kristoff presumably went to college, unlike the soldier the Post interviewed, and he describes himself as a “dove” on the question of war with Iraq. But he can’t escape looking at the world and defining the US’ alleged moral dilemmas as equally that of the rest of the world’s.
Kristof in fact accepts “Bush’s broadest principle, that some countries are so drenched in blood that we [the United States] should invade to save their peoples.” Kristof does not mention Iran and Syria, on which the eyes of Bush and company are currently focused, but he does mention the “need” for intervention elsewhere, for example in the Congo and Liberia. Applying the same principle, there would be no end to this need-which means perpetual war and human suffering multiplied. But that’s a question Kristof does not see as an even more central moral issue.
Assumed in his view is US wisdom over what constitutes right and wrong for entire nations and continents, and what’s worse, the US right to intervene for their own good. Though clothed in liberal raiment (intervention brings democracy), Kristof’s view is no more than a 21st century version of the very same imperialism that more than a hundred years ago brought Rudyard Kipling to heights of ecstasy over the white man’s burden.
The iron link of consensual prejudice between know-nothing soldier and “liberal” columnist demonstrates that, whether led by a liar, a war monger, and/or an idiot driven by no more than the lust for oil or not, the United States is likely to continue on its path to the conquest and remaking of the world because public opinion and the media support it.
Bush has apparently touched something fundamental in the American subconscious, including those of “doves” like Kristof, where there are vast reserves of ill will for other cultures, and a desire to impose on the rest of the world the superiority of American values. Whether duped or not, educated or not, Americans are in basic agreement with the Bush government’s messianic drive-and the world had better watch out.
(Today/abs-cbnnews.com, July 5, 2003)