[Vision2020] 10-20-04 LA Times: If Le Carré Could Vote [by John le Carré]

[Art Deco aka W. Fox]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lecarre20oct20,1,3327698.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
COMMENTARY
If Le Carré Could Vote
By John le Carré
John le Carré is the author of "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," "Tinker, 
Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and many other novels.

October 20, 2004

Maybe there's one good reason - just one - for reelecting George W. Bush, and 
that's to force him to live with the consequences of his appalling actions and 
answer for his own lies, rather than wish the job on a Democrat who would then 
get blamed for his predecessor's follies.

Probably no American president in history has been so universally hated abroad 
as Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international 
treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and 
cultures, his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for 
misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war - and 
now anarchy - upon a country that like too many others around the world was 
suffering under a hideous dictatorship but had no hand in the events of 9/11, no 
weapons of mass destruction and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the 
United States in a dirty war against Iran.

Is your president a great war leader because he allowed himself to be 
manipulated by a handful of deluded ideologues? Is Tony Blair, my prime 
minister, a great war leader because he committed Britain's troops, foreign 
policy and domestic security to the same harebrained adventure?

You are voting in November. We will vote next year. Yet the outcome in both 
countries will in large part depend on the same question: How long can the lies 
last now that the truth has finally been told? The Iraq war was planned long 
before 9/11. Osama bin Laden provided the excuse. Iraq paid the price. American 
kids paid the price. British kids paid the price. Our politicians lied to us.

While Bush was waging his father's war at your expense, he was also ruining your 
country. He made your rich richer and your poor and unemployed more numerous. He 
robbed your war veterans of their due and reduced your children's access to 
education. And he deprived more Americans than ever before of healthcare.

Now he's busy cooking the books, burying deficits and calling in contingency 
funds to fight a war that his advisors promised him he could light and put out 
like a candle.

Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil liberties 
that took brave Americans 200 years to secure and were once the envy of a world 
that now looks on in horror, not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but at what 
you are doing to yourselves.

But please don't feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved. Give us back the 
America we loved, and your friends will be waiting for you. Here in Britain, for 
as long as we have Tony Blair singing the same lies as George W. Bush, your 
nightmares will be ours. 
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