[Vision2020] War & terrorism

[Ralph Nielsen]

Chris Rowthorn: 'Bush couldn't have done any worse'

  Date: Monday, September 12 @ 09:55:25 EDT
Topic: War & Terrorism

  By Chris Rowthorn

  If George W. Bush had sat down and deliberately
planned to endanger the future security of the nation,
to diminish our standing in the world, to empty the
national coffers, to raise oil prices, and to imperil
the lives of all Americans, both at home and abroad,
for generations to come, he couldn't succeeded more
completely. The simple fact is this: short of doing
something completely unimaginable, like starting a
nuclear war or invading Mecca, George W. Bush COULD
NOT HAVE DONE ANY WORSE for the United States.

  Think about it: When Bush started his presidency,
Iraq was a stable secular Sunni nation that posed no
threat to the security of the United States. It even
supplied America with 712,000 barrels per day of oil,
which the United States purchased via third-party
countries like Russia and China. And when this Iraq
debacle is finally over, what will be left? At best,
Iraq will be a fundamentalist Shiite theocracy that
will quickly ally itself with neighboring Shiite Iran,
and almost certainly become an enemy of the United
States. At worst, it will become a failed state,
something like Afghanistan after the Russians left, an
open sore in the Middle East, where America's enemies
come from all over the world to train in Al Qaeda-run
terrorist training camps.

  This should be obvious to anyone who has been
watching the situation in Iraq. As Larry C. Johnson, a
former Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department's
Office of Counter Terrorism, pointed out in an article
on Davidcorn.com recently, victory for the Bushies now
entails suppressing the Sunni-led insurgency long
enough so that the Shiite-dominated parliament can
form something like a stable government. Put more
simply, the United States is spending hundreds of
billions of dollars, and wasting thousands of young
American lives, so that it can construct another
fundamentalist Islamic state in the heart of the
Middle East.

  Do you see what this means for the country? If Bush
'succeeds,' he will have constructed a future enemy
state. If he fails, he will have constructed the
world's largest terrorist training camp. Is this not a
tragicomic spectacle of truly historic proportions?
Can you not hear the derisive laughter howling from
all corners of the world, as the enemies and critics
of the United States savor the spectacle of this
ignorant boy-king single-handedly reversing the
fortunes of this great country?

  And, as Johnson pointed out, the Bushies cannot and
will not commit sufficient resources to defeat the
Sunni-led insurgency. Thus, it seems that the second
of the two alternatives is the inevitable outcome:
Bush will have spent close to a trillion dollars to
create another failed state in the Middle East ˆ a
terrorist training camp for decades to come.

  And, more importantly, in the process, he will have
provided the rationale for generations of future
terrorists to train there and to commit untold
atrocities against Western targets. For you would have
to be comatose to miss the truly historic implications
of the pictures which surfaced from Abu Ghraib, and
the stories of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo
Bay (both of which were caused directly by Bush's
actions and words). George W. Bush HAS LITERALLY
SIGNED THE DEATH WARRANTS OF THOUSANDS, EVEN HUNDREDS
OF THOUSANDS OF WESTERNERS OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL
DECADES. He has plunged the West into a permanent
state of war with Islam from which it cannot escape,
however hard future politicians may try.

  This truly historic blunder (although this seems like
a far too mild word) might be excusable if there was
some acceptable rationale for invading Iraq. But,
there was none. The Bushies only ever had one goal in
invading Iraq: OIL. That is, Oil, Israel and Land (as
in bases). This was all clearly spelled out in The
Project for the New American Century's manifesto
titled 'Rebuilding America's Defenses,' published in
2000 (and signed by the chief architects of the
invasion: Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld). Thus, the
entire invasion was based on lies and deceit. This
catapults the blunder to an entirely different level.
It was a disastrous and COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY
blunder. English lacks the proper word to describe a
failure of this nature and magnitude.

  If you subscribe to an apocalyptic version of
Christianity, in which you believe that the end is
near, and may even be hastened by bringing to pass
Armageddon, then perhaps this is not such an alarming
prospect. For everyone else, this is the worst
possible news. For Bush has Israelized the entire
West: We will now live in a world where crossing every
border is a humiliating ordeal of searches and
interrogation; where our public places are patrolled
with men bearing machine guns; and where hundreds or
thousands of us are subject to instant death at a
moment's notice.

  In short, if Bush had purposely set out to do as
badly as possible for the United States and the world, he
simply could not have done any worse.

  Mission accomplished indeed.

***

Chris Rowthorn is an American journalist based in
Japan. He has written for The Japan Times and now
writes almost exclusively for Lonely Planet
Guidebooks. He can be reached at
rowthorninjapan at yahoo.com.