It's under Bush's bed!
Paulo Coelho
Wednesday February 26, 2003
The Guardian
Bearing in mind that the president of the most powerful nation in
the world is responsible for his actions and knows what he is
talking about, I - a Brazilian writer, with no access to the secret
services, the UN inspection procedure or confidential files, but
able to read newspapers with a degree of intelligence - have
come up with the definitive answer on how to locate the
weapons of mass destruction being hidden by Iraq. I will require
payment for this information, by the way.
This is how to locate the weapons, step-by-step:
1. All UN weapons inspectors currently in Iraq should pack their
bags, settle their hotel bills and drive to Baghdad airport.
2. There they should buy business class air tickets to
Washington. I stress business class so that they have time to
rest, as the journey will involve a number of stopovers.
3. On reaching Washington, they should catch the first bus to
the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. The
address can be found in the telephone directory for Virginia.
4. On reaching CIA headquarters, and armed with the
appropriate UN inspection mandate, they should demand to see
all photos, information and documents being supplied to Mr
George Bush. These are the documents pinpointing the precise
location of each arms cache that allow Mr Bush to assure us
that Iraq has an arsenal capable of destroying the planet.
5. Once in possession of these documents, they should return
to Iraq (again they should fly business class in order to arrive
feeling rested) and go immediately to the places indicated in the
photographs. Unable to deny the evidence, Saddam Hussein will
have no option but to destroy his arsenal, for fear that the whole
world will turn against him.
6. If the CIA does not have the documents, the inspectors
should go straight to Mr George Bush's bedroom in the White
House, Washington. On the way, they should avoid all contact
with the thousands of American demonstrators taking part in
protests against the war in Iraq.
7. If Mr George Bush fails to cooperate with the UN inspectors,
they should look for the evidence under his bed. If they do not
find it there, they should go and see the president's
psychoanalyst, having first equipped themselves with a mandate
from the UN security council, and ask the following question:
"Does a son necessarily have to complete his father's work?" If
the answer is yes, please advise me at once: my father was a
civil engineer and, when he retired, he may well have left
unfinished projects for his heir to deal with.
If the answer is no, demand that the psychoanalyst - on behalf
of the UN, the US and the rest of the world - prescribe the
necessary medication to his patient so that he no longer
constitutes a threat to his country and to his planet.
This is the required method of payment:
Once this infallible line of action has been followed, I ask that
the billions of dollars that would have been spent on the war be
divided up in the following manner:
1. 50% to help the poor in Brazil, since the president of Brazil is
currently grappling with a huge budget deficit, and because the
author of this practical guide is himself Brazilian.
2. 40% to go to Africa.
3. 9% to old Europe, which wavered but did not fall - at least not
up until now, the day on which I am writing this article.
4. 1% to pay for a nice biography of Tony Blair, to be translated
into 40 languages, in hard cover, with colour photographs,
saying what a great leader he is, how intelligent, important,
charismatic, handsome and charming. That should be enough to
keep him content, in the knowledge that his remarkable qualities
have been recognised.
Finally, it is important to add the following: when speaking about
the war, please do not generalise and say: "Americans all want
to attack Iraq." We have made the same mistake before, in
saying that "Serbs are all butchers", "Brazilians are all lazy", or
"Iranians are all fundamentalists".
The people who want to attack Iraq are the politicians
surrounding George Bush, the Enron orphans. The American
people are fully aware of what is going on, and just as they
managed to stop the war in Vietnam, they may, when no
convincing explanations are forthcoming, manage to persuade
Mr Bush's psychoanalyst to prescribe a sedative and put an end
to this nightmare.
This article is a contribution to the openDemocracy debate on
the Iraqi crisis published on www.opendemocracy.net
Paulo Coelho is a bestselling novelist
comment@guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk |
