Editor's Note | The title is a wordplay. Bushery is pronounced "boucherie" in French. Boucherie means butchery/mass killings.
"Bushery"
By Eric Fottorino
Le Monde
Monday 20 September 2004
Behind the numbers, there are the deaths. All kinds of deaths. Civilians and military, those with "weapons in hand" and those "who were just passing by that way" who will never again pass by anywhere.
Iraq has become an enormous statistic of violent mortality. So here we trace curves, fill out diagrams to create a more removed version of this humdrum horror, but how speaking it is, screaming even.
A religious leader explained this weekend to our Baghdad special envoy Rémy Ourdan (Le Monde 19-20 September): The Americans kill forty times more civilians than fighters. And those civilians have fathers, brothers, and sons who will not know any peace until they've avenged their deaths.
So all this is going to continue. Time and blood run out together. Hostage takings multiply, after the French journalists, after the two Americans and a Briton, comes the turn of Turkish truck drivers, abducted and murdered.
The killing machine is running lose and no one capable of stopping it.
In the United States, these deaths in Iraq are not spoken of in the election campaign. We see members of the movement Military Families Against the War speaking out, wearing t-shirts reading: "President Bush, you have killed my son."
Ever since the White House launched this war, every day is a day of mourning in America, every day is a tornado, the end of the world in which they believed in their own invincibility, and enjoyed the feeling of being right. "Right" infuses. The right that might makes.
In spite of this supposedly won war, however, more than a thousand American soldiers have died. Kofi Annan considers it "illegal" and the weapons of mass destruction would have almost become a reason to laugh, if the laugh had not been paid for in so many lives.
What can be going through the head of the United States' president, a candidate for his own reelection, when everything that he has said is revealed to be false, when every one of his choices is a mistake?
One could believe that in his conscience he looks for an opportunity to redeem himself, to stop the massacre. Maybe he'll wake up tomorrow after a bad night to decide: "The next person who dies over there, I'll withdraw American forces and hand Iraq over to the United Nations."
The next person who dies...Angelicism is not in fashion. Bush persists and Iraq bleeds. He would be wrong to recant. It seems that his people applaud when he pronounces a sentence such as: "America and the world are safer with Saddam in a cell."
We could have sworn the opposite. I would bet without any pleasure that terrorism has become more organized, more dangerous, with constantly more killing candidates trying to make that warrior for The Good, "W.", swallow his own smugness.
Yesterday, eminent members of the Republican Party criticized the president's "mistakes or incompetence" in Iraq. I could not believe my ears. An attack of wisdom?
Not at all. These strategists consider urgent...a new ground offensive, including the deployment of 70,000 more soldiers and 25,000 more marines. In short, another "Bushery".
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