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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (9165)	3/21/2004 12:45:16 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

The foreign leaders who want Kerry to win and restore pride and decency to American politics. The year of delusion By Mike Carlton March 20, 2004 And so we enter the second year of the Iraq war with the death and carnage more appalling than ever, the al-Qaeda killers as rampant as ever, and no end in sight. Let alone any sort of victory. It is more than a grim anniversary. It is a disaster. The US President, George Bush, prattles inanely about peace and freedom, but it is a mirage pursued at the cost, so far, of more than 570 American lives, and heaven knows how many Iraqi lives. Yet the neo-conservatives of Washington agreed before it began that the war would be "a cakewalk". Shock and awe would triumph. The sleek and saturnine Richard Perle, a White House intimate and a principal architect of the catastrophe, forecast in late 2002 that Iraqi opposition would "collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder". The fighting would be over in three weeks or less. The Administration's favourite tame Arab, Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, predicted - with much sangfroid - that the streets of Baghdad were "sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans". The Vice-President, Dick Cheney, offered that "extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991." We know now that we were talked into this war under false pretences. "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tonnes of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent," said Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address. "Intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents." And Cheney again: "We know [Saddam] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Or John Howard, in an article in The Australian under his name in January last year: "Iraq already has chemical and biological weapons. It will have a nuclear capacity when it can obtain the necessary fissile material ... The onus is on those who condemn the approach of the Australian Government to articulate the alternative approach that will ensure that Iraq does not retain and, therefore, potentially use weapons of mass destruction." And so on. And on. Every last delusion now shattered by the awful reality unfolding daily in Iraq and the wider Middle East. Surely, now, we should at least contemplate the possibility that we are beset by the worst US Administration of our time. Bush is ignorant and floundering, a silver-spoon ideologue whose presidency was rigged for him by the hard-right establishment of the Republican Party. He is advised - if that is the word - by a ghastly camarilla of fundamentalist Christian bigots, Zionist zealots who often appear to owe more allegiance to Israel than to the United States, number-crunchers, spin doctors, academic fantasists, touts, urgers, corporate boondogglers and war profiteers. They make Richard Nixon's rotten crew look like the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. To say as much in this country is to be savaged as anti-American, of course. This is the last, perhaps the only resort of the Bush toadies here. But it is not so easy to pin that rap on the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, who got it spot on last week in a caustic barb recorded by a lapel microphone he was wearing. "These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I've ever seen," he said. Amen to that. Pray that Kerry wins in November to return decency and honour to the government of the United States. Here at home, no reputation is so secure that it cannot be trashed by the Howard Government in defence of its own blundering into this war. smh.com.au