A PREDATORY AND DISHONEST WAR Pt. 2

Care for a few pointers?

George W Bush. 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company. 1986-1990: senior executive of the Harken oil company.

Dick Cheney. 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company.

Condoleezza Rice. 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her.

And so on.

But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God’s work. We’re talking honest values here. And we know where your children go to school.

In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was paying a social visit to the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive their thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that ‘somebody’ was Saddam Hussein. Hence Bush Junior’s cry: ‘That man tried to kill my Daddy.’ But it’s still not personal, this war. It’s still necessary. It’s still God’s work. It’s still about bringing freedom and democracy to the poor, oppressed Iraqi people.

To be an acceptable member of the Bush team it seems you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. I think I may be Evil for writing this, but I’ll have to check.

What Bush won’t tell us is the truth about why we’re going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil — but oil, money and people’s lives. Saddam’s misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Iran’s, next door, is to possess the world’s largest repositories of natural gas. Bush wants both, and who helps him get them will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn’t, won’t.

If Saddam didn’t have the oil, he could torture and murder his citizens to his heart’s content. Other leaders do it every day — think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt — but these are our friends and allies.

In reality, I suspect, Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to America or Britain. Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, if he’s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes’ notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of American growth.

What is at stake is not — as presently offered — a handful of empty rocket-heads, but America’s need to demonstrate its over-arching military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s part in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t get out. Ironically, George W himself may be feeling a little bit the same way.

In One-Party Britain, Blair on a lousy turnout was elected supreme leader by about a quarter of the electorate. Given the same public apathy and the continued dismal showing by the opposition parties at the next election, Blair or his successor will achieve similar absolute power with an even smaller proportion of the vote. It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, and the supposed parliamentary alternatives to them merely jockey for their clothes, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. Politicians can never believe how little they deceive us.