Diff'rent strokes for Diff'rent Folks

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Mr Bush is on a roll. He's so happy he's thumbing his nose at the world. He's got away with Abu Ghraib, with Fallujah and Haiti and everywhere the rent-a-crowd counter-revolutions just seem to go rolling along.

For a man who had travelled out of the United States only once (or was it twice) before he stood for the presidency of the United States, Mr Bush seems to know a lot about the world outside. It rather resembles Texas, only very slightly bigger.

Instead of signing death warrants, Mr Bush can now appoint ambassadors and World Bank directors to destroy international institutions, carrying to the logical conclusion the remark by the prophet of the neoconservatives - Richard Perle - to the effect that the Iraq War meant the end of the "evil system of international law".

These days, nobody seems to notice, or at least, nobody of any consequence. We in the (misnamed) developing world will, however, feel some of the consequences.

Meanwhile, the US media, supposedly dedicated to freedom of the press in aid of the free society, concerns itself not with the crimes of the grand and greedy, but with the peccadilloes of rap singers, baseball players and small time hoodlums. Their picture of America the Beautiful and Free is oddly disconcerting.

It is a little off-putting to watch the necrophiliac voyeurism of a Larry King as he probes the psychic guts of yet another victim of the American way.

It is weirdly non-compelling to hear the daily recital of the elaborate fictions served up to discredit Michael Jackson or to learn that the rap singer L'il Kim faces 30 years in jail for lying about a shooting incident outside a nightclub, while somewhere else Ken Lay is explaining why he is not guilty of anything and the Congress refuses to investigate American corruption in Iraq or the corruption of the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Mr Tom DeLay.

Mr Bush's appointment of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations - a job once held by Adlai Stevenson - seems weirdly appropriate, since Mr Bolton is not only about as far right as Adolph Hitler but is a pathological liar to boot.

Mr Negroponte's appointment as America's security czar seems fitting too, in this age of American gulags around the world, and of people being rendered like fat pork - 'teased' into confessing while their brains turn to jelly in some faraway, foreign torture chamber.

The nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank seems entirely sensible, even deserved, in this scenario where morality consists of denying post-facto contraception to poor women and in prolonging the torture of a brain-dead woman who has been in a vegetative state since 1990.

Last week, the Congress of the United States attempted to prolong the agony by issuing a subpoena for Terry Schiavo to appear before them to testify in her own defence. This Grand Guignol gambit was Congress' way of trying to ensure that the plug was not pulled on a ghastly experiment in hypocrisy which has gone on for 15 years.

Of course, people do notice. Yesterday was the anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, and all round the world, millions demonstrated their impotent rage and frustration at the senseless killing and destruction authorised by Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bolton and Negroponte.

Just over two weeks ago was the anniversary of the assisted coup in Haiti where democracy was aborted on 'humanitarian' grounds. Haitians, as the acting secretary-general of the OAS, Mr Einaudi, has said, should have no business in running Haiti. Democracy works, in the horrific personages of Latortue and his gang of CIA-trained killers.

In a speech before the UN Human Rights Commission, Perez Roque, foreign minister of Cuba was scathing:

"We all knew that the Commission on Human Rights was victim to the political manipulation of its work because the Government of the United States and its allies have used the Commission as if it were their private property and have turned it into some sort of inquisition tribunal to condemn the countries of the South and, particularly, those who actively oppose their strategy of neocolonial domination."

You may remember it was the new UN ambassador, Mr John Bolton, then an undersecretary of state, who two years ago invented a monstrous lie against Cuba to the effect that biological and chemical weapons were being manufactured there. In his new post at the UN he will no doubt have the opportunity to spew his poisoned rhetoric directly at Cuba and Venezuela and all those other picayune powers who do not wish to accept US domination.

The UNCHR has long been used to pillory Cuba and other states which the US wishes to demonise. So Mr Roque chose his platform with care, it seems, and used the occasion to denounce the international double standards which allow rich and powerful states to abuse international law and human rights with impunity. Mr Roque was harsh on the European Union (EU).

A year ago, the EU had shown much tender concern for the fate of several dozen people who the Cubans considered treacherous, paid agents of the United States. Mr Roque denounced the EU for its recent use of a procedural ploy to sabotage "a draft resolution that proposed to investigate the massive, flagrant and systematic human rights violations still committed today against over 500 prisoners at the naval base that the United States keeps, against the will of the Cuban people, in Guantanamo Bay".

To the casual visitor from Mars it must seem a little odd that the US and the EU, both such doughty 'champions' of human rights, don't seem to be enthusiastic about investigating the documented abuses up to and including murder, which have happened just 90 miles north of Oracabessa.

Mr Roque was disturbed by another development: "The second event was the release of the report presented by the High-Level Group on Threats, Challenges and Change, set up at the initiative of the UN secretary-general.

It categorically states that 'the Commission cannot be credible if it is seen to be maintaining double standards in addressing human rights concerns'. Should we then wait for the representatives of the United States and its allies to come up with self-criticisms at this plenary session and undertake to work with us, Third World countries, to rescue the Commission on Human Rights from disrepute and confrontation?"

Since that is obviously not going to happen, Mr Roque spoke on behalf of the civilised world when he said that the enjoyment of human rights today depends on whether you live in a developed country or not, and on the social class to which you belong.

"There will be no real enjoyment of human rights for all as long as we fail to achieve social justice in the relations among countries and within countries themselves."

With Mr Negroponte minding the chicken coop, Mr Bolton riding herd on the fictional United Nations and Mr Wolfowitz flexing his intellectual muscle at the World Bank, it is clear that for the next four years - at least - Mr Roque's prognosis will hold true. "They will always be the attackers and never the ones under attack.

Their peace rests on their military power. They have also achieved economic development, based on the pillage of the wealth of the other poor countries that were former colonies, which suffer and bleed to death for those to squander. However, in those developed countries, incredible as it may seem, the unemployed, the immigrants and the impoverished do not enjoy the rights that are most certainly guaranteed for the rich."

The invasion and destruction of the Iraq state was first mooted by President Bush as a case for 'regime change'. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and needed to be removed for the good of humanity.

That impolitic justification was urgently replaced by something apparently more rational and likely to be accepted by the world: Bush, backed by Britain's Tony Blair, said Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was likely to use them against his neighbours, and perhaps, even against the United States.

Nightmares of mushroom clouds in American cities began to be peddled by Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser at the time. In the United States, though nowhere else, a majority of the population had been convinced by the Administration's rhetoric that Saddam was behind the atrocities of 9/11.

World opinion quickly assessed the real reason as the United States' lust for control of the world's energy resources. I myself carried a sign saying "No Blood for Oil" in one of the thousands of popular demonstrations in which millions of people around the world protested against the coming invasion.

The protests were a waste of time. Messrs Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Co were not to be stopped. On the night of March 18, 2003, the United States launched an attack meant to murder Saddam Hussein and to intimidate his people into submission by frightfulness - "shock and awe" as it was called.

This was followed by a barbaric reduction to rubble of the Iraqi state and its cities. The 8,000 year-old record of civilisation in Babylon and other places did not escape American vandalism. Museums and government ministries were looted and the whole apparatus of government destroyed in an apparent effort to remove from the Iraqi people, the very idea of autonomy and independence.

No weapons of mass destruction have ever been found. But no sweat - "Mission accomplished!"

Bush, Rumsfeld, Bremer and the Halliburton company rule. Two years later, the American 'cakewalk' has turned into a pathway to hell for the Iraqi people, more than 100,000 of whom have so far perished in the American campaign to purify their country.

Despite the American effort to impose its own 'democratic solution' on the country, the result has been the substitution of a fundamentalist Islamic government for the secular regime of Saddam Hussein. When Mr Bush began his crusade against Islamic fundamentalism/terrorism he had been warned that his intervention could have the opposite effect to that hoped for.

That prognosis has turned out to be accurate. To control Iraq and the Middle East, the Americans will need to remain in Iraq for the

foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the Halliburton company extracts its private tribute in unaccounted and unaccountable billions, and American oil companies wait to be let loose to exploit Iraq's massive oil reserves in the service of American democracy. There is just one fly in the ointment. A resistance movement which 18 months ago numbered less than 5,000 members, today counts anywhere between 25,000 and 50,000 fighters, determined to frustrate Mr Bush's grand design.

It seems that while they may have been shocked by Mr Bush's display of power, they were clearly not awed.