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http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20021023/index.php Charley Reese For Wednesday, October 23, 2002 A Matter Of Credibility It is a sad business when you can no longer trust your own government to tell you the truth. That's the great harm to America that President Bush's propaganda campaign against Iraq has caused. Trust is a fragile but precious thing. One lie can destroy it, for once a person lies, you can never be certain in the future if he or she is telling the truth or lying some more. If only President Bush had been honest with us in regard to Iraq, then I would be supporting him. All he had to do was tell the truth: There is no evidence that links Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attack; there is no hard evidence that he has any weapons of mass destruction, but we suspect that he does; given his past history, we believe it is imperative to get United Nations arms inspectors back into Iraq to determine the truth, for I fear, if he does have weapons of mass destruction, he might one day decide to supply them to terrorists. Instead, the Bush administration has asserted as fact that Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction, does have links to al-Qaida and is an imminent threat to the security of the United States. When Iraq offers to allow the world to come see for itself, Mr. Bush says that's just a trick. When Iraq offers to allow the U.N. inspectors back in, Mr. Bush argues against them going. He is determined to get the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution that no leader of any sovereign nation could accept. That's the same trick the Clinton administration pulled on Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was willing to admit U.N. or even NATO observers into Kosovo, but the United States insisted that as part of the deal, NATO troops would have unrestricted access to all of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia turned it down, as the United States knew it would, and the bombing campaign started immediately. That's what Bush wants. He wants a resolution Saddam Hussein cannot accept so Bush will have the excuse to go to war. His objective is not disarmament, but regime change and American occupation of Iraq. American and British financial interests have never forgiven Iraq for kicking them out in the late 1970s when it nationalized the Iraqi oil reserves. Two of the clauses he knows Saddam will never accept are for any permanent member of the Security Council to add its own representatives to the inspection team and another clause that states armed forces should accompany the inspectors. Mr. Bush has never mentioned to the American people that the United States corrupted the last U.N. arms-inspection process by using it as a cover for spies. That is a fact. Hopefully, the French will hang tough, and Mr. Bush won't get his war-triggering resolution. Then he will be forced to choose between naked aggression without a U.N. fig leaf or allowing inspectors to go back and do their job. I expect he will choose naked aggression. He will call whatever gaggle of small and weak countries that give their passive assent his "global coalition." I thought of George Orwell when George Bush, in a belligerent speech before he signed the congressional war resolution, said it was being done "for the cause of peace." That's newspeak — war is peace. Trust in George Bush is gone. What he is doing is anti-America in the sense that it violates all the traditions that made this country great. We are like Rome now, with thousands of soldiers stationed in more than 60 countries and our emperor proclaiming the right to remove any sovereign government he doesn't like (provided, of course, it is small and defenseless). Far from serving the cause of peace, Mr. Bush is involving our country in a perpetual war against the rest of the world, a war we will eventually lose. He is not protecting the American people; he is endangering all of us. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- _________________________________________________________ Extraordinary selection of ring tones for your mobile phone. Go on in Maktoob Ring Tones right now and make your pick! http://www.maktoob.com/ _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk