October 20, 2002
Bush League Logic
Logic has never been the strong point of the Bush mob. Power has always sufficed. The non-election of 2000, is a good example. The decision handed down by a corrupted court was as logical as a poem by Lewis Carrol. But who needs logic when you are the toughest guy on the block?No argument of the Bush administration ever makes sense. The most remarkable thing about Bush's tax cut politics, for example, is how much is an affront to common sense. The same applies right down the line to all the Bush policies. Forest fires? Open the national forests to the logging industry. Terrorist attack in New York? Take over The Middle East. Environmental destruction? Let the big polluters decide what to do. What the policies lack in logic, the regime makes up for in raw force. The administration has taken the same bull-like attitude into the realm of international politics, but here it may eventually fail.
According to an editorial in The Independent, "The logic of George Bush's campaign against the axis of evil, never persuasive, is coming apart in his hands. After months of heavyweight war rhetoric directed at Iraq, the US State Department has casually claimed that North Korea has admitted it has a nuclear weapons programme. Given that the justification for using military force against Saddam Hussein is to prevent his developing weapons of mass destruction, and particularly nuclear weapons, the inconsistencies of US policy are exposed."
Steven R. Weisman in The New York Times points out that "The two separate and in some respects contradictory strategies reflected the administration's desire not to let North Korea derail Washington's plans to confront Saddam Hussein. The risk was that some Americans might wonder why conciliation ought not to be tried toward both countries."
Oops. Be careful. Don't want anything to upset the house of cards that makes the case for taking over Iraq'a oil fields. The official explanations just muddle things up more. A diplomat is quoted by the Times as saying that while North Korea is the "worst kind of totalitarian regime" and willing to cheat, "they do not pose a threat to regional stability." There is no sense to it, except those oil reserves. Obviously the threat to peace in the Middle East is the U.S. But "stability," is different from peace. It refers to the ability for U.S. corporations to pull the resources out of a country. That is what Iraq "threatens," because it is not compliant.
Robert Scheer in The Nation says "Oblivious to the daily slaughter of Palestinians and Israelis, whose televised mayhem fuels evil passions throughout the Islamic world, Bush focuses instead on the irrelevant sideshow of Iraq. Bush seems unaware that the Gordian knot of global terrorism pulled tightly in years past by our allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia--in ugly evidence again this weekend in peaceful Bali--will not be cut unless the quest for peace initiated by Carter at Camp David nearly a quarter-century ago is finally completed."
Bush, whom Scheer politely calls "an accidental president untutored in the ways of the world" has "surrendered the presidency to a gang of bullies in his Administration that seeks to rearrange the world to its liking, not through diplomacy and peaceful example," but through force.
-- By David Cogswell