Cry for War

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New Nazis

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(1) The Manufacture of Evil

George Bush introduced the notion of ‘evil’ into world politics of the 21^st century world. Being the simpleton that he is, he merely accuses opponents of imperialism and us international criminal behavior as being the incurable bad boys, while Bush & Co wholeheartedly embody the good guys. Evil is on everyone's mind and confuses many millions, including the American president himself. What did he expect to achieve by reintroducing a medieval concept, which has never made sense to anyone?

In 1886 Nietzsche published a famous essay on this question. He noted that humanity had experimented for so many centuries with morality and ethics and had continuously defined or refined ideas about good and evil. He considered these concepts as completely worn out. Distinguishing the good from evil was no longer possible with the naked eye. Listening to the utterances of Bush junior, who nowadays applies the concept of evil left and right leads one to a fateful rendezvous with numerous unanswerable questions. While mankind expects strong and unquestioned leadership from the top-gun of the only superpower, all we are getting from Washington is incoherent babble from an obviously deeply confused and shockingly incompetent man. Bush has no clue as to the core of the problems he is faced with, and consequently makes an irreparable mess of everything.

Instead of quietly continuing to run the governor's office in Austin, George was thrust into a position, which he was blissfully unfamiliar with and unprepared for. His power hungry Dad, and associates within the Texas oil-industry, thrust the most important political-military leadership in the world onto the shoulders of his eldest son. To achieve his goal, Dad and his accomplices had to steal the election in what has been labelled

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the biggest electoral scandal in us history. In 2002, the entire world is drifting rudderless on an ocean of uncertainty and indecisiveness waiting for Godot, hoping that perhaps some day ‘the great leader of the western world’ will finally catch up with what really is going on. In the mean time, people are dying and suffering everywhere, especially in the Middle-East. In Plato's philosophy the essence of all reality was supposed to be ‘good’. ‘Evil’ was merely the faulty reflection of reality found in the world of particulars. Poor George is so totally ignorant of particulars, that he will never be able to form sound judgements on anything, let alone on the basis of realities in places beyond Crawford, Texas. After brooding for weeks as what to say June 24, 2002, the president finally coughed up his grand design for peace in the Near-East. Being an expert on election fraud, he strongly advised Palestinians to hold a free election and be sure to vote Yasser Arafat out of office. It would seem that nobody at the White House was brave enough to tell the boss, that he was overstepping all boundaries of democratic principles and diplomatic courtesies by uttering such nonsense.

The western way of life lays claim to our consciousness. ‘It operates a system which advertises its own bulging cornucopia of products and processes. However, within the industrial system evil has become systemized,’ wrote Canadian political scientist Lionel Tiger in The Manufacture of Evil (Harper & Row, New York, 1987). In professor Tiger's view, ‘The production of evil has become technologized, internationalized, multinationalized, and especially in times of war and high zealotry, officially rhapsodized.’ Bush - and Tiger - still use ‘evil’ in praeNietzchean terms. The us president calls everything he does not understand, or lacks the information to understand, ‘evil’, because that is the easiest way out.

When the disaster of September 11, 2001 occurred, Bush announced to the world, as an incontestable fact, that Osama

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Bin Laden and Al Queda were responsible for the massacre of Americans on that day. The president did not offer a thread of evidence to support his accusation. He needed a guilty party fast and used names handed to him by his intelligence services. Muslims claim their acts of defiance. No-one ever claimed 09-11. Neither Bush, nor the far majority of his worldwide audience, seemed to need any hard evidence, that would stand up in the courts. The western world in particular blindly bought the Bush version of the September 11 events without taking a second look at unanswered questions or even doubting the integrity of the president's wild guess.

This is the more surprising, since even a cursory knowledge of American twentieth century history should have taught western audiences that literally every us president, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, has been sadly catalogued in retrospect as being a habitual liar or an embarrassing crook. I am not saying it is any better elsewhere. But the us public in particular is incredibly slow to learn that they have elected the one bastard after the other to the White House.

Bush immediately acted on what he was being told. He reacted with Pavlovian precision as all his predecessors did before him: launch another war. He attacked Afghanistan to wipe out the Taliban and catch the prime suspect Osama bin Laden and bring him to American Justice. Perhaps Bush realized later, that the Saudi rebel, as he himself emphatically stressed, indeed was not guilty of 09-11 as charged. He does avoid talking about the man lately, while he initially swore he would bring him to book at his earliest convenience. Following 09-11 Bush' popularity rose from a wavering 30 percent in August 2001 to more than 90 percent. Hitler's popularity with the German people rose to an all time high after he annexed Austria on March 12, 1938. True, Washington did not declare Afghanistan part of the United States, but the us did install a us puppet regime. Whatever happens in Kabul is, for the foreseeable fu-

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ture, being decided in Washington while the us military occupation continues.

The manufacture of evil takes place at all levels of society whether a nation is run by a fascist dictator or by an elected president in a so called free democratic society. The greater the prosperity the more sharks are on the loose to grab a piece of the pie. Those who lay behind do whatever it takes to get their share in the rising fleshpots of Egypt. When Germany went down as a result of World War I, the last emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland. It did not take long for Adolf Hitler to mount the throne in a free election. Germans wanted law and order, and German glory restored. At the time Winston Churchill cheered Hitler's achievements in putting Germany back at its feet. The Nazi leader surrounded himself with likeminded characters: Hermann Goering (Air Force), Franz Joseph Goebbels (propaganda), Heinrich Himmler (national security) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (Foreign Affairs). The military-industrial complex was quickly revived in close cooperation with the corporate empire ig Farben, which in turn was linked to Kuhlmann (France), ici (Great Britain), Montecatini (Italy), av (Czechoslovakia), Boruta (Poland), Mitsui (Japan), Standard Oil (New Jersey) and Du Pont and Dow Chemical in the us. Through ig Farben and Alfred Krupp the German war machine was resurrected and would soon be unleashed to conquer France, Italy and most of Europe, with the notable exception of Great Britain. The groundwork for the ultimate Nazi defeat was laid at Stalingrad (February 2, 1943). Hitler dreamt of becoming an eu-Cop for a united Europe under the banner of National Socialism. Much like Ronald Reagan, George Bush and the junior Bush have been drifting towards a Global Cop system under the aegis of capitalism and the free market system. This paradise should be protected by an impenetrable shield in the sky to fight off rogue states which might try to attack. Hitler and Goebbels were quite suc-

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cessful in disseminating ideas and information with the design of inducing or intensifying attitudes and actions favorable to the purposes of National Socialism. They had to use radio and propaganda films or news reels in cinemas to reach the public. Bush, Sharon, Saddam or Arafat have a much easier go at it in pleading their case than the Nazis had in the 30's and 40's. They have tv, internet, cnn and all the rest.

Even Osama bin Laden reaches hundreds of millions when someone with a portable video camera would be brave enough to direct his donkey up an Asian mountain top and records what he has to say. The Qatar station Al Jazeera will then broadcast the text to millions of livingrooms around the world. Television adds a dimension to the tool of propaganda, which Hitler and Mussolini had to do without. People no longer form their opinions solely on the basis of what they hear. Since the 50's performances by those in the news can be seen and followed via tv screens.

Mark Miller, professor of Media Ecology at New York University put it this way: ‘Television has clearly shown the truth about George Bush Jr. His body language bellows his uninterest, his distraction, his uneasiness, his callousness: and he tends to blurt out all or part of what he is really thinking, even as he is trying to lie about it, when it becomes a linguistic struggle that intensifiers his incoherence. Meanwhile, his handlers and the mainstream media all keep on trying to play the revelations down, forever countering the obvious with lots of upbeat spin and tactful silence. Thus tv keeps on sending us an eerie double message, by showing us one thing and telling us another. Those who want to buy the pitch prefer the latter, naturally, while who just can't buy it feel as if they must be going crazy, what with all those smooth and authoritative voices claiming that this man should be our president when we can see, and have seen all along, that that simply is not the case.’ (The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations of a national Disorder, W.W. Norton, New York, 2001).

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Professor Miller referred to the illegal machinations by the Bush clique and the Republicans to bring George junior into the White House to do the bidding of the Houston oil lobby in international affairs. ‘Our experience of this transparent coup has been disorienting from the start,’ he wrote. ‘Hardly had he assumed the presidency or Bush was immediately hailed for his charm, his democratic ease, his rare ability to be all things to all Americans.’ And, again, we touch on another aspect of the manufacture of evil, the way the management of a free press deals with information.

(2) The Manufacture of Hatred

Pioneer in programming Nazi propaganda was Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945). In 1928 he was freely elected to the German parliament. With the Nazis entering the political arena, he became instrumental in bringing Hitler to power. He was highly effective in spreading the virus of hatred for Jews and other non-Aryan groups like Slavs and Russians. Propaganda is usually accompanied by distortions of facts in order to conform to the ideology of the disseminator who creates his own imagined or desired reality. Appeals to passion, nationalistic fervour and above all, to traditional prejudices will inflame peoples and nations beyond common sense and any reason.

No doubt, Goebbels was an intentional propagandist of hatred. After World War II Washington followed a similar Nazi-type offensive to manipulate people's minds and mobilizing worldwide hostility against the ussr. Any lies and distortions were acceptable as long as ‘the enemy’ could be destroyed. Communists did exactly the same with us. In the 70's I visited a school in Irkutsk, Siberia, where Soviet children were reassured that Marxism would win over capitalism. Our western

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schools taught kids, that a free market economy and maximum freedom for the individual would bring the Valhalla on earth for everybody. Democracy was good; communism was evil and had to be stamped out by whatever means necessary. This irrationality on both sides brought us all the Cold War.

Goebbels developed the Nazi propaganda technique of ‘a war of nerves.’ Each time, prior to Hitler making another aggressive move on the European chessboard, the German press and radio invented all kinds of accusations against the chosen target. Incidents were manufactured intentionally and then exploited to justify a German military intervention. The Goebbels design proved to be very effective in dividing people in other nations, weakening their resolve to resist the forthcoming aggression, and causing the allies of Nazi victim nations to hesitate as well.

Following World War II, Washington, the Pentagon and the cia used the same Nazi propaganda techniques to manufacture global hatred for communists. Step by step over a number of decades, the us war machine drifted towards becoming the only super power in the world by the turn of the century. Hitler's divide and rule policy, that led to his virtual control over Europe in the early 40's has been followed by Washington's global divide and rule policy that now threatens to bring all of mankind under near total us supervision and control. The us juggernaut cannot be stopped. ‘All roads lead to America, the new Rome,’ observed Martin Ivens in the London Times (June 30, 2002). ‘At Versailles in 1919, the balance of power between the United States and the British Empire was more equal. Today American military and economic power dwarfs that of its European and Asian allies,’ Ivens wrote. This undoubted accomplishment is a fact in 2002. But will a Pax Americana still prevail in 2052?

More painful comparisons must be drawn with Nazi Germany when observing us audiences generally accepting anything

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that comes directly from the Oval Office as the gospel truth. Over ninety nine per cent of all Americans immediately took Bush at his word, that Osama bin Laden was guilty and thus a mass murderer. Two weeks after the twin towers collapsed I visited Manhattan. The mere suggestion to friends and strangers alike, that may be some day, when more becomes known about what really happened on September 11^th, it could become known that Osama bin Laden, and perhaps even Al Queda, had after all nothing to do with that disaster, would persistently meet with frantic and outraged reactions.

Bush offered Americans a well constructed story, which indeed possessed a kind of reasonable narrative truth. His arguments and information seemed plausible both in logic and content. But too often narrative truth is confused with historical truth. A narrative account of a disaster can sound entirely reasonable while in reality it is A to Z misleading, since it often contains only part of the truth or none at all. In Freud's concept of narrative truth, Bush' report about what supposedly happened on September 11th, lacks ‘the kernel of historical truth’.

Psychiatrist, Donald P. Spence of the Rutgers Medical School wrote: ‘Narrative truth is what we have in mind when we say that such and such is a good story, that a given explanation carries conviction, that one solution to a mystery must be true.’ (Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, W.W. Norton, New York, 1982). Almost all Americans instantly accepted Bush' narrative truth as the historical truth. From his hideout in the Tora Bora Mountains in Afghanistan the Saudi millionaire rebel mobilized, according to Bush at least, four us airliners to cause death, havoc and destruction in the us. Professor Spence postulated years ago, that ‘once a given construction has acquired narrative truth, it becomes just as real as any other kind of truth.’ He added that in psychoanalytic treatment, basic attention is being paid to narrative reality, because it has no relation to the facts and historic reality.

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Ninety percent of the Germans supported Hitler and the narrative truth of the Nazis. The Soviets accepted Lenin's narrative truth which after seventy years was overtaken by inescapable historic realities. The ussr simply collapsed under the weight of its daydreams and narrative truths. Now, we see America goose-stepping towards unparalleled power in line with Bush's storytelling. But some day in the future the chickens will come home to roost, when historical truth catches up with popular fairy tales of the past.

All of America bought lock, stock and barrel the Bush version of September 11. From that day onwards, all Americans ‘knew’ what had happened. Tell Americans in 2002 that perhaps there is more to this tragic day in us history than the president has told them, and they go instantly ballistic. I was reminded of some devout Nazis who half a century later still stand by the Fuehrer and still considered it out of the question that the Third Reich ever installed gas chambers in concentration camps. There are still Americans today, who are absolutely convinced Oswald alone killed jfk. Whether they watched the Zapruder film of the assassination or not, they are simply incapable of accepting the historical truth that Dallas was a conspiracy. Abraham Zapruder filmed by mere coincidence the motorcade of the president when the shots at the Kennedy's were fired. The celluloid clearly showed that the president was hit by bullets from both the back and the front. Yet, many millions of Americans continue to live with the narrative truth that there was no conspiracy in Dallas, because they are apparently unable to accept the historical truth. Brainwashing implies the use of physical or psychological duress. This is not what the White House, the cia, nato, cnn or western media organizations are engaged in. Neither did the Nazis. Subtler strategies were and are designed to render leadership the widest possible support. To manufacture hatred one replaces simple truths by vital lies. Goebbels pollut-

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ed German minds by deliberately planting false and fantastic stories. The far majority of Germans fell for this Nazi crap, just as the far majority of Americans seems to blindly buy the rubbish that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell are unloading on the American public.

Harvard philosophy professor George Santayana (1863-1952) termed German philosophy ‘a work of genius’ (The German Mind, Thomas Crowell, New York, 1968). It is universally recognized, that Germans (Bach, Beethoven, Luther, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) rank among the foremost civilized and erudite peoples in the human saga. Yet, in spite of their rich heritage they collectively fell, during a vital stage in their history, for the harangues of a fascist dictator. There is no guarantee, that some day, another nation, or another highly civilized society would not buy the narrative gobbledygook of some other lying or hate mongering generalissimo or Führer.

The Nazis achieved true miracles in drumming up massive support through their printed press outlets and ramshackle radio broadcasts. Today's occupants of the White House easily command entrance to electronic highways, communication satellites and cable-networks. Their narrative truth is directly beamed into the living quarters of hundreds of millions of people around the world. To win support from an electorate has become considerably easier than it must have been in Hitler's day. But television screens also carry a clear disadvantage for unstable or psychopathic personalities seeking favor with the masses. Would Germans have blindly followed Hitler to their doom if they had been able to watch him closely and see him live delivering his thundering speeches against the rest of the outside world?

The other successful technique invented and refined by Goebbels was the launching of ‘a war of nerves’ in advance of declaring war. In 1938, for instance, Hitler was preparing his

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next aggressive move on the European chessboard. Goebbels prepared the ground for Hitler's move into Czechoslovakia. He distributed false reports about the mistreatment of German minorities in the neighboring country. His propaganda apparatus manufactured a number of violent incidents as proof that Berlin had to come to the aid of its terrorized citizens. There was no terror in Czechoslovakia against Germans. But Hitler created an alibi to justify military intervention.

It is a tactic Washington has been using since 1945 over and over again in dozens of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The White House and us intelligence services have for half a century copied Nazi tactics directly from the lexicon of Hitler en Goebbels. The us has applied state terrorism in Asia, Africa and Latin America for decades. Apart from applying wars of nerves everywhere by sending warships and B-52's to frighten far away lands into submission, covert military actions, secret invasions, political assassinations or coups d'etats against heads of state or people Washington did not like, have become us standard practices. Like most recently the wars on the Balkan's were clearly provoked and organized through covert operations by the Americans. The Albanian uck rebel army was equipped, paid for and secretly led by us agents when it went into Kosovo to destabilize Yugoslavia further with the ultimate goal of unseating the last communist leader in southern Europe. Slobodan Milosevic was simply ‘sold’ by traitors for millions of dollars to the Hague Tribunal for War Criminals. The real war criminals who lighted the fuse in the Balkan's go free in Washington. The behavior by Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. in southern Europe alone would have certainly brought applause from Hitler and Mussolini.

What options do people have after being invaded, intimidated and terrorized by a foreign power and are occupied against their will? Holland surrendered in 1940 after five days of war following the destruction of the center of Rotterdam by Go-

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ering's Luftwaffe. Reaching the age of 18 in 1943, I joined the Dutch underground. We had no choice but to resort to guerrilla warfare against the Nazi Wehrmacht. Hitler labeled us terrorists. Likewise Bush, Blair and Sharon and a number of western leaders and media organisations continue to misname Palestinian underground forces terrorists. We knew, that we were fighting the Nazis, as genuine freedom fighters. So are the Palestinians, who have battled these new Nazis for half a century. Americans, who have not been invaded or terrorized on their own soil for two centuries, seem in a quandary about the question who is a freedom fighter and who a terrorist. They have forgotten their own past, when they threw out the British and signed a peace deal in 1783 in Paris.

(3) Humiliation

The United States and Great Britain continue to operate even in the 21^st century as erstwhile imperialist powers. This is the more surprising, since Bush and Blair could be expected to be familiar with modern history. Yet, their policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict proves, that they continue to place their bets with Israel and those Arab states that are ruled by antidemocratic and corrupt royal cliques. These regimes function as full-time puppets of their western protectors in order to cash in for personal gain. These Arab traitors are selling out natural resources to their foreign masters, while all the people of these countries should benefit from the billions cashed in for oil and gas. Naturally, greedy petroleum tycoons prefer to maintain present favorable conditions. Washington and London continuously pressure their Arab partners to tolerate the state of Israel and refrain from covert support for Yasser Arafat and the plo. Arab stool pigeons in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt

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and Jordan treasure oil dollars or economic and military aid more than supporting their Muslim brothers in their endless struggle for an independent and free Palestine.

But 2002 is not 1948, when Israel became the international homeland for Jews, because at Yalta, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had so decided. Palestinians were told to get lost, since Hitler had gassed Jews. The allied powers created a convenient new colony for Jews in the middle of the Arab world because that is, what the old biblical texts were telling us they had come from. It's like telling Americans in 1948 they better vacate the us on the double, to enable Indians to return to their former hunting grounds. Of course, there are virtually no Indians left to live on their own lands, because the settlers of the new world literally killed them off one by one. Zionism and naked force, however, created Israel, hardly by a free plebiscite among the people who had been living there since times immemorial.

Today, all over the Arab region streets are seething with angry young men, often out of work, which fully realize what is going on both within their own countries as between Israel and Palestine. It does not need too much imagination to figure out where this contest will take the settlers eventually. Nor will renegade Arabs forever be in charge of the riches of the Middle East to Western oil companies. Sooner or later new generations will rise and throw the Quislings out. If one Arab domino falls into the hands of genuine freedom fighters, the others will follow as well. Even Bush, and his lapdog Blair must be realizing what goes on and what the long term prospects for the continuation of their dirty imperialist games are. Nevertheless, neither the us nor Great Britain seem to have any qualms about their continued head-on support for the Jewish invaders of the Muslim world. The present Anglo-American siding with Ariel Sharon will prove to have been the most retrogressive foreign policy failure since the collective fall of European empires following World War II.

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A United Nations survey estimates, that 22 Arab states with a population of 280 million will grow by the year 2020 - and this is very, very soon - to 410 or possibly even 459 million inhabitants. Perhaps Bush and Blair are assuming that for the time being they can safely side with the new Jewish Monaco on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. However, an average pupil of any elementary school can safely figure out what the result of continued aggressive behavior by Israel will lead to.

Ariel Sharon may have succeeded during six visits to the White House within 18 months to con Bush Jr. into believing that suicide bombers are indeed terrorists. That was an easy job anyway, because chasing terrorists has become, next to the golfcourse, Bush's favorite pastime. But either he or his successor is liable to discover what the realities of the Muslim world are. At the end of the day, at best, the Jewish mini state will be tolerated by all in the region once ‘the old soldiers’ will have faded away. Also, a new generation of Jews is liable to accept the view, that a Jewish state must consider itself rather as a guest instead of conqueror in the land of their illustrious forefathers. The existence of Israel must be viewed as a gesture of courtesy on behalf of half a billion Arabs that surround them. No doubt, the grandson of Osama bin Laden will some day enjoy spending a vacation at the beach near Haifa. Once, Israelis reach that state of mind, peace is assured. And why not? At the heart of the present bloodbath lays the Palestine life and death struggle against the Jewish settler state. Unlike the Boers in South Africa, who were no longer supported by the West and America, and had to surrender power to the black majority, Bush and Blair are still siding strongly with Israel against the entire Arab world. In Algeria, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique, European settlers lost out after bloody battles between freedom fighters and the colonialists. When metropolitan France stopped protecting settlers in Algeria, the battle for the continued French presence

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in northern Africa was permanently lost. As professor Robert Tignor of Princeton University stressed (The New York Times, May 17, 2002), the road to freedom in African colonies hinged on Western support.

Israel has been able to hold out so far, in spite of the arrogant and outright criminal behavior of the fighting horse from another century, Ariel Sharon, and solely thanks to its overseas networks. Especially the us continues to finance, arm and support Tel Aviv, also politically in the United Nations with a series of lonely us vetoes. It is a quite mad assumption, extremely unwise, and a guaranteed losing strategy to think that lethal force with F-16's, Apache helicopters, rockets, ancient us tanks and armored personnel carriers could ever be victorious over the determination of faithful Muslim warriors. The United States, Great Britain and Israel deploy their military power against what they call terrorists exactly the same way as Hitler, Goering and Goebbels terrorized and killed the freedom fighters of Europe who were battling against Nazism. Israelis assassinate freedom fighters in their cars shooting rockets from their helicopters. They wage an armed war of nerves on civilians; in short, they use state terrorism as Hitler did. In Afghanistan, the latest us Axis of Evil, (Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld) seems to specialize in preferably bombing Afghan wedding parties from stratospheric heights. Rumsfeld called it an unavoidable accident of war. The Afghan survivors told The Guardian (July 4, 2002): ‘It was like an abattoir - blood all around’. When Americans do it, nobody names it war crimes. Even cursory knowledge of Islam would reassure the western world, that Muslims do not seek cutthroat rivalry abroad at all. Current tensions are solely the outcome of American and western support for repressive Arab regimes, with as an additional irritant the presence of Israel as a kind of 52^nd American state in the heart of the Muslim world. Yet, Arabs are nevertheless belatedly prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish

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state as an unavoidable new reality. Much the same way as when Hong Kong was returned to China, no one in Beijing thought of driving former inhabitants of the British Crown colony into the sea. The Chinese dealt with this last vestige of colonialism in pragmatic way. Consequently, thousands of British citizens and employees of companies stayed on their jobs to the advantage of China and the region itself.

Israel has in spite of all its troubles developed an advanced model of a modern society. Once all the present political confusion and religious hocus-pocus about the presumed impossibility to co-exist has been sorted out, Israel could and will most likely become the most important western outpost in the Middle East for the benefit of all and mostly for those millions and millions of young Arabs that need jobs and knowledge in order to build a decent life for themselves and their families. Future generations of Jews will find it much easier to work with new generations of Muslims.

I lived in South Africa (1986-1992) during the changeover from apartheid to political independence for blacks. It became soon crystal clear, that new generations of blacks, whites, coloureds and Indians had far less problems to live and work together than they ever thought possible in the years of near total separation of the races. However, it must be added, that in South Africa religious beliefs did not stand in the way of reconciliation as it does on other parts of the world. Hostile and implacable attitudes over who will control what in, for instance, Jerusalem, are still insurmountable controversies in the Middle East.

Nor can it be denied, as Osama bin Laden has so often complained, that over the past several hundred years, western civilization made deep and unwanted inroads into the Muslim world. Growing numbers of devout believers of Islam share his opinion. ‘Fourteen hundred years ago a new faith burst out of the Arabian deserts and exploded like forked lightening

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onto three continents. Under the oasis green banner of the Prophet Mohammed, the warriors of Islam converted whole civilizations to their holy book, their way of life and their world view,’ noted David Aikman and others in a Time essay on ‘The Sword of Islam’ (June 15, 1992). The resurrection of Muslim fundamentalism is a direct outcome of what is seen as beating back, an even more dangerous crusade, than when Christians openly marched in the 12^th century on Constantinople to slit as many throats of Muslims as could be found. The presence of thousands of male and female us soldiers on the soil of Saudi Arabia is interpreted by the bin Ladenites as a virus of a new western anarchistic, materealistic and at the same time an extremely destructive invasion for Islam. The Axis of Evil in the present White House lacks the brains, education and experience to take Muslim sensibilities seriously. Naturally, these men are seen from the Tora Bora Mountains as new barbarians.

My Dutch forebears were born, lived or worked in the Dutch East Indies. Then and now, the Republic of Indonesia is the largest Muslim nation in the world. When I worked as a young journalist in the 50's and 60's in Jakarta, being the 4^th generation of my family visiting there, I learned at an early age not to yoke about President Sukarno's funny hat, a black fez Indonesians call ‘pitji’. Many of my compatriots used to make fun of Muslim head wear. As long as western stand up comedians permit themselves to describe Yasser Arafat's head wear as a common dishcloth, and as long as our audiences find a cheap jab at the unknown still extremely funny, the time has not arrived for peaceful coexistence between civilizations.

‘There are many reasons why Muslims are critical of the West,’ said professor of Arab Studies at Georgetown University, Ibrahim Ibrahim. ‘It is not theological. It is a grievance of colonialism. We have been humiliated. The West defined the world for Muslims,’ adds Tunisian lawyer Abdelwahab Bel-

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wahi. ‘Colonialism tried to deform all the cultural traditions of Islam. I am not an Islamist; I don't think there is a conflict between religions. There is a conflict between civilizations. Islamic militancy is entirely political, since Muslims reject regimes founded on transplanted ideologies.’ The views of Osama bin Laden are widely shared throughout the Muslim world. Americans have but one Pavlovian reaction to what they don't understand: kill the bastards.

(4) Gangster Sharon

Simple minds seek simple answers. Bush looks for easy answers. He isn't bothered by expertise on any foreign policy issue. The accent of Colin Powell's career, a veteran sharpshooter during the Vietnam War, lay on matters how to militarily eliminate enemies and destroy the Vietcong, rather than making an in depth study of how to constructively conduct international relations. Nevertheless the Department of State informed Bush, that the epicenter of Muslim rage was situated in and around Palestine. Therefore the president decided to have a closer look at the situation.

The most intelligent way for this Global Cop to get his facts straight was to inform himself exclusively about one side of the drama by opening up a running dialogue with Ariel Sharon and skip Arafat altogether. Why complicate matters by listening to what Palestinians might have to say? Information that Sharon committed in 1982 bloody war crimes in the Arab refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, that prompted an Israeli investigative committee to declare him unfit to ever again hold the office of minister of defence, seem to have eluded Bush completely. It happened too long ago prior to his tenure. The current Israeli Prime Minister clearly is a criminal gang-

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ster. He thinks like one, acts like one and talks like one. He bluntly tells the press, that he wished he had killed Arafat twenty years ago. George junior, also accustomed to gangster conversations about petroleum at the dinner table at his parents home, naturally considers Sharon as his shining light and a great military ally in Arab affairs.

In fact, having been a resident of New York City (1958-1992) I affirm, that the far majority of Americans thinks and feels as uncivilized and cruel like the Bushes and Sharon's do. Simply get rid of any guy that is making a nuisance of himself. Bin Laden? Kill the bastard. Castro? Shoot him, or send him poisoned cigars. Lumumba? Let the cia hack him to pieces. Allende? Bring Pinochet in and shoot him. The list of foreign political leaders, presidents, prime ministers or heads of state, that have been overthrown since 1945 on orders of the White House, the cia and other criminals in Washington is many pages long. Too often, they were democratically chosen leaders who were forcibly removed by us overt or covert operations to be replaced by fascist killers. General Suharto (Indonesia), a certified mass murderer of hundreds of thousands of suspected political opponents and innocents, was kept 32 years in power with massive us, Japanese and European military and financial aid. The same rich governments are now eagerly championing the persecution of former Yugoslav leaders as war criminals, before a special tribunal in The Hague. Of course, Washington refuses to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a new International Criminal Court in The Hague over American citizens, because countless Americans in high places would end up behind bars for the same criminal acts, that Slobodan Milosevic is standing trial for now.

Bush mistakenly looks upon the current cataclysm in the Islamic world stretching as far as Indonesia and the Philippines, as being simply caused by the evil genius of Saudi freedom fighter Osama bin Laden. The White House fails to under-

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stand, that its difficulties in continuing to dominate the Muslim world and its natural resources is basically a renewed 21^st century battle against western imperialism and colonialism. Nor is it the only us misinterpretation of why anti-Americanism is sharply on the increase across the globe. It is not just the Arab world which resents the Bush experiment in imbecility by cozening up to Ariel Sharon and ignoring the plo. Particularly so, since this man has recently been repeating his Sabra and Shatilla patent on war crimes in Jenin, and other Palestinian cities. Bush behaves towards Sharon, as if suddenly Radavan Karadzic would once more be the ideal ally in plotting new moves on the Balkan's.

When, at the request of the Security Council, the United Nations sent a mission to investigate mass murder in Jenin, Sharon simply told them to get lost. He had them barricaded in a hotel and escorted to the airport. Bush and Sharon are dealing with the United Nations in the same way Hitler and Mussolini treated the League of Nations in Geneva. The first world organization went under, because nobody reacted when Germany and Italy unilaterally went their own way in world affairs. us and Israeli behavior in 2002 begins more and more to resemble Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930's. History does have the tendency to repeat itself. The world remained silent when Mussolini overran Abyssinia in 1935, much the same way as the world is looking the other way while Israel, with us support, continues its Zionist tradition in committing war crimes in Palestine.

un representative Terje Roed-Larsen, who spoke of ‘horrific destruction beyond belief in Jenin’, first, confirmed that a blood bath had taken place in Jenin on April 18, 2002. Marie Colvin reported, ‘that human senses were overwhelmed by the devastation and the stench of death upon entering the ruins of this Palestinian city’. She wrote about Israeli tank tracks leading to the body of Jamal Sabagh (28), father of three. A

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tank smashed him. What had once been a young man was now rotting flesh mingled with shredded clothing mashed into the earth. One foot was all that looked human. The Israeli Army had banned ambulances from Jenin for 11 days, and neighbors were too terrified to go to him. He was a diabetic and not a freedom fighter. His wife and children fled, but he was too afraid to be taken for a suicide bomber and stayed where he was. Only after the Israelis had yelled over megaphones that they were going to blow up his house, that he gathered a bag of medicines and eventually lined up with other men on Seha Street. Soldiers yelled to take of his shirt and trousers. He did but clung to his bag with medicine as he tried to unbuckle his belt. He was slow and his friends told The Times that soldiers had shot him. Others were taken with virtually no clothes to the Army base at Salem. (Jenin: The Bloody Truth, The Times, April 21, 2002).

Of course, when no one in the world dares to raise his voice in protest against us-Israeli war crimes and everybody remains afraid to call a spade a spade, quo vadis humanity? As long as all of us refuse to recognize that what is sausage for the goose is sauce for the gander, Bush en Sharon will continue to get away with murder. As long as the world behaves like cowards and measures war crimes with double standards, the us Gang of Four will have its way. The Bush II White House lacks the intelligence and brainpower, to demand from the Israeli leader that he simply observes international law. Even compared to the first Bush Administration, the second Bush White House behaves like lawless vigilantes. If international standards would be applied to superpower bosses as well, the entire current command of the United States would he receiving oneway tickets to the newly opened icc in The Hague.

Just as Adolf Hitler felt in the late thirties that he could do anything he wanted, Bush feels likewise that is free and not bound to observe the Charter of the un to plan a blood bath

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of his own in Iraq. With Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell - three cronies who used to cook up mischief for Dad - junior Bush is preparing a Blitzkrieg against Saddam Hussein. It's a repetition of the old Hitler tactic to invade weaker neighbors. Rumsfeld has already visited us bases in Kuwait and Qatar as well as those of the 5^th, fleet in Bahrain. Special forces and covert cia Waffen-ss action would even be launched inside Iraq. According to a report in The Observer (July 7, 2002), even Jordan would be used as a ‘jumping off point’ for some 250.000 us soldiers chosen for this latest job of wanton us aggression. The motorway Amman-Baghdad is, after all, only 600 miles. According to eyewitnesses preparations are underway at the Muafaq Salti air base at Azraq, 50 miles east of Amman on the road to Baghdad. In exchange, Washington will double its ‘aid’ to Jordan up to 500 million. General Tommy Franks and the chairman of the Jordanian Chiefs of Staff, general Khalid Jamil Surayrih conferred the end of June on attacking neighbor Iraq in collusion with another puppet of the us Axis of Evil. In the mean time did both Jordan's foreign minister, Marwan Muasher, and Information minister, Mohammad Al-Adwan categorically state, that Jordan would never allow this to happen.

Nevertheless, in true Nazi tradition, Bush & Co are preparing a superpower attack on an Arab nation of 25 million. Iraq is an extremely desirous objective, since it would be without a us blockade, the second largest oil producer in the Near East. Iraq has been seriously weakened first by the war with Iran and second by the Gulf War with a grand alliance of states, when the backbone of the Iraqi Army was destroyed. Then followed the near fatal economic blockade that even spread hunger and disease. I visited Baghdad in May 2002. Suffering Iraqis do put on a brave face, but compared to their erstwhile prosperity and affluence, one wonders why it has to be this way. Why not bring Saddam to Camp David and find a non-violent solution? There was a time, when the same man wasn't looked

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upon as being evil and even considered an admired and trusted ally of both Dad and Margaret Tatcher. Now, the White House swore to take out Saddam, dead or alive of course, commemorating the old days of the Texas sheriff. Will the son do a better job at it than the father? Osama bin Laden, too, used to be considered in Washington a true freedom fighter with the us and against the ussr. He too is now being hunted as an evil war criminal.

(5) Suicide bombers

Memories run short. Many believe that suicide bombers are an invention first launched on 09-11 in New York and Washington. But in 1983 a gigantic blast killed 241 us soldiers in their barracks Beirut, the Lebanon. For 20 years, Iranian Hizbullah (Party of God) guerrilla's acted as shock troops for the Iranian Islamic Revolution. The us identified them as Shiite terrorists. They carried out waves of suicide bombings, airline hijackings and numerous hostage takings. Especially among young Muslims post colonial Arab ruling elite's, who play ball with the us are sharply rejected. The more Bush connives with Sharon against the plo, the more anti-American passions will rise in the Afro-Asian world. Al Queda is simply an extension of earlier blunt warnings to the West, that unless America stopped interfering in the internal affairs of the Muslim world - by example the free delivery of the latest most deadly weapons, rockets and technologies to Israel - more freedom fighters would be ready to bring the ultimate sacrifice.

It makes George Bush's question, ‘why do they hate us?’ his very first asinine reaction to 09-11. If the man had done his homework, he could have answered himself. Americans are totally in the dark about the global mischief their govern-

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ments have been manufacturing since World War II. After the twin towers collapsed in Manhattan, ‘they felt their innocence had been shattered,’ said anthropologist Wade Davis of the National Geographic. Innocent? Americans are as guilty as hell! The only response to whatever they do not understand regarding the feelings or motivations of peoples in far away lands, is ‘get the B-52's and B-1B's ready and load them with precision-guided laser bombs.’

All of us, including the suicide bombers who are engaged in a Jihad against Israel and America, now live in the so-called American age. The British journalist Henry Fairlie, who for several decades worked for The Times in Washington, defined America as ‘The Spoiled Child of the Western World’ (Double Day, New York, 1976). Alexander the Great slept with the Iliad under his pillow. He found his heroes in the noble spirits of Achilles and Hercules. As British historian, Thomas Carlyle once wrote, ‘Napoleon was our last great man, because modern times deny both the existence as the desirability of great men.’ The current Yankee hero, George the Great seems to never skip an episode of The Bold and the Beautiful. All he is, is the epitome of a spoiled kid from a nouveau riche Texan oil clan. Hardly the ideal choice amongst 280 million Americans to guide the nation through stormy weather.

When from the White House rose garden Bush delivered June 24, 2002 his long awaited speech on the Middle East, an Israeli cabinet minister remarked to the Dutch paper nrc-Handelsblad, ‘It looks as if the Likud (Sharon's party) wrote the text.’ The Israeli paper Ha'aretz commented, that the Bush Administration had accepted the Israeli line on the conflict with Arafat and apparently approved Israeli war crimes in the occupied territories. Yasser Arafat seemed to have entered the mind of this us president as the latest member of his concept of an Axis of Evil.

Unsurprisingly, Sharon and his supporters were elated. But

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was this fateful speech of Bush Jr. really in the interest of Israel or the United States? Bush seemed only sensitive to deceptions by Arafat and the plo. But what about the deceptions of Sharon & Co? They promised the world that there would be no new settlements in Palestinian occupied territories. Instead, ‘new settlements sprout daily like poisoned mushrooms,’ said Yossi Sarid, leader of the Israeli opposition party Meretz. Bush's call for a new Palestinian leadership and the removal of Arafat as chairman of the plo was apparently inspired, as we were told in The New York Times, by the revelation that us intelligence services discovered that Arafat had made a payment of 20.000 dollars to a group that claimed a recent suicide attack in Jerusalem. The document came to Washington through the Mossad, Israel's most important spy organization, created by David Ben-Gurion in 1951. Other Israeli intelligence organizations are: the idf (military), Amman (intelligence branch of the idf), api (Air Force), bp (Paramilitary border police and occupied territories), ni (Naval Intelligence), gss (or Shin Bet or shabek, internal security) and rppc (Research and Political Planning Center) (The Secret History of the Mossad, Gordon Thomas, St. Martin Press, New York, 1999)

For the rppc it is standard procedure to manufacture on demand any desired document. As here, a far too convenient transparent was used as proof to convince dilettante statesman Bush, that Arafat was giving money to suicide bombers and therefore is an evil man. Nor would junior be the first us president to fall for similar tricks played by intelligence services.

Bernard Wasserstein, History professor at Glasgow University told The Times (June 30, 2002) that indeed the by then notorious speech on the crisis in the Near-East did fan terror in the region even more. ‘The shallowness of real concern for democratic reform is indicated in the fact that, by all accounts, the favored American (and Israeli) candidate to replace Arafat is a former chief of the Palestinian secret police,’ Wasserstein said.

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The British historian feared that with his call for Arafat to disappear from the scene Bush had undercut his own political objectives by driving Palestinians even more into the arms of their godfathers.

In short: new legions of suicide bombers will be lining up following Bush's manifest babble about condoning the continued war crimes by Israel against Muslims in Palestine. An Al Queda guerrilla is one answer to renewed and unparalleled aggressive us imperialism. Even Joseph Stalin drew the conclusion after the ussr had first come under attack by German fascists, that ‘not heroes make history, but history makes heroes’. Osama bin Laden is a clear historic Muslim emergency answer to us-Israeli aggression. Many in the Afro-Asian world asked themselves, who else will oppose the dollarization of the globe led by the gang of four in Washington?

Heroism is not just bravery. Heroism is a virtue: the virtues of the Romans. ‘Virtues included ideas of valour and excellence,’ wrote British journalist Henry Fairlie. ‘Valor is again different from courage. It is a quality that makes us courageous when it matters, the character that makes the courage seem more than an act of bravery. Heroism is courage given a value that is beyond courage.’ (Too rich for heroes, Harper's Magazine, November 1978).

Suicide bombers of the 21^st century are genuine heroes. History produced them. They fight against us-Israeli interventionism and new and provocative military intrusions of their holy grounds by using bare hands and naked bodies. This time, the ‘new world’ descended on Muslims to subdue and exploit them and induce them to accept the American way of life as the sole road to happiness and prosperity for all. But, like the crusaders of the 12^th century, Western invaders find Mujahideen and Al Queda blocking their evil schemes.

Palestinians have no other weapons to resist Israel than with human bombs. Young men, and even girls, blow themselves

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up at places where it hurts Israel most. The plo has no tanks, no armored personnel carriers to wrap their freedom fighters safely in steel, to protect them from enemy bullets or to be able to counter-attack their invaders. After all, who invaded whom first? Jews committed a forced entrance of Palestine exactly the same way Hitler invaded the Netherlands. We also formed resistance bands to sabotage and kill our unwanted trespassers. When Dutch guerrilla fighters killed German soldiers, the Nazis immediately took innocent hostages and executed them. Sharon does exactly the same in Palestine. In response, Hamas warriors retaliate, who cannot get close to military targets in Israel, because they would be immediately detected and destroyed before inflicting damage. What else should they do?

‘But these Hamas criminals kill innocent civilians!’ Americans shouted in exasperation, when I was in New York following 09-11. My reply: ‘Did Americans loose any sleep over becoming the first nation in history to use the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki filled with innocent civilians, causing 224.000 deaths and an equal number of seriously wounded? Did any of you ever figure out how many Japanese pizza parlors were hit by those two atomic sweeps alone? Don't accuse others with your own mass-murdering record of atomic and chemical warfare record everywhere in the world.’

(6) Mujahideen

The story of the guerrilla warfare following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is somewhat known. Few have familiarized themselves with relevant details, while nevertheless most people feel they have formed a correct opinion about what happened. If they had informed themselves properly,

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they would not have so enthusiastically endorsed Bush's crazy war on terrorism to be launched out of all places right there. Nevertheless, the president ordered the Marines, bombers and warships to catch Osama bin Laden ‘dead or alive.’ The president got himself entangled into a quagmire even worse and more dangerous than Vietnam. And why was he so stupid? Because, running a baseball team or even the state of Texas is not quite the same as beginning another quixotic crusade against Muslims, this time as late as in the 21^st century.

Initially, most observers gave the Mujahideen no chance against the Soviets. The Kremlin aimed at a Blitz with modern, mechanized, and technologically advanced weaponry. Yet, nine years later, the communist superpower withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace after losing 13,833 young soldiers. An estimated 1.3 million Afghans lost their lives while over a third of the entire population, 5.5 million became refugees.

The population of Afghanistan consists of Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen's, Persian speaking Hazaras, Balochis and various smaller tribes. An estimated 99 percent of all 17 million inhabitants are Muslims. Of these, 85 per cent are Sunni, the others mostly Shia. ‘The Mujahideen are true volunteers - unpaid warriors with family responsibilities who fought to protect their faith and community,’ wrote Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan Army, and Lester Grau, a general in the us Army in their 400-page report Afghan Guerrilla Warfare (mbi Publishing, St. Paul, Minnesota). The us, China, Britain, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates funneled military, humanitarian and financial aid via Pakistan to the Afghan resistance to cause further bloodletting among Soviet soldiers. When Osama bin Laden joined the struggle in Afghanistan, he was looked upon in Washington as a staunch ally of the West. In reality, he is a pure Muslim freedom fighter against any threats from any quarter against Islam. And that includes the menace coming from the Bush White House.

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Immediately following 09-11 the us commander-in-chief was persuaded by former associates of his Dad into ordering his own military adventure in Afghanistan. For a man, who knows all about innings, battered balls and strike zones, it must have been quite a switch to be in the White House situation room ordering pilots to use laser guided bombs on live people. The Afghan Taliban did harbour Al Queda freedom fighters like the us are the worldwide headquarters for illegal, criminal activities of the cia and connected murder organizations. It's doubtful Bush ever read the fully documented pages on Mujahideen warfare by the two generals in the above-mentioned book. They illustrated each ambush or guerrilla attack against the Soviets with detailed maps. This lively documentation of actions of war make chilling, and bloodcurdling reading. The Soviets employed massive military force, including tanks, artillery and helicopter gun ships against an almost barefoot underground army, and at the end of the day they lost and left the Mujahideen alone.

(7) Colonialism revisited

What Washington and Tel Aviv both seem to constantly ignore are some of the inescapable facts what they also are up against in the Middle East. For instance, 60 per cent of the population in the Gulf region is under the age of 25. The Arab work force will double by the year 2020. In Saudi Arabia alone, 3.3 million people are unemployed. In 2020 eight million additional jobs are needed. The Economist (March 23, 2002) pointed out that Saudi Arabia alone has 5 million students in its universities, which is eight times as many as in 1970. King Fahd is incapacitated by a stroke. His stand-in Crown Prince Abdullah (78) has not quite the appeal that enables young

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Saudi's to look up to in reverence. That honor is reserved for bin Laden, whose tape-recorded speeches are hot items for young people throughout the Arab world. New wave young Muslims are waiting for reasonable future in an ever more crowded part of the globe. They know their crooked leaders are playing ball with the new colonial mandarins in Washington.

Michael Elliott described the June 24, 2002 address on the crisis between Israel and the plo like ‘a speech given by a colonial governor.’ He added, ‘Bush set out the conditions they had to meet before winning approval from the Great White Father. Imperialism is back in vogue.’ (Time, July 8, 2002). His national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, is primarily a specialist in Soviet affairs and the Cold War. This young lady defended her boss on abc television with the words, ‘This is the most experienced administration in foreign policy in quite some time. This president is leading a brilliant war against terrorism.’ Fortunately, Miss Rice is quite an accomplished piano player and classical musician. When she leaves the White House with her Republican boss in 2005 for good she will be contracted by the Woman's Club of Sheboygan, Wisconsin to come and play Chopin. For the moment she is telling tv viewers unmitigated nonsense about her boss. Bush is reinventing wheel in foreign affairs. He is even dictating Palestinians what they have to do before the us would recognize a Palestinian state. He will never get away with his presenting colonialist prerequisite conditions to Arab freedom fighters. Time's Elliott was a bit mild when he called the Bush approach to Arafat ‘all mighty odd.’ It actually was crazy.

(8) Terrorists

The Counter Terrorism Center (ctc) at the cia headquarters in

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Langley, Virginia, has become the spy organization's busiest outfit. It consumes hectares of space with computers whirring, phones jangling and tv sets turned on 24 hours a day. This main section of the cia has grown so large, that corridors have been given street names like Saddam Street and Osama bin Lane. Some 1.100 analysts and clandestine agents are employed here. It receives every day 2.500 cables from cia stations all over the world. The ctc grinds out 500 terrorism intelligence reports a month, some of which are being distributed to 80 other us government agencies. The group also prepares a daily top-secret report for the president, called the ‘Threat Matrix’ with an average of 25 pages. It contains a running tab of possible terrorism threats.

Time writers Douglas Waller and Christopher Preston further reported that the biggest prize they so far had captured was bin Laden's chief of operations and recruiting, Saudi born Palestinian, Abu Zubaydah (31), who was caught during a gun battle in a villa near Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was rather seriously wounded, but after he recovered, he began to spill some beans about future Al Queda operations. An estimated 10.000 documents were recovered from this Al Queda safe house. In order to find Zubaydah, the cia had formed a task force and manned it with 100 covert operatives, cia analysts, technicians and even agency rookies, who had agreed to interrupt their spy training to mine data banks for this special assignment. Actually, since 1995 a group of 50 cia officers has been working full time on locating, killing or capturing Osama bin Laden. A similar group has been set up to find another of his top aides, Egyptian Ayman Al-Zawahiri, whom the cia also still considers to be alive and on the run.

Americans say that they have arrested 2.000 Al Queda suspects around the world, with many thousands supposed to be still at large. Ten of the 24 men the cia considers to be senior bin Laden lieutenants have been killed or are in custody. This

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leaves 14 top Al Queda operatives in command. Time writers call them, as do Bush, the us government, the cia and cnn ‘terrorists.’ The serious reader, however, should not be misled and see them for what they are, namely anti-imperialist freedom fighters.

It would be a fatal mistake to assume, that capturing or killing bin Laden would end the current global guerrilla warfare against worldwide us imperialism. Aside from eta in Spain, Red Brigades in Italy, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, the ira in Ireland or even Timothy McVeigh in the us, there are numerous lesser known resistance organizations, foremost in the Muslim world. Bush assumes he can stamp them all out by an insane War on Terrorism. He launched his very first assault on Al Queda, because he held them responsible for 09-11. Others are to be attacked next. According to Bush a terrorist is a criminal who deliberately kills civilians. The difference between freeddom fighter killing, deliberate assassinations, for instance with F-16's and collateral ‘damage’ victims, elude the man from Texas altogether.

That is too complicated for his Yale and Harvard trained mind. Between 1960 and 1975 alone, millions innocent Asian civilians perished as a direct result of another us crusade. The one against communism. Through military intervention in Asia, which introduced open chemical warfare in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the United States ranks among the foremost nations that violated not only human rights but also it's legal and ethical obligations under international law. The us has committed some of the most hideous war crimes in human history. In Bush's mind there is a fundamental difference between the 3.800 victims of 09-11 in America or the 224.000 burned men, women and children in 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atom bombs on open cities was fine. Airliners flown into buildings is unacceptable.

To us minds Osama bin Laden is a war criminal. Period. No

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discussion necessary. He should be shot, like the top Nazis were hanged in Nuremberg. Why? Beacause his suicide commandos deliberately killed Americans. (It remains unproven that 09-11 was a bin Laden operation.) On the other hand, Harry Truman is considered an undisputed nationale hero. Yes, he killed 224.000 innocent Japanese civilians with two atom bombs, but that was different. The Japanese had it coming, they had declared war on America.

What most Americans fail to recognize is, that millions of Muslims look upon Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat as icons of resistance. Al Queda is the same type of guerilla movement as we organised against the Nazis. To millions of Muslims, Osama bin Laden is a resistance hero. He is leading Muslims into the final battle against us-Israëli aggresion. That is why many Arabs were relieved and congratulated each other when they heard that their own young men had finally struck back at America. It was the same joy Americans felt when they bombed open cities of the Nazi Axis powers in retaliation for enemy aggression. Both sides are wrong, ofcourse. One does not aim at non-combattants ever.

(9) Yale

Bush graduated from Yale at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968. In his autobiography, A Charge to Keep (Harper Collins, New York, 1999), he underlined that he and his friends avoided attending lectures by speakers, who came to New Haven to discuss the war in Vietnam. Apparently, Yale academia missed a golden opportunity to install the lucid notion into minds of undergraduates, that in order to form an opinion one has to acquire as many ingredients of information as possible. I learned this significant basic lesson early in life at the dinner table.

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George was born at Yale, when his Dad was an undergraduate there. The elder Bush continues his vengeful crusade against Iraq through his obedient eldest son, who has promised his Dad to finish the job. When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the Class of 1950, as president of the Yale International Club, we invited as many outside speakers as were willing to come to Pierson College to share alternative argument and different points of view with us. I brought a number of ambassadors and diplomats from the United Nations to be our guests in New Haven, Connecticut. How else were we to gain insight into Political Science and International Relations? For the junior Bush even at Yale it was an easy way out by ignoring diverse opinions. Problems were easier to grasp when one has less options to choose from. Naturally, poor George is skipping Arafat altogether. He even wants him removed, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be so much easier to handle without this pig-headed freedom fighter hanging on to power. The mental handicap of the current us president was recently illustrated when, on August 1, 2002, King Abdullah of Jordan sat next to him in the Oval Office. The king's face expressed considerable dismay whilst listening to the claptrap of George II. Sharon had ordered an F-16 to kill Hamas freedom fighter Salah Shehada in Gaza City. The building where he lived was destroyed, members of his family and nine children and babies who als lived there were killed. Sharon immediately called these murders ‘a great success’. Understandably, a few days later Palestinian freedom fighters detonated a heavy bomb at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Seven dead and dozens wounded.

Bush, with the king, whose wife is a Palestinian, on his side declared, ‘I am just as angry as Israël is right now. I am furious that innocent lives were lost. However, through my fury, even though I am mad, I still believe peace is possible.’ Bush is not even aware, that when speaking to the media, he gives him-

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self away by identifying himself completely with the Israëli side of the conflict. Bill Clinton, also educated at Yale, probably picked up later at Oxford, that you do not call yourself a mediator when you side 100 percent with one party in a conflict. There will be no peace in the Middle East until this Gang of Four is voted out of the office. One dreads to think of how much blood has got to flow first in the Arab world until the day that us voters will final send a man with non-chaotic brains to the White House.

In his mémoir, Bush wrote (p.p. 50) that the main concern for him and his buddies at Yale was whether or not to join the military and fight in Vietnam. George ended up by enlisting with the Texas Air National Guard and got training as a pilot. Had he bodily participated in the battle against communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia (who, of course, also were called terrorists) he would have viewed the film Born on the Fourth of July (in which Tom Cruise plays disabled Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic), as director Oliver Stone did. Stone also attended Yale, but he was man enough to serve in Vietnam and share with other young Americans the horrors of this mad war. Yet, the 43^rd president of the United States is losing little sleep over starting another war, which will result in the slaughter of foreigners and Americans alike. Junior Bush has no clue as to what he is up against. He has already decided at Yale that the less one knows about the real problems one is up against, the easier it is to decide. In 2002 this idiot is the most powerful man in the world.

Following the disaster of 09-11 Bush declared it to be the ultimate goal of his War on Terrorism to wipe out all terrorists in the world. Obviously, this is easier said than done. This president seems incapable of perceiving that his concept would literally mean taking on many millions of devoted Muslims. He is in for a rude awakening from this hallucinatory notion, that he is able by superior military means, alone, to eliminate

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the worldwide opposition to his Global Cop playing. He will probably meet his Waterloo in Baghdad, as Richard Nixon met his ultimate military defeat in Saigon. Some political observers expect that to enable the White House to carry out its devious plan against Iraq, another Al Queda type attack on America will be needed. This will be done to firmly mobilize national and international support for such an illegal and criminal act on the part of the most powerful democracy in the world.

It should be remembered, that in 1961 the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the chairmanship of general Lyman Lemnitzer, planned a secret operation under the code-name Operation Northwoods. James Bamford, in his book Body of Secrets, (Doubleday, New York, 2001 p.p. 82-83) named it ‘the most corrupt plan ever created by the us government’. It called for innocent people to be shot in American streets, boats carrying refugees fleeing from Cuba to be sunk, and a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, Miami and elsewhere. Ofcourse, all these interior terrorist acts courtesy of the us Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bamford explained: ‘People would be framed for bombings they did not commit. Planes would be hijacked. Using phoney evidence, all of it would be framed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch a war.’ On the basis of my 34 years as a foreign journalist operating form New York, I question whatever the Bush clique says about both 09-11 or the latest us conspiracy to eliminate Saddam. Remember how they intended to create an alibi to pre-empt Castro? But then, jfk was in the White House. He cancelled these insidious Pentagon plans. In doing so he made even more enemies who were ready to have him bumped off as having gone soft on Fidel. In reality, jfk intended to maintain international law and the Charter of the un. He refused to approve vigilante initiatives in foreign policy. If a second Al

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Queda type disaster would hit America, possibly even arranged by Washington itself, the Gang of Four might easily gain massive support for a Hiroshima type of solution in Baghdad.

Bush's neo-Nazi megalomania leads him to believe that he will make the world safe for a Pax Americana. Adolf also believed at some point, that he could simultaneously fight the allies in the west and Stalin in the east. He was confronted with reality at Stalingrad. There, Hitler met his Waterloo. Bush awaits a similar disaster, unless his friend Tony Blair can make him see the light and soon.

(10) Blind Rage

Daniel Williams of the Washington Post succeeded in meeting and interviewing some members of the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades. They are the young Palestinian militants, who sprang up during the most recent uprising against Israel. They are action-oriented gunmen and number in the thousands. They have gone deep underground since Sharon ordered his tanks to enter Palestinian cities and have his soldiers hunt down as many prospective suicide bombers as they could find, murder, arrest or lock up. The Aqsa Brigades still upstage both Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) and the Islamic Jihad. The same goes for Arafat's political and armed group, Fatah, which assisted in directing the harder-edged aamb fighters. The Israelis hate them since they consider them to be the warriors responsible for most suicide attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. Sharon hunts the aamb leadership with helicopter gun ships and rockets and has them shot dead. They are even targeted in the cars they traveling in.

Rage does not obey orders, not from Arafat, not from Bush, not even from Sigmund Freud. Sharon's wild and precipitate

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actions have led to new forms of collective rage among Palestinians and visa versa. Bush firmly concluded - and we have seen how he goes about informing himself since his days at Yale - that Sharon was right and Arafat wrong. This obdurate and outrageously stupid resolution has further enraged Arabs. Repressed and maladaptive anger has run amok on both sides. Israelis and Palestinians are locked in fear for each other. These are essentially emergency emotions that are biologically determined. Both peoples respond to affronts to their pride, status, manhood and dignity with biological defenses appropriate for assaults. They are continuously experienced as bloody threats to sheer survival. Apart from bodily harm the adversaries in the Middle East share deep psychological assaults on their well being, which propel violence and rage even further. Willard Gaylin, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons has warned, that human anger, per se, is not invariably a pathologic phenomenon, nor is it automatically translated into aggressive behavior. We actually don't know much about the biology of anger. The central nervous system remains an enigma, even today. ‘We have not yet adequately chartered the anatomy - the structure - of the brain, let alone its physiology or function. Pathways of the brain have remained a mystery... Nothing - let me repeat nothing can be definitely said at this point about the chemistry of emotion, despite all the claims and counterclaims.’ (The Rage Within, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984). In the mean time, the current man in the White House plays world affairs by ear, and was far from trained in world affairs. His moronic conclusion of the current perils in the Near East was, that Sharon was right and Arafat wrong. This rush to judgment led to another crazy demand, namely, that the plo chairman call off the boys of the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades at once, or even better, vacate his chairmanship of the plo altogether. Bush seemed to think, that Arafat had a convenient

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magic switch in his Ramallah headquarters, with which he could, at will, turn off Arab rage.

The president lacks the intelligence to test his opinions with the chairman of the plo, whom he has refused to see since he entered the White House. When in 1961 jfk prepared for his first summit with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 in Vienna, he invited psychiatrist Dr. Bryant Wedge of the School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University to draft a report on the personality of the Soviet leader and how best to handle him. I went to interview professor Wedge. He explained how he had assembled a team of 20 psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians. They analyzed speeches, films and television appearances of the general secretary of the cpsu. They handed jfk a 50-page manual on how speak and negotiate with Mr. K. It was Soviet intercontinental missile power that inspired Kennedy at the time to take the Kremlin very seriously. Unfortunately, in other instances, like dealing with Fidel Castro, jfk returned, as did most us presidents, to the classic White House reflex: ‘Kill him.’ If Bush would have been a true statesman, as miss Rice feels he is, and if he cared as profoundly for human rights as he says he does, he would be taking Arafat seriously as jfk had Khrushchev studied by the best men he could find. jfk would - like Bill Clinton did - at least have taken time out to listen.

Kennedy at least showed a degree of sophistication by consulting experts and scientists on how to deal intelligently with uncharted territory. If Bush had been properly educated for the job he now holds, he would have discovered many years ago, that we learn most from those with whom we fundamentally disagree. I joined the Club of Rome in 1971 and worked, in close cooperation with its chairman dr. Aurelio Peccei, for a dozen years in the former ussr. Like everybody else in the West, I arrived in 1971 in Moscow burdened by biased views and plenty of prejudice. I stayed till the fall of Gor-

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bachev. One lesson I relearned in the ussr, to paraphrase Shakespeare, was that there was more happening in Russia than dreamt of in my philosophy. If I thought for a minute, that Bush was genuinely interested in this late hour what is really happening in the occupied territories of Palestine, I would send him myself Gaylin's book on Rage.

‘Rage does not obey orders’, wrote Uri Averny, head of the Israeli peace movement ‘Gush Shalom’ in The New York Times (March 28, 2002). He spoke of Israeli tanks running wild ‘shooting indiscriminately in all directions, in an orgy of vandalism, causing panic to a whole population, and this induces helpless rage. When soldiers crush through a wall into a livingroom of a family, causing shock to children and adults, ransacking their belongings, destroying the fruits of a life of hard work, and then break the wall to the next apartment to wreak havoc there as well, it induces further helpless rage.’

Averny described how Israeli officers ordered soldiers to shoot at ambulances, to kill even doctors engaged in saving lives of the wounded. At least this Israeli writer was aware that suicide commando's are actually eliminating feelings of helplessness and despair among Palestinians, that are under constant attack by overwhelmingly superior us backed Israeli state terrorism. At the same time, Israelis are dumbfounded by these suicide attacks in their cities, ‘because they don't know (and perhaps don't want to know) what is really happening in Palestinian towns and villages. The obedient Israeli media suppress the information, or water it down’, wrote Uri Averny. It's Nazi Germany all over again. After the Third Reich collapsed in 1945 a far majority of Germans had no clue as to what their leaders had done to people in the Nazi occupied territories, or for that matter, to Jews. Both in Israel and the United States, the public is haphazardly and one-sidedly informed about realities on the ground. Just as their boss in the White House doesn't want to know the whole truth about

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what criminal mischief his Israeli allies are really committing. Uri Avnery, a rare Israeli voice, penetrated for this one single occasion the otherwise deafening barrage of misinformation in us and western media. He ended his alarming message on this note: ‘American politicians, like Israeli officers, do not understand what they are doing. When an overbearing us vice-president (Cheney) dictates humiliating terms for a meeting with Arafat, he pours oil on the flames. A person (Cheney) who lacks empathy for the suffering of the occupied people, who does not understand their condition, would be well advised to shut up. Because every such humiliation kills dozens of Israelis. After all, the suicide bombers are standing in line.’

(11) Israeli settlements

Western audiences are told by the present Gang of Four in Washington, that Arab terror is the root of all evil in the Middle East. But Israel captured during the 1967 war large chunks of Palestinian territory and categorically ignores all un resolutions to give them back. They are intentionally depriving Palestinians of prime land and water. They are purposely breaking up Palestinian geographic continuity. Israel deliberately makes it impossible for a secure border to be established.

In an editorial, April 4, 2002, The New York Times recalled that before the Oslo Peace process began, settlements were still a major concern for the us government of Bill Clinton. Even father Bush at one time threatened to withhold loan guarantees from Israel worth 10 billion dollars, if the building of more settlements was not immediately frozen. The controversy over settlement policy between Washington and Tel Aviv eventually contributed to Shamir's downfall in 1992. Yitzak Rabin took over.

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The Oslo Peace Talks started in 1993. Israeli settlement policy was then still a major concern for the us. But, while peace negotiations were proceeding, the us lost interest in illegal moves by Israeli settlers. Under a bombardment of us-Israeli propaganda Arafat was condemned by world public opinion as being responsible for the collapse of the talks. However, while the Oslo discussions were still proceeding an additional 100.000 illegal Israeli settlers invaded Palestinian territory bringing the total to 200.000. The standard Goebbels tricks were repeated by calling Arafat an unreliable partner and a murderous monster as well. How did anyone ever expect Arafat to overlook, or even agree beforehand, to this massive illegal settlers invasion of Palestinian territories for the sake of a so-called peace? How could Arafat ever allow illegal occupations to become part of a status quo?

The New York Times summarized this dilemma as follows: ‘Two decades ago, most Israelis considered the settlers to be oddballs by messianism and nostalgia for the derring-do of Zionist pioneers. A few thousand, and then a few tens of thousands set up cheap mobile homes on windswept hillsides and vowed to double their number. But by the early 1990s, when Sharon served as Housing Minister, the situation had changed radically. Aided by government subsidies and other inducements, there were already 100.000 settlers. For Israelis, settlers were no longer zealots but ordinary fellow citizens. Suddenly their plumber or neighbor's sister was living in a big semi-detached house in a community on land captured (illegally) in 1967.’ Does the outside world understand, that Palestinians look upon a seemingly endless occupation of their land as the continuation of war by other means? The present evil foursome that sets the rules for the world in Washington obviously does not. In utter myopic stupidity Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld side with Sharon.

Concurrently, a so-called ‘battle royal’ is being waged be-

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tween the Pentagon and the State Department over a joined approach to the Middle East. Powell and his staff continue to have grave concerns, that the unprecedented Israeli offensive and destruction of the Jenin refugee camp, and other similar actions by massive military force, have fostered a rage and hatred among Palestinians that will be extremely difficult to defuse. As it stands, it has only prompted thousands of Muslims throughout the world, to prepare themselves for the Jihad against American imperialism.

In the 1970s Sharon was Agriculture minister and promised by the year 2.000 that 2 million Jews would have become settlers. As foreign minister in 1998 he called on settlers to grab hilltops before they were ceded to Palestinians through ongoing negotiations. Now, Sharon is prime minister and named a former Soviet refusnik Natan Sharansky as Housing minister. At the same time, the present Defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer has authority over new settlement construction. Who will stop them?

Tim Golden reported from Givat Eshkodesh, an Israeli settlement on the West Bank, that Jews told him, that their illegally occupied hills ‘looked straight up to God’. Palestinians in the nearby village of Singil, however, told The New York Times-reporter, ‘They are coming closer all the time. The Jews here believe they have been chosen by God and that we are animals.’ (The New York Times, July 5, 2002). And, last but not least, the suicide bombers in the Eshkodesh region feel they serve Allah, if they shoot settler families in their houses, much the same way as Israeli tanks do aim at stone throwing children.

Yet, as David Ignatius eloquently summarized, ‘Twice over the past 20 years Sharon has gambled with Israel's security and lost. Each time the reason was essentially the same. He thought the explosive application of military power would demoralize and overpower his enemies - and intimidate them into submission. Both times, the “strategy” failed. Sharon op-

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erates without any backup plan - other than waiting for a diplomatic rescue from the United States.’ (Washington Post, March 23, 2002)

The first major butchery happened in Lebanon, when Sharon using the classic Hitler's Blitz method, thought he could quickly drive the plo out of Beirut. But the Palestinians held their ground forcing Sharon to a siege of the Lebanese capital. Thanks to us intervention, Arafat and his men were safely led out of Beirut and settled in Tunisia. To this day, Sharon talks like a Nazi executioner, when he keeps saying, he wished he had killed Arafat in 1982.

The second strategy failure unfolded during 2001, when Sharon desperately tried to crush the new Palestinian Intifada by naked military power. Ignatius likened the latest Palestinian uprising to the collective equivalent of a suicide bomb. Sharon's approach showed the same flawed logic as when Washington believed the Vietnam War could be won by ‘gradual escalation’. Lyndon Johnson and his successors assumed that the will of the enemy could be broken by employing ever more force. The Vietnamese made fools of America's military super power. Apparently nobody in Washington learnt anything from the Saigon debacle in 1975. They embarked on a similar military fiasco in Afghanistan, and are about to open a second front against Iraq. In the mean time, as James Bennet warned in The New York Times, ‘the death ratio during the first Intifada 15 years ago was 25 dead Palestinians for one Israeli. In the present Intifada 3 Palestinians die against one Israeli’.

When Zionism overran Palestine in 1948 the Jewish invasion of a predominantly Arab state was simply a repeat performance of 19^th century colonialism. During 52 years of systematic Israeli colonization Palestinians were powerless to effectively resist that 85 per cent of their land was taken over by unwanted foreigners. The invaders themselves had come as victims of Nazi terrorism. Slowly but securely the newcomers be-

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came terrorists themselves. The evil mind of Sharon is now leading Jews behaving as Nazis to another blood bath in a life and death struggle with Muslims. Why do so many in America and the West refuse to accept the simple fact, that in 2002 Palestinians are resisting Israel no longer, because they are Jews, but because they stole and are continuing to steal their land?

(12) Oil

During the first half year of his son's Administration, the elder Bush picked up a phone twice to reassure Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi-Arabia, that his son's heart was in the right place when it came to dealing with the Middle East, reported Jane Perlez in The New York Times (July 15, 2001). Twice the former president had intervened in a critical foreign policy area. Prince Abdullah had complained, that the junior Bush was far too close to Ariel Sharon. Dad told the Saudi royal not to worry, his son was going to do the right thing. The New York Times added, that Dad had further assured the Crown Prince that his son had a true grasp of the Middle East situation. One dreads to think of what the Saudi ruler must have concluded from that telephone conversation. In the mean time, no one in America dares even to think about the question of how much Dad is still involved in affairs of state officially conducted by junior. Given the disparity in experience between father and son in foreign affairs, ‘it was a natural instinct for the father to guide his son informally,’ reported miss Perlez. After all, Dad made foreign affairs a sort of hallmark of his own presidency. Therefore, Dad continues to receive cia briefings on all major issues on the world scene. He even requests this information on a far more frequent basis than other living former presidents. At Langley they joke about them as ‘president daddy's daily re-

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port.’ Jean Becker, current chief of staff of Bush I told The New York Times that the father was ‘not comfortable’ to talk about phone calls to his friends. ‘The son's staff at the White House, does not return phone calls when reporters make efforts to discover to what extent father and son consult on matters of urgency in foreign affairs.’

It is well known, that the top echelon of the Bush II government, including the offices of vice-president Cheney and secretary of state Powell, former aides of Daddy are sprinkled through the present foreign policy machinery. General Brent Scowcroft, for instance, chairman of Warren Rudman, has also returned to the Administration of junior as chairman of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The general had been criticizing the son of his former boss for letting Arab friends down during the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He was first invited in July 2001 to the Bush summer home at Kennebunkport, Maine. There he was assessed once more by Daddy, after which reporters were told that he too, was returning to Washington to assist the son.

The Bush clan goes out of its way to hide from the public, to what extent father and son decide between themselves what is best for America and the world. The New York Times reported likewise, that after junior was in office five months, Daddy sent him a report drawn up by Korean expert, Donald P. Gregg, advising the Bush II Administration to keep the us, door to North Korea open. Not too long afterward, junior announced in his paranoid 2002 State of the Union Address, that the us was threatened by an Axis of Evil. According to cia estimates, North Korea and possibly Iraq could have missiles capable of hitting the American mainland by 2015 (The Economist, February 2, 2002).

Six months after Dad dispatched his ideas on the Middle East to his son, George Jr. delivered his by now notorious speech to the world that an Axis of Evil was threatening world peace.

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Scare tactics represent a classic trick to get public support. Hitler and Goebbels were masters at this game. To avoid anxiety, crucial portions of awareness are being closed off. Psychologist Daniel Goleman put it this way, ‘We tune out, we turn away, and we avoid. Finally we forget, and forget we have forgotten. A lacuna hides the harsh truth.’ (Id.: Vital Lies, Simple Truths, id. p.p. 244). But when the great leader of the free world suffers from this kind of cloudiness of mind, all of us are in trouble, and in mortal danger. No imaginary Axis of Evil threatens mankind or the survival of the human race. It is the defunct modus operandi of junior's brain that represent a deadly peril to all of humanity at the beginning of the 21^st century. Junior even overruled his Dad on what to do in North Korea.

Paul Krugman commented in The New York Times (August 7, 2001), that Bush's heart belongs like that of his Dad to those who sell oil. In 1980 Saudi Arabia was still one of the richest countries in the world. Those were the days that Riyadh constructed a 20 billion dollar gargantuan airport, a third of which was immediately moth balled. The Saudi princes felt that the port of entrance to the kingdom should be able to compete with New York or Tokyo. Still, Saudi Arabia remains the world's largest petroleum exporter. What the House of Saud earns yearly in oil exports is about equal to what Americans spend yearly on cigarettes. The 5.000 or so princes and the great merchant families, like the bin Laden's, are indeed rich beyond the dream of avarice. But the kingdoms per head income is just a little higher than Mexico's. On the whole, the oil income for the Gulf Cooperation Council (gcc) countries has dwindled from a peak of 150 Billion in 1980 to an average of 80 billion in the 1990s (The Economist, March 23, 2002).

The political situation in Arab nations in the 21^st Century too often resembles the era of 19^th century colonialism. The us, as the big powerful bully using superior military power to tell

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the weaker nations what is good for them and whom they should choose as their leaders. The British in India and the Dutch in Indonesia used to seek close cooperation with Indian Maharajah's and Javanese sultans and princes. The British first, followed by the Americans, did the same in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia was the only modern Muslim state in the region that was created by Jihad. In 1902, Saudi Arabia's founding father, Abdul Azis ibn Saud led 40 followers in a daring raid on Riyadh. His family had been linked to puritan Wahhabi clerics since the 18^th century. Only in 1925 did the holy cities of Mecca and Medina fell to Saudi royals. Today 16 million barrels of oil leave the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. Gulf oil, including that from Iran and Iraq, accounts for 40 percent of global trade in oil. While most reserves will last for another 25 years, oil from the Gulf region is expected to last for another 100 years.

Apart from the Saudi royals, the West deals with Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad as-Sabah of Kuwait. In Bahrain rules Sheikh Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa, in Oman Sultan Qaboos, in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Than and in the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan. The Gulf's princes, princesses, sheikhs and sheikhas, and often their quite distant relatives, continue to enjoy perks of free travel on national airlines, free utilities and ownership of prime property. Most of the Gulf's royal clans have amassed large, and sometimes colossal fortunes, at the expense of the masses.

I lectured in the United States during the second half of the past century for W. Colston Leigh of New York on subjects like ‘The slow death of colonialism’, based on data I assembled during reporting from Afro-Asian countries between 1950 and 1990. The petroleum oriented Bush clan seems to have missed the point that the days of privilege and exploitation by western imperialists in developing lands are a thing of the past. Where they are still in operation they are surely on the way

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out. Neither does one have to be an expert or a clairvoyant to understand, that new generations of educated Arabs, some of them having attended us colleges and universities, will certainly insist on the further democratization of their homelands. The Arab puppets of the Bushes and the Cheneys in the Middle East are walking on their last legs. Hence, it is unwise and short sighted to put one's eggs in Arab royal baskets. Yet, Bush II seems bent on repeating the mistakes of the European imperialists when they failed in the 20^th century to interpret history correctly.

(13) Arab Police States

While western propaganda advertises some Arab leaders and their governments as true us allies, tehy are in fact clones of Nazis and Hitler. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, cordially entertained by both Bush I and Bush II at Camp David, would sell his mother to buy arms to join a us attack on Iraq. Abdel Gamal Nasser must have been turning in his grave. Mubarak proclaims that those who carry out terrorist acts have no claim to human rights. All fascist dictators say those things. The president of Egypt knows only too well, that the day will come when he too will be hanged for treason. According to The Economist (February 2, 2002) at least 20.000 people are detained in Egypt without trial. Mubarak is the kind of traitor who like Bush calls for a global crackdown on fellow Muslims in order to prolong his fascist rule as long as possible.

Egypt is fast approaching 70 million inhabitants. With a growth rate just fewer than 2 percent annually, overpopulation is a real problem. At the same time the al-Hazar mosque and university in the center of Cairo, a city of 12 million, are still forming the most conservative bastion of Islam in Egypt (News-

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week, March 19, 2002). Many jihadis - or disciples of the holy struggle - are more interested in first overthrowing local corrupt tyrants, or us puppet regimes. This is for them a priority of life and death between the weak and the evil and strong. The Washington Gang of Four seems totally blind as to what millions of Muslims consider the real Axis of Evil.

Why did a shy doctor from Cairo, Ayman al-Zawahari, turn to Al Queda and join Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan? Why did he loose all hope for Egypt, or for a change in regime from within? Mubarak is kept afloat by billions of us dollars. The people of Egypt hate his police methods, his jails and his silent executions. They despise the man for selling them out to Washington. They are powerless to change their fate, like billions of others in the Afro-Asian developing world. Only half a century ago they were all still subjugated under the joke of colonialism. They were merely surviving in overseas possessions of the rich northern half of the world. They have been kept for centuries by the West under Nazi types of occupation. They at last find themselves in the first stages of nation building but do not have the resources or the financial means to liberate themselves from the continuing neo-Nazi chains of the G-8. The haves of the world continue to control the deprived, which are kept in line through indebtedness to the us dollar. Or, through institutions such as the imf and the World Bank. This unscrupulous debt device and the so-called new wave of globalization are the 21^st century instruments by which western imperialism continues to strangle the poor in this world. The destitute are being kept in line through billions of dollars in debt, which they will never ever be able to pay back. Add to this disguised continuation of colonial exploitation by other means, the standard practice of installing us Quisling regimes, that dance to the tune of Washington. Then an accurate picture of what really is going on in the 21^st century emerges. That is why there is an Al Queda. This underground Muslim

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resistance reflects, what billions of abandoned and weaponless masses feel in this world. That's why there are suicide bombers. Their ultimate sacrifices are seen as a disgrace to modern civilization. But they do, what we did during Hitler's occupation of the Netherlands. Except they are possessed by a deeper religious faith than we held. The heroic Muslims of the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades are infinitely more courageous than we were. At last, Muslims are counterattacking because payback time has finally arrived.

For nitwit George Bush, modern history starts on that fateful day of 09-11. While innocent Americans were minding their business, all of a sudden, as lightening striking from the sky, they came under attack. Why? We have always behaved as perfect gentlemen in world affairs are ‘Ugly Americans’ reassuring themselves. Yes, we did install through cia coupmethods some nasty fascist dictators in Indonesia, Congo and Chili and perhaps some other countries. That was bad. Henry Kissinger misled us in saying Augusto Pinochet was a fine man. But we truly believed we were doing it for their own good. We did assassinate numerous leaders we did not like. But don't compare us to Hitler, please. He was a diehard Nazi. We are not. We are different. We are true patriots. Hitler massacred Jews. We slaughtered millions Asians for their own good. Imagine if Southeast Asia had gone communist. And then, all the billions we have poured into these ungrateful nations over the years. Perhaps we did keep some foreign Nazis in power. And, yes, we urged some of them on to do some killing of their own. We supplied them with lists whose throats should be cut first. We might have collaborated with a mass killer as Suharto in Indonesia, true. But also think of the prosperity he delivered to America by selling out his nation's natural resources against bargain prices. Yes, too bad for the Indonesian masses that saw the Suharto family become billionaires. Did Bill Clinton not describe Suharto as ‘our boy’? Of course we looked the

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other way on Suharto's human rights record. He deserved to become a billionaire at the expense of his people. That is common Wall Street business practice. He was aiding our multinationals and helping to raise the us standard of living to new heights. He also liquidated thousands of communists and kept Moscow and Beijing influences to a minimum. Plenty of sound business reasons to channel billions Suharto's way.

Yes, Ferdinand Marcos used to be our friend. And yes, he robbed the people of more than 10 billion dollars. He enriched himself, but he enriched us too. So we played even. Yes, the cia installed colonel Mobutu in Congo, and yes, he too robbed his people of billions. But we needed the Congo's resources, therefore his stealing from the people turned us into profitable partners. We needed the raw materials for the military industrial complex. Remember, Hitler would have never gotten as far as he did without ig-Farben, Krupp, Messerschmidt, Bayer, Hoechst etcetera.

We have got to work with Saudi princes and other royal clowns, because it's the only way to get the energy we need. True our banks profit too from doing business with our worldwide network of robber barons. American imperialists repeat all the old tricks of the 19^th and 20^th century European colonialists with the consequent backlashes for the masses in the impoverished third and fourth worlds.

Since 1945, Washington pretends that it supports one man one vote for every man and woman on earth. Except for elections that would favor leftist or socialist regimes. When Chili elected Salvador Allende, the cia (and Henry Kissinger) was instrumental to have him removed and shot. Another exception formed the energy rich Middle East. It would be inconceivable that Washington would encourage a popular vote to be held in the present collection of Arab police states and royal dictatorships, thus endangering a steady flow of black gold to the West from this the region. The hunt for oil is a shock-

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ing hypocritical and in the end self-defeating con game. The Bush II White House seems bent on improving the scores. Yet, the us xxl-size Gulliver is bound to collapse. It's only a matter of time.

(14) Schmoozing

In 2002 total defence spending in the world is 800 billion dollars. The us alone wastes 331 billion on arms, and Bush recently asked for an increase of 48 billion to finance this stage in his war on terror. Even tiny Israel suffers under New Militarism (Newsweek, June 10, 2002). During the past 20 months the Al Aqsa Intifada has profoundly changed the Israeli Defence Force (idf). Israeli militarism has been clearly revived. Before, Israeli soldiers and officers were disciplined for maltreatment of Palestinian civilians. Those days are gone. It's a free for all. So far during these 20 months, 1.600 Palestinians and 500 Israelis have been killed. It is only the beginning of another bloodbath. As lesser minds take over, the greater will be the number of casualties. Junior Bush and Sharon have brought the Middle East further away than ever from an acceptable solution for all.

The present White House is strictly run as a major corporation American style. Dick Cheney comes from Halliburton, the oil services giant. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil from Alcoa. Commerce Secretary Don Evans from a Denver oil-and-gas outfit. ‘The corporate criminals among us, the swindlers and profiteers, are now described in language once saved for bin Laden's legions,’ reported Time (July 22, 2002). ‘It is as if we have given the ceo's weapons of mass destruction at least economically?’ said professor Brian Shapiro of the University of Minnesota.

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When the latest series of corporate scandals broke in America and as more details surfaced about Bush' obscure sale of stock, whilst he was director of Harken Energy in 1990, junior Bush looked, when defending himself against these allegations, ‘like a 5-year old losing a battle with an ice cream cone on a hot day,’ reported Bill Saporito in the same issue of Time. The then son of the president dumped 848.000 dollars worth of Harken stock two months before the company announced a 23,2 million dollars loss. On top of it, he was 34 weeks late in filing a form of this record sale with the Securities and Exchange Commission about this record sale as requested by law. Now, all of a sudden, being in the White House himself, Bush is preaching corporate morality following a series of major company scandals. Few are prepared to take him seriously anymore. Enron in Texas was one of the first conglomerates caught in a web of malpractices and falsifying the books.

The top military chief in the White House is former Enron vice-president Thomas White. He sold between June and November 2001 no less than 12 million dollars worth of Enron stock; well before the Enron scandals broke. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, was chairman of two technology companies, before he accepted to join the Bush team. Mitch Daniels, the Budget Director, was vice president of the Lily drugs company. Mr. Bush's personal lawyer, Robert Jordan, went as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Robert Zoellick, the us Trade Representative, was a member of Enron's Advisory Council. Lawrence Lindsey, the president's top economic advisor, used to be consultant to Enron. Even the Attorney General (Minister of Justice), John Ashcroft, had to excuse himself from the Enron investigation, because he had received a 58.000 dollar donation from Enron.

The management of the present White House is a hornet's nest of dubious dealings and inappropriate financial liaisons. The worst trouble is connected to vice-president Dick Cheney.

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When he left his post as ceo at the Halliburton oil services company to become the running mate of the junior Bush, Cheney made no less than 18.5 million dollars profit by selling his shares for more than 52 dollars each. Sixty days later the company announced it was doing much worse than expected. The very same shares went down 11 per cent in one day. The New York Times reported that Cheney's former shares are in July 2002 only worth 13.10 dollars. Therefore, even the vicepresident is now being investigated by the sec and sued by both shareholders and a group of lawyers belonging to Judicial Watch. What also helped bring down Halliburton shares was the fact hat ceo Cheney signed in 1998 a merger with Dresser Industries, when that company was heavily burdened by asbestos-contamination lawsuits. The Halliburton stock plummeted further after Cheney's foolish move.

By mid-July 2002, the White House expected a 165 billion dollars budget deficit. Public confidence in the economy and aggravated doubts about the immediate future with the announced military intervention by the Gang of Four in Iraq further increases the downward trend of the stock market. The economic fall-out of corporate scandals culminating in the collapse of World Com at this time of writing, affects the public deeply. A decade ago 30 percent of all us families owned stock. In 2002 half of all Americans invest at the stock market. Bush's approval ratings for the economy fell from 72 percent in the fall of 2001 to 58 percent in the summer of 2002. Analysts are already forecasting that dissention over widespread schmoozing between the White House and the corporate world will express itself in us politics, especially during the next presidential election in 2004. This Bush will be out after one term, just like his Dad.

Edward Alden asked in The Financial Times (July 13, 2002), whether the political fortunes of George Bush will take a similar trajectory as the current downward trend in the economy

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and the financial markets. Other comments expect junior to try to finish his father's crusade against Saddam Hussein in a desperate effort to unite the public behind his corporate oriented Republican Administration. But the signs are not favorable for this strategy. Father Bush scored in 1991 a smashing victory against Iraq. Yet, in the same year he was voted out of office. The elder Bush managed to defeat Saddam with an absolute minimum of military casualties among the 600.000 troops sent out to crush the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. An attack on Iraq in 2002-2003 will be a different matter. In 1991 Saddam was trying with the active assistance of Mikhail Gorbachev to escape military annihilation. He then succeed in rescuing most of his elite Republican Guard and other units. This time, the evil four in Washington are crazy enough to carry out their much-advertised war against Iraq. Yet, they might discover that this time the Iraqi leader is prepared to fight to the death. This could resort to the deployment of chemical and biological weapons, of which the Washington gang contends that he has plenty. Desperate needs lead to desperate deeds.

Meanwhile, James Dao reported in The New York Times that a growing number of Democrats, and even Republicans, in Congress are urging Bush to give more information about his war plans. Dao: ‘The lawmakers do not say that they oppose the idea of military action. In fact, nearly all of them support the action, or at least in concept.’ (July 19, 2002). During the 34 years, that I lived in New York, I learned with my work as an international journalist to accept, that us politicians and members of Congress usually talked utter nonsense about countries, which I had covered for years. Foreign leaders whom I had studied, met and interviewed were foul mouthed and misrepresented in the extreme by honorable members of the us Congress. The worst that can befall an overseas head-of-state is when American parliamentarians begin to compare

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them to Hitler. Sukarno, founding father of Indonesia, would be recklessly called from the floor of the House or Senate ‘a Hitler type Nazi’. After earlier failed attempts to shoot him the cia ousted him in 1965 and replaced him with a full blown fascist military dictator. What Americans were saying or thinking about him was utter rot and had no relation to reality.

Father Bush used the same stupid lie when he launched his assault on Iraq. He denounced Saddam as a monster similar to Hitler. Most Americans mistake such nonsense for the gospel truth since it comes from Godfather in the White House. In our day the son of the liar is taking this heroically mad unfinished Iraqi business of Dad stoically and serious. The behavior of the present Gang of Four in Washington, or for that matter the Sharon regime, comes increasingly dangerously close to the way the Nazis considered it their duty to bring order into what they saw as European chaos. Americans are the new Nazis that intend to bring their Yankee order to the entire globe.

For the moment little is known about how Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld intend to go about replacing Saddam with a us puppet regime. They aren't saying. Their real aim is to extend, via local Quislings, total control by Houston oil barons over super rich Iraqi oil fields. Hitler managed German power in identically the same way. Simultaneously, the Bush polls are steadily going down. From 90 per cent on that fateful day of 09-11 to 70 percent a year later. Soon his overall popularity will sink to 50 per cent and even well below. The people can be fooled for some time, but not all the time. A further downward trend in public support could make a planned Iraqi invasion unlikely or even impossible. A parallel downward trend in economic prospects could further complicate the financing of further lunatic us adventures in the Middle East.

When, by the summer of 2002, stocks were sinking to new lows, Bush rushed to Wall Street in an desperate effort to calm down the markets. The more he spoke, however, the further

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share prices plummeted. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Fed (Federal Reserve Bank) tried to lighten the minds of investors by spreading an upbeat message. But he also referred to the ‘infectious greed’ that seemed to grip the business community. Reality in 2002 is much worse than the chairman has said. Americans are in the grip of consumer doubts all the way. ‘Understandably, investors rage about the deceptions they have suffered,’ editorialized The Financial Times (July 20, 2002). ‘They want the crooks punished. They should be. But it was the public's credulity that made the reign of the crooks possible. Chief executives gave investors what they wanted. If they failed to do so, they were punished. This is, alas, an old story, repeated in every generation.’

Likewise, what is being repeated by every single generation is that voters, just like investors, believe what they are being told by each new generation of crooked politicians. Each time they vote crooks into the White House again. Trust has become an endangered species like the central African giraffe or okapi. As Mark Twain wrote in 1901, ‘The blessings-of-civilization trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But christianity... has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the people who sit in darkness have noticed it... and have become suspicious of civilization.’ President Harry Truman kept this thought of Mark Twain on his desk in the White House. Yet, by ordering two atombombs on open Japanese cities, Harry most certainly became the most celebrated massmurderer of innocent civilians in the 20^th century. Compared to Truman, Osama bin Laden (if he is responsible for 09-11 as Bush, the chronic liar, says he is) pales like a miserable amateur.

What we witness as happening in the realm of Big Business is equal to what is occurring in international politics, diplomacy and the conduct of us Foreign Affairs. The current White

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House is so totally interwoven with crooked business interests and greedy Arabian petroleum investments, that to assume that voters are being told the truth about anything anymore brings us back to the trusted days of childhood. We truly believed that the wolf in Little Red Ridinghood had eaten the loving grandmother. Few stop and think what could be the real reason for the Bush family and their looting friends to dispatch the big Yankee wolf to Iraq to eat Saddam alive. The new Nazis are preparing for a deadly Blitz assault on the Iraqi oil-fields by organizing staging areas and cooperation from American controlled and financed fascist police states in the region, for example Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. It looks as if young American men and women will be asked again to sacrifice their lives for another unforgivable hoax. In Vietnam the mission was to kill communists. In Afghanistan to kill Osama bin Laden and as many Taliban as they could lay their hands on. That also hundreds of Afghan civilians got killed is seen in Washington as unavoidable collateral damage only. Where is a war there are corpses says the Gang of Four.

The latest crusade will be the hunt for Saddam. Daddy Bush informed the people long ago that the mission was necessary to get rid of the Iraqi Hitler. Young men and women should refuse to be drafted and wasted once more as cannon fodder on orders of the White House. They should decline to become ordinary war criminals because of deranged minds of warmongering generals and admirals under the command of a gaga commander in chief. If the military personnel of the us armed forces knew the plain truth they would perhaps finally discover who is the worst Hitler of all in this.

(15) Iraq

When I boarded an airliner in Baghdad for Jordan on May 10,

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2002, a stewardess brought me the latest issue of Time (May 13, 2002) with a cover-story by Johanna McGeary entitled ‘The sinister world of Saddam’. I had just been there to attend a conference with other representatives from some 40 countries. Her first line read, ‘The mad hatter might feel at home in the wonderland of Iraq.’ I could imagine a cia or White House report with a similar Goebbels type catch phrase opening a report on Russia ruled by Stalin. But this was an opening statement on current Iraq in perhaps the most widely read international magazine in the world. I hardly felt like a ‘mad hatter’ upon leaving the office of the highly articulate and intelligent vice prime minister Tariq Azis after an early evening intense conversation. My last line to him was, ‘If you are continuing to smoke those trunks of cigars, you will not last too long anymore.’ His reply: ‘Fidel corrupted us all.’ The real mad hatters are in Washington not in Baghdad. Or for that matter among the editorial board of Time who unloaded this McGeary garbage about Iraq on its readers.

In the very first paragraph of 15 lines, while describing the festivities for 65^th birthday of the Iraqi president, she drew an instant parallel with Italian fascist Mussolini. Taking a clear cue from Joseph Goebbels, she safely planted her first lie about Iraq in the mind of the unsuspected reader. Thus the intended Nazi poison was already penetrating the neurons of all persons who picked up that weeks copy of Time. The magazine neatly tuned in with the Bush' agitprop calling Saddam a new Hitler. Alas, the real new Nazi resides in the White House.

Prominent and prestigious journalists secretly working for intelligence services is not a new phenomenon. Al ready in the 70's, detailed information surfaced in Washington as to what extent us reporters, academics, and religious leaders were being recruited and used as paid spies for the us undercover operations. James Reston, together with Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most renowned us journalist of the 20^th century, re-

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ported April 27, 1976 in The New York Times that the us Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities had completed an investigation. It found that dozens of journalists and employees of media organizations had been recruited by the cia to assist them in their dirty work. Editors of newspapers were solemnly assured by the intelligence units, that none of their journalists were either working for them or being secretly paid for their services. The cia denied everything for years and continues to lie about it. Even, after the Senate Select Committee presented proof, that us spy organisations were lying, the cloak and dagger boys refused to cooperate with Congress.

President Gerald Ford played ball with the cia and refused to issue orders to George Bush, at the time director of the cia, ‘to clear up this mess,’ wrote Reston. ‘Some of us,’ he continued, ‘talked privately to the president about it. He does not condone it, nor does he deny the congressional report that the practice continues.’ At the end of 1977, John Crewdson and Joseph Treaster published three entire pages in The New York Times in which they documented how the cia had been engaged in an unremitting, though largely unrecognised, effort to shape foreign opinion in support of American policy abroad. In 1977, the cia turned out to be either the owner, or was subsidizing at least fifty newspapers, news agencies, radio stations and magazines, both inside and outside the us. cia personnel was working for television operations throughout the world, while most of these operations were unaware they were employing us spies. At least 250 us publishing houses, some even well known and prestigious, were in 1977 publishing books, that were authored and subsidized by the cia. A quarter of a century later the skills of espionage and propaganda have only become more sophisticated, far-reaching and global.

Anyone who might be under the illusion that all nations within the nato alliance, do not use the same illegal and criminal tactics as offshoots of the Big Brother in Washington, should

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have their heads examined. Being in journalism for 50 years, I have witnessed this happening all around me, at un headquarters in New York, as well as in Holland. In the early eighties I tried to get a debate started on this subject in the Dutch parliament. This was immediately torpedoed by the then minister of the Interior, also in charge of intelligence matters, Hans Wiegel. It was naïve on my part to assume, that when the us Congress can't stop illegal and criminal activities of spy organisations, we in The Hague could or even would.

Even as recently as May 6, 2002, when one Dutch candidate for the premiership, Pim Fortuijn, advocated amongst others the abolishment of the armed forces, with the exception of the Royal Dutch Navy, he was simply shot dead one week prior to the elections. This was the only way in which Fortuijn could be stopped in eventually carrying out his for nato rather disruptive plans. Inspire of his premature death, his lpf party became the second largest party in Holland. Fortuijn was promptly replaced by a minor employee of the ministry of Defence, Mat Herben. Prior to the murder of his party leader, he carried Fortuijn's briefcase, or filled up his coffee cup during his press conferences. Herben was prior to the murder virtually an unknown co-worker in the lpf party. But once Fortuijn was dead, the government, with Herben's support of course, rammed through the contorversial Joint Strike Fighter (jsf) project, that Bush wanted the Netherlands to underwrite with billions of dollars, amounting to plenty of work and jobs for the us Hitlerite military-industrial complex. Against these backgrounds McGeary's Time piece on Iraq should be read.

Prince Hassan of Jordan (what was he doing there in the first place?) strode into a meeting of Iraqi dissidents in London as was arranged by and paid for by us and British intelligence. Hassan embraced a scion of Feisal, the last King of Iraq, who was assassinated in 1958 and dragged by automobile at the end of a rope through the streets of Baghdad. The us and Britain

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are feverishly trying to organise a legion of future puppets who will agree to play ball with Houston oil firms. According to the Sunday Times, Tony Blair is readying 20 to 30.000 troops to lend support to the Big Brother from Texas. Later, King Abdullah of Jordan told The Times (29 July 29, 2002), that his uncle had made a serious faux pas. The king told Michael Binyon, ‘Prince Hassan blundered into something he did not realise he was getting into and we are picking up the pieces.’

According to the Jordanian monarch Bush had told him on another occasion, ‘I am the one that articulates foreign policy and the one that translates it for me is Colin Powell.’ It has been clear for a number of months, however, that the us foreign secretary has been continuously sidetracked by the White House. He seems to be outvoted by Cheney and Rumsfeld, with Bush, wet behind the ears on international politics, siding with the Washington warlords. The king strongly feels that hardliners are threatening the peace all over the Middle East. He's equally opposed to Bush's personal fatwa for the removal of Yasser Arafat. ‘His popularity goes up the minute you point an Israëli tank barrel at him or there is a ludicrous statement out of Washington,’ the king said. Abdullah, himself somewhat new to the king's profession, fails to recognize the Mount Everest climb he has to perform in order to reach the brain cells of the us president, and then to discover that they are largely confused due to a lack of availability of valid information.

Furthermore, apart from plans for an invasion, the president has already instructed the cia to capture or kill the Iraqi president, as The Guardian reported from Washington (June 18, 2002). King Abdullah was arriving too late to prevent that delinquent White House order. Nearly all us heads of state have behaved since World War II as serial killers of foreign leaders whom they disliked, did not understand and therefore concluded that it would simplify matters for the Global Cop if

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Murder Incorporated (cia) liquidated the bastards. Sharon's mind operates identically. Junior Bush and senior Sharon produce uncontrolled roguery, which the Middle East has never ever experienced before.

Iraq does not threaten the us. Nor did Lybia, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Nor does North Korea or Iran. Yet, us war criminals talk about these nations as if it were normal and acceptable procedure for Yankees to decide what is good and what is evil for the peoples in those countries. It seems to escape the silly asses in the halls of Congress and the White House, that perhaps the beliefs, hopes and priorities of others, do not necessarily jive with the American way of life. Hitler overran Europe. He felt, that national socialism offered the continent the best prospects for the future. He soon discovered that none of the occupied territories were prepared to accept the Nazi way of life. In 1932, with the rise to power of Hitler already in the air, Einstein wrote to Freud, that the craving for power characterizes the governing class in every nation and that this uncontrolled lust for power endangered national sovereignty of others. Meaning: we all have the right to decide on our own future in our own land. All of Europe united to oust the Nazis, who wanted to think and decide for us. With large scale us and Soviet assistance, the Germans were driven back to Berlin. In turn, the Cold War drove the Soviets back to Moscow. In our time, the question remains open, whether casino dollar imperialism and the intended globalisation of the American way of life will become acceptable to all, or whether Yankees, too, will eventually be driven back into their cages.

In the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th centuries Christians desperately tried to recover the holy land, Palestine, from the Muslims. These incursions were called ‘armed pilgrimages’. Thousands of years later these imperialist expeditions do make shocking reading. ‘The lust for power’, said the psychologist Erich Fromm in 1941 watching Hitler marching into the ussr, ‘is not

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rooted in strength but in weakness’. Christians were motivated to march on Constantinople out of fear for Islam. Sharon sends his tanks into Gaza out of fear for the suicide bombers. Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Poland never posed the slightest threat to Nazi Germany. Just like North Korea, Iran and Iraq have no intention to invade California or Massachusetts. Yet, Bush intends to march on them. He is sending stratospheric bombers over Afghanistan in fear of the Taliban. Some wacko's are already suggesting, that it will be necessary to occupy Iraq for many years and remaking that country into the Yankee image. This is Nazi behaviour of a miserable weakling, hardly that of a 21^st century statesman. What are future historians to make of the Bush dynasty madness of our time? ‘That kings should become philosophers, and philosophers kings, can scarcely be expected’, wrote Immanuel Kant in 1795. ‘Nor is it to be wished, since the enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgement of reason, and perverts its liberty.’ How to make it clear to ignorant fools in Washington, who are entertaining daydreams of launching another Mobile Oil crusade into the Middle East by attacking Iraq, that their forerunners such as Hitler and Mussolini, would have awarded them the Nazi Iron Cross for their efforts.

In the plane from Baghdad to Amman whilst reading the Time cover story on Saddam, I realized to what frightening extend this magazine was doing Bush' bidding. McGeary reported in the manner of a cia spy on the pay-roll of Washington instead of doing what she was supposed to do. Be the eyes and ears of her readers. Her 6 page saga was tailored to all the lies and projections about Saddam just as they have been coming out of Washington over the past years.

Bush and Blair seem to agree, that the world would be better off without Saddam. They are preparing a Wagnerian exit for the Iraqi leader. Needless to say that hundreds of millions of Arabs, Asians, Africans, and lately even Europeans, are rea-

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soning today how much better off the world would be without this odd couple of warmongers, Bush and Blair.

Scientist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976), told The Guardian, that if Saddam was a danger to world peace, Bush was just as much a threat to humanity. ‘It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv.’ Also, in Britain opposition to Blair's tandem with Bush against Iraq is stiffening. Former British ambassador to Baghdad, Sir John Moberly said: ‘A lot of our former diplomats are very uneasy about the way we are going.’ Imagine if another Hitler came to power somewhere, not an imaginary one like Saddam, but a real Nazi dictator, determined with a traumatized mind, that Bush and Blair must go. Mankind would be faced with World War III. Or has the guntoting, triggerhappy cowboy form Texas already embarked on this dead end road?

Bill Cinton made an effort to break with standard criminal practices of Washington. He talked for days on end with Yasser Arafat and began to understand some of the basic grievances of Arabs against America. He cancelled a planned cia uprising against Saddam. This abrupt cancellation of this covert operation did cost numerous cia operatives their lives. Saddam caught and shot them. During the Nazi occupation of Holland, we did not mourn the death of traitors either, because they collaborated with Germany. They were killed by Dutch underground forces. We saw this as justice being done. Iraqi turncoats working for the cia were considered in Baghdad as having joined the us Waffen-ss. Apart from the Iraqis, there are hundreds of millions of people in Afro-Asian and Latin American lands that are finally beginning to recognize, that in the 21^st century the United States is looming as a worldwide Nazi threat.

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(16) Late incoming notes

Hans von Sponeck, the former un humanitarian aid coordinator for Iraq (1998-2000), has been advising Saddam to call Bush's bluff and let the weapons inspectors return to Baghdad. After a recent inspection trip of his own, Sponeck reported in The Guardian that as it stands Saddam could easily let the inspectors back in again, since it's clear that Iraq poses no threat to anyone. Could it be, that Washington does not want the inspectors to return in fear of another political affront of the first order, namely that Iraq does no longer have weapons of mass destruction? Scott Ritter, former American chief inspector for unscom (United Nations Special Commission) has been arguing for some time that Iraq did not posses any capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction (End Game, Scott Ritter, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1999). Therefore, why are Bush and Blair hell bent on shedding blood not only of us and British soldiers, but of countless Iraqis as well? Their policy vis-à-vis Iraq is like Hitler revisited.

***

Andrew Alexander of the London Daily Mail studied the origins of the Cold War. In March 1946 Winston Churchill delivered his notorious ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri. The British prime minister took a cue from Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi propaganda minister could have been writing the Churchill speech, with its warning of the red peril threatening the west. Stalin was evil. Truman and Churchill were angels. Therefore, they created the phoney myth, that the Soviets were about to invade western Europe, which in turn made the creation of nato a military necessity. Immediately, the mad arms race began to spiral. Following World War II, the us turned in the largest Hitlerite military-industrial complex the world had ever seen since the allies destruction of the Nazi war

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machine. Researcher Alexander discovered recently in Soviet archives, that never at any time did Stalin consider attacking the West. Truman and Churchill deliberately started the Cold War legend about the deadly dangers of the usSR exactly the same way as the Bushes are now saddling the world with all this bunkum about an Axis of Evil (North Korea, Iraq and Iran) supposedly threatening the us and all of mankind. Out of the goodness of their hearts Americans pose as saviours of us all by going to war to these nations that are absolutely threatening no-one.

***

The Gulf War of father Bush cost and estimated 61.1 billion dollars, of which 48.4 billion was paid for by the so-called allies of Washington. Will the White House, apart from tailwagger Blair, have any sucker nations pick up 80 per cent of the tab for another us oil crusade? Some day in the future, another journalistic researcher, someone like Andrew Alexander, will prove on the basis of the historic record, that Bush and Blair were making up these mega fairytales to whip up public opinion to support their endless sabre-rattling for the sake of oil profits among the weaker nations. Simon Tisdall reported in The Guardian (July 31, 2002), that Bush was already refining other bellicose plans for regime change in Iran. Teheran, too, is according to the Gang of Four piling up weapons of mass destruction, according to standard White House hogwash.

***

William Pfaff, columnist for the Los Angeles Times reported, that following 09-11 notable tension and distrust is colouring us relations with Europe. He stressed, the post Cold War alignments could be overturned by European nations overnight, if the Bush Administration continues its unilateral policies and simply ignores the opinions of its allies. Pfaff suggested that European members of the grand alliance, who are almost unanimously opposed to a us-uk invasion of Iraq, could deny

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the use of Europeans nato assets on the basis that such an unprovoked act of war does not fall under nato's article five. This was used to agree to the War on Terrorism. Pfaff stressed, that ‘nato no longer serves to protect Europe from any threat. The ussr threat is gone. For Europeans, nato is an expensive relic of the Cold War.’ He continued, ‘Richard Holbrooke once said (to some European indignation), that the United States is a European power, and so it is, as long as nato exists.’ Pfaff further suggested, ‘A polite mutiny by some or all of the European nato countries on the war with Iraq would certainly produce what Saddam Hussein might describe as the mother of all trans-Atlantic rows, but in the end the usa would back down.’ Murdered politician Pim Fortuijn thought along these lines. Washington asked the us ambassador in The Hague to visit him and test his views. Weeks later Fortuijn was shot.

***

Western Europe is presently moving to the right. First Spain, Italy and Austria moved to the right. France and the Netherlands followed suit. Germany might make a turn around during upcoming elections. This is all good news for Bush & Co. Nevertheless, the French called the us approach to Iraq ‘simplistic’. Lately they have gone a step further by accusing Bush of being obsessed with the Iraqi leader. Obsessive behaviour means, to be suffering from a persistent and irrational idea accompanied stereo-typed and ritualistic acts. It serves to overcome anxiety and calm feelings of guilt. Daddy seems to have transferred this obsession to his son. The headline in The Observer read ‘I will whup Sadam for you, Poppa’. Thank God Hitler did not have a son, to step into his father's war boots! The British sunday paper announced that junior's declaration of war on Iraq was only weejs away.

The French also worry, that nato might loose interest in supporting the us in the War on Terrorism, should the Americans start attacking countries whose regimes they simply do not

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like. In Britain unrest is growing, also within the Labour Party, over Blair's highhanded going it alone policy in tandem with Bush.

Rowan Williams, the upcoming archbishop of Canterbury, already said he would not support a British-backed military attack on Iraq. Bush and Blair use the same deceit as they did in the case of Osama bin Laden. They announced to the world that he was guilty and that proof would be submitted. They never did. Now Blair has told parliament, proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction would be given to the Commons in time. His spin doctors and intelligence officers will come up with whatever fabrications they can think off. And, while nobody is buying the balderdash, 20 to 30.000 military personnel will be dispatched to the Iraqi war theatre as Her Majesty's contribution to the massive Goebbels type of trickery this time practiced by socialist Blair of all people. The prime minister is even refusing to commit himself to consulting lawmakers prior to declaring war on Iraq. ‘I am not going to commit myself to any particular form of consultation’, he flatly told the House of Commons on July 25, 2002.

Even Japan and South Korea begin to express public annoyance with the Bush-Blair policy of going it alone. When the Pentagon issued a warning, that China's military threat is increasing, Japanese strategists told The Washington Post, that America should stop its alarmist propaganda. But since the us has presently an alarmist bunch of leaders, having also - Hitler did in the thirties - too many dangerous military tools at their disposal, they are liable to continue to launch global invasions, just as the Nazis engaged in state terrorism in Europe.

***

Where lies the difference between father and son Bush versus Iraq? The father served in the military during World War II, while his son managed to evade taking part in the war in Viet-

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nam. Dad, with a deeper understanding of the horrors of war, stopped short of marching on Baghdad knowing this would amount to a bloodbath for both Americans and Iraqis. Colin Powell concurred. Junior lacks any war experience. The younger Bush is simply reaping the advantages in favour of war from the 09-11 disasters. He clearly banks on anxiety and widespread fear amongst all Americans, who clearly expect additional attacks from Muslim terrorists. The Gang of Four keeps telling the public that chemical, biological and even nuclear attacks must be reckoned with. They also say, without a thread of evidence, that the only foreign potentate capable of supplying these horror weapons to terrorists is Saddam. Therefore he must be destroyed.

Of course, Iraq's huge oil deposits are never mentioned by Houston oil crooks. The us public believes the president to be a man of honour, integrity, and of superior intelligence, who would never lie to them. Hence, his support is still estimated at 70 percent. Nevertheless, hints that Iraq would scheme with Al Queda to bring down the Golden Bridge in San Francisco, is just as cuckoo as most of junior Bush's notions about world affairs. He knows nothing about international relations or foreign affairs, and, yet, he is the man who must guide the American people and much of the rest of the world safely through what for him is totally uncharted territory.

***

The Sunday Times headlined at the time of writing, that an attack on Iraq could be launched as early as October 2002. They operate according to the ancient precept that to go to war diverts attention away from problems and failures. As consumer confidence plunges, and the stock markets further go down, the closer Bush and Blair edge towards war. Hitler used the tactic over and over again because he, too, like the us now, was producing far too many guns and not enough butter. The Observer asked in a recent headline why a blueprint for a con-

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flict with Saddam was leaked at a moment when sleaze scandals hit a new peak in New York and Washington. According to this British paper, the leak had come from the Pentagon through top officials who opposed going to war against Iraq. In 1991 a similar situation occurred. Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs, was opposed to the Gulf War. Father Bush and his Defence Secretary Dick Cheney bullied Powell into fighting it. ‘Powell and Cheney have despised each other ever since’, wrote Ed Vulliamy in The Observer. This time, once again, Powell prefers to bluff the Iraqis into concessions rather than dispatching 250.000 troops to the Middle East. War plans are rumoured to have been scaled down to 50.000, including a force of 5.000 dissident Iraqi soldiers. That is the old trick, which worked so well in Afghanistan, having Afghan northern alliance soldiers taking the flak.

On July 27, 2002 The Guardian carried a report by Simon Tisdall and Richard Norton Taylor from New York, that Boeing and other us Krupp factories were already working around the clock producing satellite guided ‘smart’ bombs that would be used in huge air strikes to accompany a ground invasion. Neither Bush nor Blair feel it is necessary to ask a new authorization from the United Nations Security Council to justify their attack. Washington and London do indeed behave as Germany and Italy did in the 30's and 40's. The less that is taken into account that they are also signatories of the un Charter the better. The world organisation in New York might spoil the fun.

***

Just whatever happens this autumn or early spring, when junior Bush and his hoodlum friend in London seem set to launch an all out attack on a medium sized Arab nation, the outcome of it all will be as disastrous as Korea, Vietnam, Cuba or Afghanistan. The son, like the father, will meet his Waterloo in Baghdad. He, who does not know his history, cannot

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learn from it either. On July 28, 2002 president Saddam went on television and challenged Tony Blair to produce the evidence, which he said he would present, that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction. And, if the British prime minister was only fantasizing anyway in order to please his maniacal friend from Texas, then ‘put up or shut up’, Saddam said. (The Times, July 29, 2002).

***

‘Elite units of American special forces are to launch raids on ships and covert attacks on terrorists hideouts in a worldwide drive for victory on the War on Terror’, headlined the Sunday Times of London (August 4, 2002). For an average normal person is this 21^st century, such war drums sound like George Orwell all over again. But Americans hear this kind of war language already for years and have come to accept it as a normal state of affairs. They have been chosen by the Lord to keep law and order over humanity.

Super hawk Donald Rumsfeld ordered more radical action to reinvigorate the us anti terrorist offensive. Navy Seal commandos and the Delta Force, America's own Waffen-ss elite corps, already received orders on ‘aggressive, unilateral and behind-the-scenes missions’ where-ever the New Nazis in Washington deemed necessary. Does the world realize that America's president intends to consider the entire globe as a new hunting ground for freedom fighters? ‘Only crazies would sacrifice the sons and daughters of others for what they call a cakewalk to Baghdad’, testified Anthony Cordesman of the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies before a congressional commission in Washington. Rumsfeld will allow his ss squadrons to board foreign vessels by force, if general Charles Holland, chief of the Special Operation Command, deems this necessary. ‘He is impatient,’ wrote Tony Allen-Mills, ‘with the diplomatic niceties of international law enforcement, and determined to inject fresh thinking into the

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campaign on terror’. What the London Sunday Times correspondent failed to note in his frontpage story was that the behaviour of the Bush II regime in particular seems to have been borrowed straight form the thinking in Hitler's Mein Kampf.

***

George Monbiot summed up the situation around the Guns of August 2002 perhaps most accurately. ‘There is something almost comical about the prospect of George Bush waging war on another nation because that nation has defied international law. Since Bush came to office, the us government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more un conventions than the rest of the world has done in 20 years.’ (The Guardian, August 6, 2002).

Furthermore, us arguments for a war against Iraq have continuously changed. From the refusal to let weapons inspectors in, to Iraqi flouting un resolutions, or even sponsoring of Al Queda terrorism, to finally Bush flatly coming out putting his real intention on the table: regime change. None of Washington accusations could stand up in court. But Daddy's mortal enemy must be destroyed. The mere thought that junior Bush would be developing a fresh taste to remove whomever leader in the world he would consider unacceptable to him is perhaps the most frightening thought possible in the nuclear age. Fortunately, the Gang of Four are miserable cowards. They know better than to dispatch their ss Blitzkrieg toops into China or Russia. They only will invade small and poorly armed opponents, who will not be unable to defend themselves against the overwhelming us military force. When nations under us attack bring freedomfighters into action. Washington hastens to call them terrorists and treats them like animals, as they do with Al Queda fighters in Guantanomo on Cuba. And what, after Saddam would be defeated? What did Hitler teach Bush? Go into Iran, Syria, Lybia and God knows where else?