New Nazis

(15) Iraq

When I boarded an airliner in Baghdad for Jordan on May 10, 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, reported April 27, 1976 in The New York Times that the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities had completed an

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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 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. Inspite 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 Her-

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ben. 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 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 Murder Incorporated

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(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 be-come acceptable to all, or whether Yankees, too, will eventually be driven back into their cages.

In the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries Christians des

perately 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 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 21st 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

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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 reasoning 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 gun-toting, 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 can-cellation 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 ha-ving 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 21St century the United States is looming as a worldwide Nazi threat.