Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: Credibility Bomb


[Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator.]
The "powerful odor of mendacity" (to borrow Tennessee Williams'
phrase) hung over George Bush's primetime virtual declaration of war
Monday night.
When Bush proclaimed that "The Iraq regime continues to possess and
conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," that was a
lie. What are the "most lethal weapons ever devised?" Why, nuclear
weapons, of course. That Iraq possesses nukes, or is even close to
making them, is something for which Bush has been unable to provide
any evidence that would withstand scrutiny. The United Nations'
inspectors have found none. And that which the administration has
produced turned out to be fraudulent -- like the centerpiece
documents about Nigerian uranium shipments to Iraq, which were
childish forgeries.
Bush asserted that Iraq "has aided, trained, and harbored
terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda." The last part of that
was a lie. Pieces of the crucial document of U.S. "proof" that
Saddam Hussein has aided his ideological enemy Al Qaeda -- a cut-
and-paste British report assembled by Tony Blair's public relations
strategist, and recommended heartily as the fundament for this
assertion by Colin Powell in his prosecutor's brief at the United
Nations -- turned out to have been plagiarized from a paper by a
graduate student, based on data a decade old, and augmented by more
plagiarizing from press cuttings.
Senior officials of both the British and U.S. intelligence services
have told the press of their convictions that assertions of a
Saddam/Al Qaeda connection are errant nonsense. For example, a
British de fence Intelligence Staff (DIS) report -- leaked to
newspapers in the wake of Powell's speech by senior spooks appalled
at the way their work was being distorted by their political masters
-- concluded there were no such links, and added that "We believe
that Bin Laden views the Ba'ath as an apostate regime; his aim of
restoration of an Islamic caliphate, whose capital was Baghdad, is
in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq."
In a reflection of the chimerical nature of Bush's "proofs," his
speech did not even mention 9/11. And the day before the president
spoke, the Baltimore Sun published a lengthy report showing that
Bush's obsession with toppling Saddam preceded 9/11 by nearly a
year: at the very first meeting of his National Security Council,
the Sun reported (on testimony from participants) that Bush ordered
plans to be drawn up "for both clandestine and military action to
topple the regime."
Saddam has, of course, sent money to the families of Palestinian
suicide bombers; but so has our "ally" Saudi Arabia -- and we're not
making war on the House of Saud.
Bush's assertion in the speech that, when we bring "democracy" to
Iraq at gunpoint, this "will set an example to all the Middle East"
has been proclaimed as "not credible" in a secret State Department
report ("Iraq, the Middle East, and Change: No Dominoes") leaked to
the Los Angeles Times and published on March 14. The report noted
that "Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject
to exploitation by anti-American elements." Where democratic
elections have been tried in the region's Muslim countries, the
results have been victories for Islamist parties in Algeria (a
result abrogated by a military coup) and in Turkey, and a strong
showing by Islamists in Morocco.
This is not an argument against democracy, but a reminder that
international politics is not checkers, but chess: one has to think
eight or 10 moves ahead. Bush is no chess-player. His war on Iraq is
a gift to the Bin Ladens of this world and to the extremist
theocrats; it will fuel the fiery preachments of the Islamist
mullahs, facilitating recruitment by Islamist parties everywhere,
and creating a climate in which the creation of new generations of
terrorists will take a quantum leap.
"War criminals will be punished," Bush intoned, "and it will be no
defense to say I was just following orders." This from a president
who, in his first year in office, used the U.S. veto power at the
United Nations to reject the International Criminal Court set up to
prosecute war crimes (while asserting the U.S. military's right to
be exempt from prosecution under international law).
Bush tried to blame France for causing the war by threatening to use
its veto. What hypocrisy: since the United Nations creation, the
United States has used its veto 76 times, and 41 of those vetoes in
the last three decades concerned attempts by the United Nations to
call Israel to account for its violations of multiple U.N.
resolutions. Not just the Muslim world but many outside it find this
record shockingly one-sided.
By asserting the United States' right to invade whomever it likes
whenever it likes, Bush's speech brought the world to the most
dangerous moment in its history since the Cuban missile crisis of
1962. A first-strike on Iraq, unprovoked by any aggressive act on
Saddam's part, will start a new nuclear arms race by countries that
have nothing further to lose by creating a nuclear deterrent to the
unchecked imperial power of Washington.
A first-strike on Iraq turns the United States into an aggressive
power as a matter of policy, shreds the fragile framework of nascent
international law and takes the global diplomacy back 70 years by
making the United Nations as irrelevant as the League of Nations was
in its ability to stop aggression.
Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, who was this country's
representative to the International Conference on Military Trials in
August 1945 and the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes
trials, told his colleagues then that "we must make clear to the
Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial
is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must
not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the
war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify
resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as
an instrument of policy."
Bush's Monday speech definitively threw that American principle into
the trashcan of history. And that is ultimately more dangerous on a
planetary scale than any depradation which Saddam has the means to
accomplish.

 record shockingly one-sided.
Bush cerca di dare la colpa di questa guerra alla Francia per la minaccia di
dare il suo veto.
Un'altra ipocrisia, dal momento della sua costituzione gli USA hanno usato
il loro potere di veto 76 volte, e 41 di questi riguardano il tentativo da
parte delle NU di richiamare Israele per le violazioni delle  risoluzioni.
Non solo il mondo mussulmano ma molti altri al di fuori di esso considerano
questi numeri come impressionanti posizioni di parte.

 
Oggi mi sono letto la lista delle 33 nazioni che sostengono gli Stati
Uniti nell'attacco all'Iraq.
Roba da barzelletta, se non fosse una cosa seria...
Comunque, la domanda piu' bella fatta al portavoce USA al momento della
divulgazione della lista e' stata: "Ok, qui abbiamo 33 paesi. Vuol dire
che in 160 hanno detto di no?"
Il portavoce ha glissato.
Bye,
	Red
-- 
"30 orizzontale, 2 lettere: lo e' la domenica
di Rai 1."
"Opel."
"Eh?"
"Il 30 orizzontale e': costruisce l'Astra. Ed 
e' di 4 lettere."
"Tu bari."