S. Faizi / Special to Environmentalists Against War – 2006-03-03 00:39:11
http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/know/read.php?&itemid=3816
TRIVANDRUM, India (March 2, 2006) — George W Bush has grown to become the deadliest of contemporary threats. Having to preside over a country that went to war 23 times against developing countries since the second world war, obviously, transforms the incumbent into a state of deifying military violence.
The unchallenged military might and the strategic possession of the world’s largest media constellation that serves as a military software intoxicates one who commands these forces, especially when one is an under-healed alcoholic partly relieved by the psychic impact of evangelical fundamentalism and described as a textbook case of a neurosis rooted in fear, aggression and dogmatism in a frequently referred psychiatry study by a team of eminent US psychologists lead by Jack Glaser.
Budhadeb Bhattacharya, the chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal, was only speaking an acknowledged truth when he matter-of- factly described Bush as the leader of the most organized pack of killers, which was overwhelmingly approved by the huge gathering that he was addressing. Perhaps it was the typical ill information of Americans about the world that prompted the US Ambassador David Mulford to undertake the diplomatic misadventure of writing a protest letter to Budhadev. The Ambassador, evidently, does not know what the world thinks of his president.
A year after receiving the Nobel Prize, the German author Gunter Grass told Outlook, an Indian weekly, that George Bush was a danger and threat to the world. On the eve of Bush’s visit to London last year, the celebrated mayor Ken Livingston declared that the visitor was a threat to the planet. The British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter has called Bush a mass murderer. Back home in the US, Noam Chomsky, arguably the most perceptive intellectual of our time, has said the same.
Sam Hamill, a renowned American poet, alerted the world, as Bush was set to invade Iraq, to the potential danger that the president bears. Today he is leading one of the remarkable movements in the history of poetry by galvanising the strength of the written word to oppose the tyranny of Bush, a movement that is assiduously being sidelined by the corporate media.
In the November of last year the Argentinean football legend Diego Maradona, describe Bush as a criminal, fascist and terrorist, to the cheer of a massive international gathering in the Argentinean resort of Mar Del Plata where Bush was attending the Summit of the Americas. Budhadev’s was obviously an understatement.
No human being in the recently history has been the subject of the kind of mass opposition as George Bush has been. In Seattle, Miami and Genoa, it was a cross-section of the entire world that was demonstrating against Bush for his tyrannical wars and neo-colonial economic policies imposed on the developing world. An opinion survey conducted in Europe on the eve of his invasion of Iraq showed that less than eleven percent of the people in Europe supported such a design. In an international opinion poll conducted during the re-election campaign of Bush, he was overwhelmingly voted out by the world’s public, with the expected exception of the Israelis.
Colin Powel has regretted the hoax of weapons of mass destruction played by the US, especially on the UN, as an excuse for the American war of aggression, so have many conscientious military officials. Hans Blix and Scott Ritter former chief UN weapons inspectors, deliver lectures around the world exposing the hoax. Yet, Bush does not regret; instead he is further entrenching the occupation and at the same time designing new hoaxes against- Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, etc. Against any country that dares hold a world view that is different from America’s.
US created and cultivated the Afghan Mujahideen, fondly calling them “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers,” in order to fight the Soviets. Eventually, US installed its own Babrak Karmal, and is using the same militant entities, it has created as the new alibi for its Endless War on a large part of the developing world. Reagan had compared the Contras militia — who were fighting for them against the democratic Sandinista government of Nicaragua — to the founding fathers of America. Latin America today is waking up to face the American empire in an unprecedented manner.
Bush’s desire for repeating a September 11 (1973) that butchered the democratically elected president Allende and installed the American client Pinochet, to eliminate the Third World’s icon Hugo Chavez would prove to be in vain. Bush’s new game plan on Iran shall not be as easy as the 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
Though America has greater reason to be concerned about this time, for if the proposed Iranian oil bourse based on euro — instead of dollar — comes through that could pose a considerable challenge to the imposed domination of dollar and prompt the Norwegians too to pursue their wish of having a euro-based Scandinavian oil bourse.
Bush is militantly positioned against the global South on every issue of concern. Whether it is global (as opposed to selective) denuclearisation as required by Article VI of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, democratisation of the UN Security Council, cancellation of the debilitating debt burden of the South, fair and equitable trade, freedom from occupation, sovereignty of nation states, strengthening of democratic multilateral forums, climate change mitigation or biodiversity conservation we face the same recalcitrant might of the US on a daily basis.
Perhaps the American ambassador should have read the book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by the well-respected psychiatrist Justin Frank of the George Washington University Medical School before venturing to write to Buddhadev. Frank’s account of Bush as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” would have helped the envoy to perform his diplomatic mission in a matured manner.
Bush may be a fitting president for a country that sings the creed of violence for an anthem but [he remains] a grave threat to the civilized world, especially to those who have few means to defend themselves.
This prophet of violence cannot have a better anthem than this hymn in praise of violence. “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air/ Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
Calling this one president the friend of India is an immense insult to the soul of India and gravely detrimental to its long-term national interests.
S Faizi is an ecologist specialising in international environmental policy. He may be reached at: sfaizi@eth.net, biodiversity@rediffmail.com
