Fighting terrorism with 'abuse of intelligence'

On June 1, 2008 the Australian contingent of 550 troops in Iraq lowered their flag at Camp Terendak in the southern Iraqi city of Talil, their Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has fulfilled the mandate of his people for the withdrawal that they gave him in the November 2007 election. The withdrawal of the Australian troops from Iraq has at long last justifies many people who have been skeptic of the war. There were two reasons for going to war, one, that Saddam Hussein was preparing WMD, and, two that there was link between his regime and al Qaeda. But what is obviously more damning than these false assumptions was the role of fudging of the intelligence agencies’ reports and the role of the US and in essence the detestable doctrine to which even others fell victim, namely, that you are either with us or against us. The ravages of the war are still in full display. The lesson learnt is that those who called for the destruction of evil ideology [Bush and Blair] have proved themselves not only wrong but what Harold Pinter has called the greatest terrorists of the world. Their ideology was evil and not that of Saddam Hussein. If Australia chose to go to war what else was there in common between the two: Australia and the US? As Rudd said on June 1, Howard wrongly believed that Australia's close alliance with the United States left him with no choice but to join the campaign in Iraq.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd not only exposed his predecessor John Howard as misled by the US but as too eager to gang up according to the predilection of the West that a WMD in the hands of Saddam Hussein would be more dangerous than an Ariel Sharon. In 1973 war it was this general in the desert of Sinai who used the most deadly weapons [rushed to him straight from the US] on the poorly equipped Egyptian army and slaughtered them in their thousands and had also used the Christian militia in the refugee camps of Sabrila and Chatila to massacre the unarmed civilians. The West chose to blame Saddam for what he did to the Kurds and the people of Southern swamp land of Iraq but not Ariel Sharon. With all this in the background the US and its hardcore allies still favour a hard line approach to the problems of the Middle East which cannot displease Israel let alone even the balance of justice. A corrupt prime minister elsewhere would have attracted another nefarious foreign policy article of the US: regime change. But Ehud Olmert like his predecessors does not come under the purview of this foreign policy otherwise readily available article.

One must recall the Spanish government’s decision to recall the Spanish soldiers from Iraq. On March 11, 2004 Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar blamed ETA [Basque separatists] for the Madrid bombing. Three days later his party lost the election. On March 15, the new government decided to pull out of Iraq. No one should be under the delusion that al Qaeda brought about this change through terror tactics. You can fool some Spaniards for some days but not all the Spaniards for all the time. Spain is a functional democracy. Australia took much longer to realize its folly. The bombing of Bali 2002 did not produce any change. But a concerted effort to better educate the electorate during the last election on the issue of fighting terrorism produced the chemical change which brought Rudd to power. Barrack Obama is also fighting for the change the electorate can believe in. Will he succeed for a change? The corrupt regimes of our time are the regimes of Bushes and Howards and Blairs. It is they who have whipped up mass hysteria of aggression. Others also had rushed to where angels feared to tread. That, too, with neighbours. But some sanity prevailed. India was also fighting terrorism.

Another folly of the war rhetoric is appropriating the western viewpoint for the entire world. This is pax Americana. America represents the world! Even reviewing Rudd’s decision to pull back troops reveals this rhetoric: White House press secretary Dana Perino said she had not reviewed Rudd's comments, but said the U.S. invasion was based on intelligence that the entire world had.[AP June3, 2008] How could the whole world have it unless the CIA had supplied to every world government its doctored intelligence?

Howard ruled Australia eleven years and Bush is completing eighth year What Rudd realized: "It caused me great pain as a long-standing friend of America to fundamentally part company with the administration's policy on Iraq," is still lost on Bush and Cheeny
The legacy of Blain continues with the British Prime Minister, John Brown. How long will the American electorate take to learn the truth of the war, the longest they have ever fought. Their indifference to words of advice from Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky shows a cussedness of character that their founder fathers had never thought of.

Why did President Bush then fudge the intelligence reports? His trusted friend and former press secretary McClellan provides the answer in his tell-tale book "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception"( June 2008: “Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East." Therefore the ruse of WMD. McClellan says that Bush was not ‘open and forthright on Iraq’ and lied on ‘propaganda to sell the war.’
So America has lost much of its pragmatism and position as a result of this bogus war and the signs of decay contrary to wishful thinking of Samuel Huntington’s robust view of American civilization have set in. Pakistan an ally is also fighting war on terror but is secretly having talks with tribal chiefs in the North West frontier, which is a place where the US is carrying out air strikes on suspected al Qaeda leadership. It is another ally, Turkey that is carrying on negotiation with Syria on Golan Heights that too with tacit approval of the greatest of all allies of the US, Israel. Israel is building more settlements on occupied land although American policy is contrary to this. Noori Al Maliki government in Iraq gave hero’s welcome to President Ahmedinejad of Iran. The American propped government of Siniora in Lebanon is having sharing of power with Hezbollah. Egypt is talking with Hamas over the release of Israel solder captured by them. Egypt cannot be negotiating with an organization dubbed by the US as terrorist without the approval of the Israelis. On the top of it, the Bush juggernaut on terror has let China have a freedom of a field day. All in the name of fighting terrorism. How handy comes terrorism in the hands of some opportunists!