[THS] John le Carré: The United States of America Has Gone Mad

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26427.htm

"The United States of America Has Gone Mad"

By John le Carré

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I
can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long
term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

Democracy Now! - Broadcast September 20, 2010
[see url above]


TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: British novelist John le Carré. I spoke to him in London on Sunday.
While he’s famous for his spy novels, he wrote a widely read antiwar essay in 2003
just before the US invasion of Iraq. It’s called "The United States of America Has
Gone Mad." This is an excerpt.


      JOHN LE CARRÉ: America has entered one of its periods of historical madness,
but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay
of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.


      The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for
in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America
the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant
US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that
should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the
East Coast press.


      The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who
made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain
such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its
shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s
poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They
might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for
UN resolutions.


      But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are
riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US
defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A
splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe
easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less
clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the
American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost—because most of those 88 per cent are
thoroughly decent and humane people—in Iraqi lives?


      How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden
to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But
they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam
was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is
not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and
fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow
conspirators nicely into the next election.


      Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the
enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see
Saddam’s downfall—just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under
the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.


      The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most
sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God
has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any
way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle
Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b)
anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist. [...]


      What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic
imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its
military power to all of us—to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little
North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and
who is to be ruled by America abroad.


      The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s part in all of this is that he
believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a
phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned
into a corner, and he can’t get out.


      It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the
ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s
Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their
credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. [...]


      I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s sophistries to this
colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men.
What he can’t explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a
territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of
our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the
public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the
altar.


      "But will we win, Daddy?"


      "Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed."


      "Why?"


      "Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide
not to vote for him."


      "But will people be killed, Daddy?"


      "Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."


      "Can I watch it on television?"


      "Only if Mr Bush says you can."


      "And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid
any more?"


      "Hush child, and go to sleep."


      Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a
sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he’d
finished shopping.

AMY GOODMAN: British novelist John le Carré reading from his 2003 essay "America
Has Gone Mad." John le Carré is the pen name for David Cornwell. His new book,
Our Kind of Traitor, is coming out soon. We’ll be broadcasting the full interview with
le Carré in the coming days.