Toronto Sun | September 28, 2003

No wonder America has so many enemies

By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor

President Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican-controlled Congress
for lying about sex. President George W. Bush and aides lied the United
States into a stupid, unnecessary colonial war that has so far killed more
than 305 Americans and seriously wounded more than 1,400. It has also cost
many thousands of Iraqi dead, and $1 billion US weekly.

Lying about sex is an impeachable offence; lying the nation into war
apparently is not.

I was no Clinton fan, but give me his iffy morals any day over Bush's
Mussolini-like strutting. Sen. Edward Kennedy is absolutely correct when he
calls Bush's Iraq war a "fraud" concocted to win the next elections. A
fraud and an epic blunder.

Last week, Bush received a glacial and scornful reception at the United
Nations that symbolized the world's contempt and disgust for his
administration. Not since Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the
speaker's rostrum has a major leader so embarrassed himself and his nation
before the world body.

In his UN speech, Bush again claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction
and "ties" to terrorism. Days later, U.S. intelligence teams that scoured
Iraq for four months reported no traces of weapons or terrorism links - the
pretext used by Bush and his neo-conservative handlers for unprovoked war
against Saddam Hussein.

The White House was left choking on its own grotesque lies.
Incredibly, VP Dick Cheney, a prime architect of the Iraq war, actually
claimed recently that Iraq still had mobile germ labs, though U.S. and
British inspectors debunked this claim last June. The "special"
intelligence network created by neo-conservatives is still apparently
feeding disinformation to America's leadership.

This latest humiliation came only days after Bush finally admitted Iraq was
not, as most Americans were misled into believing, behind the 9/11 attacks.


No wonder world leaders gave Bush the cold shoulder, and even usually timid
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned against "dangerous acts of
unilateralism" - a pointed reference to the bellicose Bush administration.

Unfortunately, many Americans still do not understand how gravely the Bush
White House has damaged and sullied their nation's once noble reputation.

Dangerous aggressor

Recent polls show that even among traditional friends abroad, America is no
longer regarded as a champion of freedom, democracy and human rights, but
increasingly as a dangerous aggressor bent on imperial domination and
exploitation.

America's most precious and proudest asset, its moral reputation, has been
gravely damaged by the Bush White House. The only positive note: rising
anti-Americanism is largely associated in the eyes of non-Americans with
the persona of George Bush, a man who projects almost all the negative
stereotypes foreigners hold of Americans.

Bush's blinkered core supporters in middle America simply don't understand
or don't care what the rest of the world thinks of their nation, which,
since 9/11, has wrapped itself in a cocoon of xenophobia and self-righteous
rage.
The White House's mouthpiece media, led by Fox News, have simply blanked
out world opinion and endlessly chorused administration war propaganda.

A fascinating March study of network TV news by New York's Fairness and
Accuracy in Media shows how Americans were misled into war by outrageously
biased programming on Iraq.

The analysis found: a) 76% of all commentators about Iraq on TV were
present or former government officials; b) only 6% of commentators
expressed skepticism regarding the need for war - when 61% of the public
supported more time for diplomacy and inspections; c) on the four TV
networks, less than 1% of sources were identified with anti-war groups.

And more than two-thirds of commentators were from the U.S., 75% either
present or former government or military officials. The small number of
foreign commentators mostly came from nations like Britain and Israel which
were backing Bush's war policy.

In short, the major networks, under White House prompting, beat the war
drums and blatantly excluded commentators with contrary views, giving
Americans a badly warped view of world events.

No wonder so few Americans understand what is going on abroad, how the
outside world really sees them, or why America has so many enemies
overseas. Small wonder many Americans are turning for balanced news to the
CBC, BBC and the Internet.

Citizens of the old Soviet Union suffered the same information isolation.
Like Americans since 9/11, they were force-fed agitprop and patriotic pap
disguised as news, and deprived of all knowledge of the real world around
them.

Back to reality. Bush's UN speech was another attempt to mislead Americans
into believing the horrid mess in Iraq - entirely the creation of Bush and
the neo-cons - is somehow the fault of the UN.

French President Jacques Chirac proposed the U.S. hand Iraq over to UN
control. But Bush, still lusting for Iraqi oil and fearful his family foe,
Saddam Hussein, would return to thumb his nose at him, foolishly scorned
this wise proposal.
Bush is praying his hit teams will assassinate Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein before next year's elections. But even that may not save him from
the growing anger of defrauded Americans who are slowly realizing that his
Iraq war was a political version of the giant Enron swindle.

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Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com