A Sense of Perspective

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Three years ago, several millions of us around the world were busy marching and demonstrating our objection to the brutal war we knew was coming in Iraq. We knew then that Mr Bush's reasons for war were bogus.


Ramadi, Iraq - Residents salvage their belongings from a damaged house, reportedly after a raid by US soldiers, in Ramadi, Thursday, March 16, 2006. According to residents, US soldiers raided a house Wednesday night in an insurgent-plagued area west of Baghdad. (Photo: AP)

We knew that Iraq had not been involved in the 9/11 atrocities, we suspected that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and many of us, myself included, carried posters reading "No Blood for Oil!" I have been rereading what I said then and I found that I had nothing to regret or correct:

"We are the world, we are the people, and last weekend, for the first time in our half-million years on this planet, humanity found the means to speak with one voice. The global village had suddenly become the global family, able to make its views known, to demand that its conscience be heard.

"It was a giant step forward for the human race.

[Nothing] could have affected the message we sent to our human family councils - to the United Nations and the governments of the world: We want no tribal war; we want no blood on our hands; we want justice and commonsense; we want Peace!

The globalisation of greed has called into existence its antithesis, the globalisation of conscience - the discovery of the international public interest.

While we cannot and will not defend Saddam Hussein, we remain to be convinced that he has shown any predisposition to attack the United States or anyone else, or that he possesses, as the British and American leaders claim, weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

Natural justice would seem to demand a true bill of particulars, a credible list of charges, an indictment, not plagiarised theses and hearsay 'intelligence'."

That was then.

The then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US, General Shinseki, was fired out of hand for suggesting that the US needed hundreds of thousands of troops to subdue Iraq. He has nothing to correct or regret either.

The neocons, the chicken-hawks, the Sunday soldiers and armchair generals are in a somewhat different position.
Today, large majorities of people in the United States and among the American soldiers in Iraq believe that the war is a mistake. They want an end to it.

Today, Mr Bush's popularity is way down and dropping like a stone.

Most people in the world were right three years ago, and the generals and their satraps - Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Blair - were wrong.

But, if you will forgive me one last self-quotation, most of the rest of us knew what was wrong and what is needed to correct it: "...the mechanisms meant to organise and advance the public interest have been captured by the people we deputed to minister to our needs and to fulfil our aspirations.

They have been captured by our delegates, our boards of directors, by the managers and the politicians, and have been converted into instruments for the aggrandisement of wealth and power, instruments of oppression. Having jettisoned their responsibilities to their constituents - stakeholders, shareholders, electorates, consumers and taxpayers, they now attempt to put themselves above the law and out of reach of the public interest which they say they serve.

"The result is carnage; the wanton destruction, destitution and demoralisation of people by war, slavery, starvation, unemployment and alienation and by man-made plagues and cancers."

What we call democracy has proven to be an empty shell, a zombie's carcase, inhabited and moved by a small horde of apparatchiks who have used our apathy and our decency to hog-tie us, to demonstrate that no matter what we want we will get what they want to deliver - false promises, empty slogans and brutal actions intended to intimidate and silence.

The tide is turning; we are in slack water when it is not clear which way things will go. The gaulieters are in disarray, in as much disarray as we are, but we do not understand that we need to seize the time and to try to ensure that we are not swept away again in a boat piloted by greedy, selfish fools.

We can change governments all we want, but until we change the systems of governance to make them answerable to us, there is no hope that things will be much different five years or five decades or five centuries from now.

What is certain is that if we allow our current leaders to continue on their mad careers, we all will go over the cliff with them.

At this moment, stopping wars is important. Ending the torment of the Haitian people and the Darfur refugees is important. They are the women and children of Lifeboat Earth. But Lifeboat Earth has to be put under new pilotage because if it isn't, we will all sink with it.

The Iraq war in all its brutal fatuity is, in a way, a metaphor for our existence on Earth. Our systems of production and consumption are destroying our environment, our health, our children and civilisation itself. The things that seem so important to the Bushes and the Blairs, to the Rumsfelds and the heirs of Sharon are small potatoes to the real problems that we face.

Pieces of Antarctica the size of Palestine have broken off the ice shelves there, the glaciers of Greenland and Europe are melting at an accelerating pace and the Arctic Ocean is becoming a seaway after 11,000 years.

Bird flu is not a disease of wild birds, as most people imagine; it is the result of factory farming; the DDT and PCB found in mothers' milk all over the world is produced by the same processes. The Earth has been yoked to systems of production which survive only because there is still space in China and India for its final fatal efflorescence.

As the globalisation bird chases its own tail in search of cheaper and cheaper labour, the Chinese are beginning to go through the same disillusionments gone through by workers in New York, watching their jobs flee to Georgia, to Mexico and then to China. Sooner, rather than later, the race to the bottom will end - at the bottom, somewhere in China.

Meanwhile, the treasure spent on war could have stopped the AIDS pandemic in its tracks and could probably also have built a house for every homeless person in the world. While the Jamaican minister of finance glories in having sold 30-year, 10 per cent bonds, people in the US with bad credit records are fighting off mortgage lenders eager to hand them money at eight per cent.

'Every Day Bucket go a well...

...one day the bottom must drop out', as the Jamaican proverb has it. As I get nearer to real old age, and increasingly to understand that the world is just as crazy as I thought many, many moons ago, my one real regret is to watch the depreciation and increasing depravity of what I once called the profession of journalism.

When Slobodan Milosevic died last week, it soon became known that he had been protesting against the medical treatment he had been getting. One of the things he protested against was the fact that his blood had shown the presence of rifampicin, a drug which is used to treat tuberculosis and leprosy. Milosevic, in a letter to the Russians, complained that he couldn't understand why he was being given this drug.

A New York Times story on his death reported that "Preliminary autopsy results said he had died of a heart attack, although doctors who examined him just months ago said they did not believe he had significant heart disease. Likewise, tests done before he died detected the presence of a medicine he had not been prescribed, one that would have put him at grave risk by reducing the effectiveness of his blood pressure pills.

"Court officials and some scientists have been quick to insinuate that Mr Milosevic was secretly ingesting the extra medicine to exacerbate his medical problems, so that he could be transferred to a clinic in Moscow, where his family now lives."

According to the NYT, Mr Milosevic's blood pressure had become increasingly difficult to control and prison doctors had long suspected that he wasn't taking the medicines prescribed for him.

The NYT says: "After several weeks of sleuthing, the toxicologists recently determined that Mr Milosevic ingested the antibiotic rifampicin, which would blunt the effect of his blood pressure medicine. Dr Uges, as well as tribunal officials speaking on condition of anonymity because an investigation is under way, suggested that the antibiotic was taken intentionally, smuggled in by visitors."

It is an odd story. Mr Milosevic complains that he was wrongly being given the same drug which the responsible officials suspect that he was taking intentionally. Something doesn't make sense here, but my fellow journalists do not care.

In another story, this one from the Iraq war, the New York Times reported on March 16 that American soldiers demolished a farmhouse after encountering unexpected resistance from insurgents, killing a number of civilians in the process. "The American military said that only three civilians had been killed, while Iraqi officials said an entire 11-member family - from a 75-year-old grandmother to a six-month-old baby - had died in the attack."

The Reuters version of the story begins: "Iraqi police accused US troops of killing five children in a raid on an al-Qaeda suspect on Wednesday as ousted leader Saddam Hussein used his televised trial to call on people to "resist the invaders".

"The judge promptly cut off the cameras and barred the press." After a diversion about the court proceedings, the Reuters story returns to the raid:

"A senior Iraqi police officer said autopsies on the bodies, which included five children, showed each had been shot in the head. Community leaders said they were outraged.

"Television footage showed the bodies of five children, two men and four women in the Tikrit morgue. One infant had a gaping head wound. All the children seemed younger than school age.

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," US spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.

"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."
Keefe said the al-Qaeda suspect had been captured."'

Reuters perseveres with the story however, and makes it clear that the US version is not accurate. Under the subhead "Horrible crime" Reuters reports that "Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said US forces had landed on the roof and shot the 11 occupants. Colonel Farouq Hussein, said autopsies found all had been shot in the head.

"Their hands were bound and they were dumped in one room before the house was destroyed, Hussein said. "It's a clear and perfect crime without any doubt," he said.

"Ishaqi town administrator Rasheed Shather said. 'We want the Americans to give us an explanation for this horrible crime.'"
Nothing more has been heard of this grisly incident. Nothing.

The pictures of the civilian bodies, including the children, were shown on American television, at least on CNN, but no American reporter seems to have been concerned that every person in the building had been killed, except, apparently, the wanted al-Qaeda insurgent.!!!

After all that I am afraid there is no room for my own personal saga of mystery and intrigue, concerning how my e-mail appears and disappears. Cable and Wireless has no explanation.

I am, however, writing it up to ask both my Internet service provider, C&W, and my mail service provider, Mac.com, to try to explain some mysterious happenings which have dogged my communications with the outside world.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky, however. Had I been practising my profession in Iraq I would no doubt by now, be among the more than 100 journalists caught in the crossfire and murdered by accident.

One needs an appropriate sense of perspective. I promise to try harder.