Elephant in Musth

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It is apparent, looking at Florida, that the most perfect system can be subverted by determined saboteurs with enough money - as long as good people keep quiet. The real George Bush, if he is appointed president, will use his time to destroy the integrity of the country he rules, starting with the Supreme Court.

Then he can start on dealing with the rest of us. That's his job, and as the American Press has made plain, nothing needs to be known about him and his multifarious incapacities because Big Brother in the giant corporations will tell him what to do. We are all in a for a very rough ride.

"Democracy! Enough Already!" - Common Sense, Dec 10 2000.

The good people seem at last to be coming awake.
After six years of conspicuous slumber and inexplicable silence, influential actors in the United States are at last finding the courage to defy the miasma threatening all of us.

All over the world, it seems, people are beginning to realise that we are being led down the road to Armageddon by a US Administration lacking either moral sensibilities, strategic reasoning or elementary common sense.

The Republican Party in the US Senate has at last rebelled against Mr Bush's maleficient defiance of International Law and world opinion. They have been joined by the one-time designated adult in the Bush Administration, Colin Powell. They have rejected George Bush's attempt to circumvent his own Supreme Court in order to authorise the torture of foreigners in US custody and to backdate forgiveness for all those who obeyed his corrupt instructions to flout the Geneva Conventions.

Last week, as Carl Hulse says in the New York Times, "On one side are the Republican veterans of the uniformed services, arguing that the president's proposal would effectively gut the nearly 60-year-old Geneva Conventions, sending a dark signal to the rest of the world and leaving the United States military without adequate protection against torture and mistreatment."
On the other side are the dinosaurs of the Republican Party and the president and his White House cabal.

The British establishment has long been clear about what Mr Bush has been up to.

Lord Steyn, perhaps Britain's most respected judge, two years ago described the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay as a scandalous, "Law-free zone". A few months ago, the Lords of Appeal unequivocally denounced the US gulag system, declaring it an uncivilised affront to humanity and justice. And, a few days ago, the head of Britain's Judiciary, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, excoriated the American position in the following words:

"It is a part of the acceptance of the rule of law that the courts will be able to exercise jurisdiction over the executive.
"Otherwise the conduct of the executive is not defined and restrained by law.
"It is because of that principle that the USA, deliberately seeking to put the detainees beyond the reach of the law in Guantanamo Bay, is so shocking an affront to the principles of democracy.
"Without independent judicial control, we cannot give effect to the essential values of our society."

It was the second time Lord Falconer had spoken out about the controversial camp, where 450 terror suspects are thought to be detained. In June this year, the Lord Chancellor denounced Guantanamo Bay as a "recruiting agent" for terrorism, and described the existence of the base as "intolerable and wrong".

In Brussels, the European Parliament last week heard the Spanish foreign minister Miguel Moratinos report that "[Spanish] territory may have been used not to commit crimes as such but as a stopover on the way to commit crimes in other territories".

He added that 66 suspect flights had made stops in Spain. What is so shocking is that the president has boldly, flagrantly and contemptuously attempted to defy and make meaningless, the decisions of his country's Supreme Court.

It is a court most of whose members were appointed by Republican presidents wanting to castrate the power of the judiciary to exercise the constitutionally decreed checks and balances which were thought to guarantee democracy in the United States. The present Supreme Court is even more Republican than the one which sanctified George Bush in the presidency of the United States despite his losing the presidential election in 2000.

When I predicted that George Bush would use his time to destroy the integrity of his country many people told me that I was simply prejudiced against the man; but I had observed his behaviour and came to the conclusion that he was going to be a disaster for the United States and a catastrophe for the rest of us.

The starving, brutalised people of Palestine, Darfur and Haiti, the terrorised millions in Iraq and the opium growers of Afghanistan are eloquent testimony to the accuracy of my prediction.

In addition to the attempt to subvert the law, the Bush administration has openly attempted to samfi the world into believing all sorts of impossible things.

Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) blasted the US Administration indirectly and Congress directly for a brazen attempt to sell a monumental lie as a pretext for their anticipated war against Iran.

In an unprecedented broadside from a UN agency, the IAEA denounced a US Congressional report as "outrageous and dishonest" including "serious distortions" and "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements".

The letter from the IAEA was addressed to Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chairman of the committee that issued the report. The IAEA said the report contained a litany of misleading statements, and falsely (and fantastically) suggested that the IAEA sidelined an inspector who believed that Iran was deceiving the IAEA about the character of its nuclear ambitions. The IAEA suggested that Congress should check its facts.

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of Iran as a threat". As a substantial minority still understand Saddam to have been behind 9/11.

According to the Washington Post, "Privately, several [American] intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

The committee report entitled 'Recognising Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States', was published on August 23.

The report is a classic piece of Republican propaganda. It is reminiscent of the administration's attempts to con world opinion to believe that Saddam Hussein, against the odds and all his protestations, possessed weapons of mass destruction and was an accessory to 9/11. The report's author, Frederick Fleitz, was a senior adviser to the United States' UN ambassador, John Bolton, until 2005.

John Bolton in orbit

One of the most dangerous identified lying objects in the Bush firmament is a short, self-important man named John Bolton. Like many of the Bush neo-con brains trust, Bolton has a murky history. His most dangerous exploit up to now was his attempt to con the world into believing that the US would be justified in attacking Cuba. He falsely alleged, in official documents, that Cuba possessed biological weapons of mass destruction and was peddling them to terrorist organisations and regimes.

This outrageous lie was finally exploded by President Jimmy Carter and a consortium of experts who visited Cuba to disprove Bolton's fantasies.

If war is politics by other means, as Clausewitz said, the Bolton doctrine does not admit that war is failed politics, it holds rather that war is preferable to politics. Bolton has been the lead agitator in attempting to blackmail the Security Council into adopting sanctions against Iran, justifying an American attack on that country.

Bolton has a Napoleonic complex, some would say a Superman complex, believing that the rest of the world epitomised in the United Nations, is utterly useless except when it acts as the servant of, and cleaner-up for the United States. His appointment to the United Nations was not simply a studied insult by Bush and Cheney, it was a deliberate provocation.

Even in the Republican-dominated Congress the move was unacceptable, and a scheduled, second hearing to confirm his nomination as ambassador had to be postponed because at least one Republican senator was prepared to speak out and vote against this misguided messenger.

The hearing will now await the new Congress, and if my instincts are accurate, it will fail ignominiously in a Senate newly dominated by Democrats with the support of disenchanted Republicans.

Subverting democracy

The Republican Administration in the United States could easily pass as a creation of George Orwell. Democracy is spread by invasion and war and almost every statement of any importance conceals somewhere within it a lie.

Right now, a galaxy of Republican Congressmen is either under lock and key ('Duke' Cunningham) under indictment (Ney and Delay) or under investigation for criminal misfeasance and malfeasance. The Senate majority leader (Frist) is himself under investigation, and if the Democrats win in November, as I expect, bogus voting or no, even Mr Bush may find himself impeached.

In its last two tenancies of the White House the GOP contributed an impressive list of malefactors up to and including the national security adviser McFarlane and the secretary of defence Weinberger who were saved from jail only by presidential pardon. Lesser lights, starlets like Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, and Roger Noriega have contributed more than their share to the brutalisation and suffering of Latin America. Those who contributed to the stealing of the 2000 election were handsomely rewarded and let loose to wreak more havoc. The emblem of the Republicans, the Grand Old Party (GOP) is, aptly, an elephant.

Male elephants over a certain age periodically go into a condition known as musth, characterised by a huge excess of testosterone. Elephants in musth are as eager to fight as to mate, and they are so aggressive that the normal tribe hierarchy is disrupted, because even the most senior and biggest bulls will avoid smaller, younger bulls in musth because they are so dangerous - like teenage gunmen.

Musth is the Hindi rendering of the Urdu word mast, meaning intoxicated, which comes from an earlier Persian expression, which means poisoned. An elephant in musth will kill anything in its way - humans, including its keepers, other elephants or any other animal. Musth elephants are sometimes known as rogue elephants.

The behaviour of the Bush administration is, in my view, similar to the behaviour of an elephant in musth. John Bolton expresses the metaphor perfectly. He is the United States' senior diplomat though he does not believe in diplomacy. He is US Ambassador to the UN - which he believes is an unnecessary nuisance.

He deals with problems not by dialogue, but by threats and aggressive behaviour. He is the frontman for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, as dangerous a group of human beings as a whole herd of elephants in musth. They will not take "Yes" for an answer. Nothing but total submission will do.

And in their mad career they are fortified by the support of the American media.

Last week, the giant media network ABC, broadcast what it claimed was a documentary, entitled The Road to 9/11.
Before the so-called documentary was broadcast, there were several complaints about the accuracy of the script and it was soon clear that the enterprise was an assault on history and the truth; it was the opening black propaganda broadside against the Democrats in advance of the crucial November elections. When the Clinton administration left office, they made sure to warn the Bush administration about the nature of al-Qaeda and the intentions of Bin Laden.

Bush was asleep at the wheel on September 11, 2001, but the documentary blames Clinton and his crew for 9/11 and claimed that its conclusions were based on the official 9/11 Report.

The ABC documentary is reminiscent of the Swift Boat affair of the last Presidential election, when the Vietnam war hero John Kerry was painted as an unworthy coward and Bush, who spent most of the war in 'undisclosed locations' in Texas and Alabama, was painted as the hero.

In the 1970s, we used to be blasted when we complained about the malign attentions paid us by the foreign - mostly American - Press.

When one sees what they will do to their own heroes and others, we must consider ourselves fortunate to have escaped without greater damage. The Haitians, the Palestinians, the Guatemalans and the Chileans were not so lucky.

Of course, we also forget that September 11 was the anniversary of the American-sponsored coup which killed Allende and thousands of Chileans and subjected Chile to two decades of terror and bloodshed. The current President of Chile, Mme Bachelet, was herself a victim of Mr Kissinger's surrogates.