WHY BUSH IS CALLED AN ARROGANT SON OF A BITCH

Someone in the Tinig.com Forums asked why many now say that United States (US) President George W. Bush is arrogant.

Before we begin to dwell on why Bush is called an arrogant son of a bitch, we must first go into how he has conducted himself on the issue of war, which from all indications he thinks is his duty to wage against what he calls "terrorism".

September 11

I and countless others who are now raging against Bush and all the others in his clique have full sympathy for the victims of the September 11 attack. But we understand why not a few of the families of those who perished in that act of treachery found it in themselves to lend their names to such campaigns as that of Not in Our Name, which opposed the war on Afghanistan.

Those who have been following international news closely cannot fail to catch the revelation that long before September 11, 2001, when the whole thing was still just a plan, Bush knew it was going to happen. His intelligence men--and some intelligence personnel in the Philippines--had long ago sent warnings to the US government that such a thing was being plotted.

But he did not take the measures necessary to prevent it. He allowed it to happen and used it as a pretext to rain bombs on a wedding party, a marketplace, a hospital, and several villages in Afghanistan--bombs which killed 3,500 civilians who are now no longer around to say for themselves whether or not they were Taliban supporters. Worse, many of those taken as prisoners of war were anti-Taliban leaders whom US military personnel who were doing their jobs well could not have failed to recognize.

Is it not such a strange coincidence that all cameras happened to be focused on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001?

Not Terrorism

Obviously terrorism was not the issue here.

That the Afghan War came down to such absurdity shows that it was a war for the sake of money. The war came at a time when the US economy was down on its knees--you do not need to have lived in the US for most of your life to know this--and history shows that the US economy, particularly in the last one hundred and four years, has primarily lived on war. Historical data show that the US joined or provoked wars whenever it had an economic crisis, and its economy reached the summit everytime it was at war.

For that matter, it was the US that installed the Taliban into power in the 1990s as a reward for their services in the campaign against the former Soviet Union. While the Taliban were committing the most barbaric human rights violations in Kabul's sports centers, the US went on negotiating with them on an oil pipeline deal. The US only began to push its weight on the Taliban after a dispute on that oil pipeline deal. For information check out articles by the British writer Andy Rowell.

War Again

Now the US government is bracing for another war, this time against Iraq. On what grounds?

1. That Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?

Where is their evidence? Bush says all the time that he has evidence, but the very fact that the United Nations (UN) has had to resort to inspections shows that he has no real evidence.

Furthermore, it is unimaginable that Iraq could have developed weapons of mass destruction while suffering impoverishment for the last decade due to economic sanctions.

And who the hell has the most weapons of mass destruction? Data from the Natural Resources Defense Council show that it is the US which is the world's greatest nuclear menace. The Soviet Union's nuclear stockpiles have long been undermaintained and half of them are inactive. The US has more nuclear stockpiles than France, China, and the United Kingdom combined. It has refused to dismantle its nuclear weapons, in full defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty drafted by the UN--of which it was one of the signatories. What moral right, then, has Bush and his ilk to insist that Iraq dismantle its "weapons of mass destruction"?

2. That Iraq is a threat to world peace?

Iraq has not attacked any nation for the last twelve years. It has made peace with its former opponents Iraq and Kuwait. Furthermore, history shows that the attacks on Iran and Kuwait were due not to any world hegemonic design but to border conflicts.

And why in the world did the US not call Iraq a "threat to world peace" when it attacked Iran? Special reports even show that it was the US which provided Iraq with the biological weapons it used in the attacks on Iran.

Furthermore, who the hell has provoked the most wars in the last one hundred and four years? Who provoked the wars in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?

Who the hell continues to support that Middle Eastern bully named Israel?

3. That Saddam Hussein is a tyrant?

Even we who oppose a possible war on Iraq are not oblivious of this. We are fully aware of his part in the massacre of thousands of progressive personalities within and outside the Baath, as well as his rapes of countless women in front of their fathers, brothers, and husbands.

But who installed Saddam into power in the first place? The coup which catapulted Saddam into power was sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency--as was the coup which unseated and murdered the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. His massacres and rapes were allowed to pass before he started to defy US wishes that it be allowed to control Iraqi oil.

Human rights are a pet invocation of US leaders. In line with this they have consistently heaped mud upon leaders like Fidel Castro. But Augusto Pinochet, Anastasio Somoza, Pol Pot, and Ferdinand Marcos each committed more atrocities against human rights in less than thirty years than Castro has ever been accused of in the more than forty years that he has governed Cuba--and yet they were fully supported by the US until their very own people began to throw up their bile at the mere mention of their names. Why? Because unlike Castro, they never defied the US.

What moral right, then, has the US government to wage wars in the name of democracy?

Brazenness

The brazenness of Bush in insisting on wars without any legal nor moral basis is the reason he is called an arrogant son of a bitch.