"Bush...has prostituted words such as democracy & freedom"

[Bluebear]

When the cheerleaders admit they were wrong, we'll move on

Three years on from the invasion of Iraq, how Blair and Bush got us into this mess matters as much as how we get out of it.


Madeleine Bunting
Monday March 13, 2006
The Guardian

By the time you get to bed tonight, more will have died brutal bloody deaths in Iraq. The toll in the two weeks after the destruction of the Samarra mosque was 500, which averages 35 people a day - men, women and children. The explosions and the deaths have become so routine, they barely register with public opinion any more. Occasionally they make the television news and we flinch with horror from the blood and brutality. This is a conflict unlike any other, where the killers kill themselves as they kill.

The words of Zalmay Khalilzad, the US envoy to Iraq, were so chilling last week because they gave voice to a growing fear. He warned that "we have opened a Pandora's box" that "would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child's play". He was referring to the nightmare scenarios of civil war provoking wider regional conflict drawing in Iran, Turkey and Syria. Afghanistan's violence is on a smaller scale but still vicious. Last year 1,400 Afghans were killed in the bloodiest year since 2001....

It has had precisely the opposite impact from that allegedly intended, by significantly increasing the threat of terrorism while alienating large sections of Muslim opinion across the globe. Yet the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and still uttering the same meaningless platitudes. Take Tony Blair at prime minister's questions last week, in which he declared he was proud to have helped remove the Taliban and that he would have thought "anyone, whatever their beliefs or faith, would stand up for democracy against terrorism". George Bush in Bagram for lunch this month, declared: "It is possible to replace tyrants with a free society."

Their make-believe fantasies are a world away from the garrison democracy increasingly suborned by the warlords they've installed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's "free society" and Blair's democracy is, in reality, the most efficient narco-economy in the world. As you read, the new shoots of opium poppies are being nurtured by the spring sunshine over 320,000 acres, promising a bumper crop. Ninety per cent of Europe's heroin now comes from Afghanistan. These two world leaders have so prostituted words such as democracy and freedom that they have lost all meaning....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1729399,00.html