Just How Cynical Is George W?
In the beginning Bush claimed this vague international federation simply refused to tolerate Saddam's weapons of mass destruction any longer. When these bugaboos proved to be more rhetoric than reality the coalition, with much greater ease than one might have imagined, then decided Saddam's internal brutality was far more intolerable. Beastly weapons begone from message; enter the good guys' unfailing humanitarianism.
This much we all know. We also know it's a crock.
The coalition's vaunted, forty-odd count of mostly inconsequential nations was as laughable as it was pathetically symbolic from the get-go. (Best laugh yet: One coalition member's prime minister was unaware of his country's involvement until a reporter called for comment. The little nation of the Solomon Islands has since withdrawn its mysterious membership.)
Further, suspicious White House hype about stockpiled WMD soon revealed itself as more than just your garden-variety ballyhoo. It was outright deception. Not one molecule of Saddam's anthrax or mustard gas or even foul-smelling deodorant spray was unearthed in the war's aftermath. Nor will it be, assuming, that is, Rummy doesn't airmail it first.
Yes, that debate is over, dear Bush apologists. You were egregiously - though willingly on your part - misled all along. The debate is over and done with since, lo and behold, administration officials now admit they never really expected to find illegal stash. Saddam's WMD were a lovely pretext to muscle their way into the Middle East, redo it, and in the process scare the bejesus out of the world by demonstrating American military power. This they disclose only after the sale. You want sleazy? Don't look to American Airlines' very former CEO. The true pros of sleaze reside at the White House. As president, a little hanky-panky will get you impeached. But murder thousands of innocents, expend a few hundred uniformed American boys and girls, con the public to the tune of God-only-knows how many billions of dollars and naturally, you're hailed as a leader.
Worsening the swindle still, piece by piece we learn that behind the curtain of fabricated hysteria sat calm insiders marking time until Dick and Rummy coughed up their benevolent graft.
Again, all this has been reported - in print, at least - and the focus of many an op-ed page. But there was another, equally offensive crock that went largely unnoted by the press, perhaps from exhaustion as it toiled to keep up with all the other crockdom gushing from Bush II. I venture you won't be surprised by this underreported transgression, however.
It's our constant companion: The president's brazen, but casual, hypocrisy.
I said you wouldn't be surprised.
His hypocrisy has become so routine it's barely even newsworthy these days. We simply expect it, so it no longer qualifies as an interesting development to be reported. Nevertheless, what should have been newsworthy - indeed, profoundly striking - about this particular hypocritical go-around was its global scale.
Before a puzzled world, the president turned on a dime and quickly hustled the revisionist reason for demolishing a non-belligerent country; that is, the "coalition's" determination to snuff out Saddam's human rights abuses. Yet the freedom-loving coalition he assembled contained some the world's most notorious human rights abusers themselves. How, with a straight face and no shame, 43 could boast of a coalition teeming with Saddam-like cutthroats and torturers staggers the mind and offends every sense of decency.
According to the latest annual reports issued by Human Rights Watch - a nonpartisan organization as tough on Iraq as anyone - America's new-found ally of Albania, for instance, winked at "violent attacks against journalists" in 2002 and condoned "widespread … torture and physical abuse of detainees," including children. Even worse, if that's possible, Albania was a "major point of transit" in the "trafficking of human beings. Most victims were women and girls trafficked for forced prostitution and children trafficked into forced labor." Albanian officials dismissed these accusations as an "issue of illegal migration rather than a serious human rights violation." Nice fellas, no? And we count them among our friends - all of whom, Bush instructed, detested Saddam's cruelty above all.
Down south we had as a coalition participant the upstanding nation of Colombia, where "paramilitary groups operating with the tolerance and often support of units within [the formal] military were linked to massacres …, selective killings and death threats." In Africa, one hopes we'll always have Uganda as an allied human rights advocate. Yet it seems that in 2001 its "elected" regime dispensed "torture and state-sponsored violence against opposition supporters," and the following year "broke up a peaceful rally … by firing on demonstrators with live ammunition." Next door in Rwanda the government "demonstrated continuing hostility towards political dissent, press freedom and an independent civil society" as it steamed, as promised, towards righteous democracy. Uh-huh.
Space limitations prohibit HRW's grim tales of other coalition countries, such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ethiopia and Uzbekistan - the latter of which the watchdog group said only 2 months ago "is distinguished by human rights abuses on an epic scale." What's more, many of the countries recently criticized by our own State Department as inhumane, and in some cases labeled as "serious human rights" abusers, were - you guessed it - happily included by Bush in his coalition to end human rights abuse in Iraq.
While the president's right-wing base dutifully applauds his every behavior no matter how odious, his cynical hypocrisy in the course of this crock is offensive beyond words to honest patriots. They yearn for at least a smidgeon of ethics in the White House. It is nothing less than tragic that they'll have to wait 2 years or 6.