October 31, 2001
Kamloops Daily News



"When war is declared, truth is the first casualty," U.S.
senator Hiram Johnson (1918).

Just what is the U.S. doing in the middle east?  The quick
answer is that they are out to get the evil Osama bin Laden,
dead or alive. That's an admirable goal but there are other
reasons. 

President Bush has made it clear that friends of bin Laden
are the enemies of the U.S.  If so, why isn't the U.S.
military attacking Saudi Arabia?  Saudi Arabia supports bin
Laden through it's fundamentalist Islamic group, the
Whahabi.

The Whahabi supports bin Laden with all the fervour of
Afghanistan's Taliban.  They have both declared a holy war
against America.  Except that Saudi Arabia has even more
money than Afghanistan to fund  the holy war.

Osama bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, as were one half of
those terrorists who died in their attack on September 11. 
Saudi Arabia refuses to freeze the assets of bin Laden.

But, you see, there is a greater good in Saudi Arabia that
outweighs the evil.   It is oil.  Saudi Arabia controls 25
per cent of the world's reserves and the U.S. wants most of
it.  In war, the truth is not absolute, it is relative.  Oil
has the power to negate evil.

President Bush, a Texas oilman firmly believes in the
healing balm of oil.  He is prepared to do anything to get
it, even drill in the fragile arctic.  Bush's vision of
America is one in which fossil fuels must be consumed like
there is no tomorrow.

The truth was a casualty in 1990 when president Bush senior
sent  troops into the middle east.  He sent 500,000 troops
to save the tiny country of Kuwait from the evil invader
Saddam Hussein.

But the U.S. was simply protecting oil interests there.  And
the military foray was a popular move for Bush senior.  His
approval rating soared to 90 percent.  It's always popular
to bang the drums and rattle the sabers in the face of evil.

Now there is talk by his son, president George W. Bush, of
going into Iraq to finish Saddam Hussein.  What is the U.S.
doing in the middle east?   Goals, like truths, seem
elusive. 

President Bush has learned that there is nothing like
popularity to shut your critics up.   A group-think
mentality has sent reporters and critics to the foxholes. 
The result is that the truth is more elusive because it is
not being reported. 

The only "reporting" is being provided by the U.S. military
through their smug press conferences which feature their own
videos of their smart bombs pummelling Afghanistan.  There
is only one interpretation of the events we see.  No
reporters are on the planes to verify what's going on.

Not that reporters would be likely to report anything but
the military line.   "Within I'd say three days of the
attack, the media went into a kind of a patriotic insanity,"
says John McArthur, publisher of Harper's magazine.

It's not surprising.  Many reporters are centred in New York
and if they weren't directly involved in the terrorist
attacks, they know someone who was.  No wonder that the
instinct of reporters is to hunker down and don't stick your
head up - - you just might get it blown off.   Or get
anthrax.

And it's not just the terrorist threat to reporters life and
limb, it's the verbal arrows that must endured by who speaks
against the U.S. war.  UBC professor Sunera Thobani quickly
found out what happens when you dare say anything critical
of the war effort.

Bill Maher, host of the TV show, Politically Incorrect,
learned the same lesson after his comment:  "We have been
the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.
That's cowardly.  Staying in the airplane as it hits a
building, you can say what you want about it, is not
cowardly."

Free-thinking Americans who would normally applaud political
incorrectness were ready to lynch Maher.   Sponsors
threatened to pull out of the show and Maher publically
apologized.

Perhaps there is an absolute truth in all of this, but God
only knows and She is not telling.  Both sides claim that
God is on their side. There is a relative truth in the
middle east that brings the world's most powerful to
worship.  It is oil.

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