April 2, 2002
Kamloops Daily News



"Wild, dark times are rumbling towards us, and the prophet
who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent
entirely new beasts, (Heinrich Heine, 1797 - 1856)"

It's hard to be optimistic about the literal bloodbath that
has become common place in the middle east, or about the way
President Bush is inflaming world war.  

Palestinians strap explosives to themselves and become human
shrapnel in Israeli restaurants.  Israelis tanks rumble
through the streets of the West Bank, cannons blowing
Palestinians to bits as they sit watching televison in their
living rooms.

The hawkish Israeli premier Sharon is all to eager to apply
the biblical admonishment of an eye-for-an-eye.  Chairman
Arafat nods away while Palestinian aspirations of a homeland
evaporate.

President Bush throws gasoline on the fire.  His
hang-'em-high style of frontier justice is happily applied by
both sides of the conflict.  Bush's rhetoric is a license
for any state with a real or perceived grievance to come out
with guns blazing.  The only justification needed is to
declare your enemies as terrorists.

Bush's style is that of the schoolyard bully --you are
wrong if I say you are wrong and if you disagree, I will
unleash all the power at my disposal to demonstrate how
wrong you are.

"Instead of looking for a solution to the Palestinian
problem, Bush gave the green light to Sharon, so that he
could run berserk in the  Palestinian territories,
re-conquer, kill, destroy, uproot, besiege,  surround and
cut off," says Uri Avnery of Israel's peace movement Gush
Shalom.

Bush's macho style of foreign policy is popular in the U.S.
because it is easily understood.  But he keeps upping the
stakes.  First he wants his allies to support his
retaliation for the barbaric crimes committed on September
11.  That's something that Canadians are prepared to do.

But then Bush expects us to follow him into his misadventure
into Iraq.  He expects his amigos to help him settle a
family feud.  Bush's daddy, George Bush sr., couldn't finish
off the tyrant Saddam Hussein and now he wants us to help
settle the score.  

If Iraq were completely destroyed, it will break in three: a
Shiite protectorate of Iran the South, a Kurdish state in
the north and a small Sunni state in the  middle. That would
completely destabilize the whole region, inflaming more
conflict.

Like Chairman Arafat, Saddam Hussein is the lesser of evils.
Without them in place as heads of state, things get worse.

President Bush has more diabolical schemes in mind than the
destabilisation of the middle east.  The leader of free
world has declared that under some circumstances, he would
consider using nuclear weapons against enemies he calls "the
axis of evil (Iraq, Iran and North Korea)."  This latest
revelation into the inner workings of Bush's psyche has
potential allies reeling.

Scott Taylor, editor a Canadian military magazine called
Esprit de Corps, says "By threatening to visit retaliatory
annihilation upon millions of innocent civilians, the United
States has itself become what it purports to be fighting: a
global terrorist."

"The European community has become increasingly alarmed over
Bush's haste to widen the war even as military operations in
Afghanistan continue to escalate," says Taylor.

George Bush jr. has not learned the most elementary fact of
nuclear weapon use --nobody wins a nuclear war.   Almost
every other world leader figured out the nuclear riddle
decades ago. 

One of two things happen when any nation deploys nuclear
weapons, both of them bad.  Either the attacked nation or
one of its allies fire their nuclear weapons in retaliation
or the nuclear fallout drifts back to the aggressors,
poisoning those who fired the weapons.

When you look at a globe, president Bush, those lines that
you see around countries are an artificial political
construct.  They have no protective function.  Seen from
outer space, the lines disappear and it becomes clear that
we share the same land masses, oceans, and air.  As with
global warming, everyone suffers the consequences of global
radioactivity.

Canadians will go to the ends of the earth, even to the
improbable county of Afghanistan, to avenge the horror of
September 11.  But we will not follow you down the road to
Baghdad to your inventions of evil.

And we certainly will not link arms and march with you
towards the resurrection of the rough beasts of nuclear
destruction.

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