FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY

US President George W. Bush begins his second term in office between fantasy and reality. More wars threaten instead of “freedom and democracy”.

By Rainer Rupp

[This article originally published in: junge Welt, 1/20/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.jungewelt.de/2005/01-20/007.php.]




In his first term in office, George W. Bush polarized the American population more than any other US president. Thanks to the successful mobilization of Christian fundamentalists, he begins his second term in office to fulfill his divine mission – as he believes himself. An increasing number of his opposing party compare him and his neoconservative administration to the world in George Orwell’s “1984”. “Permanent war” also prevailed in “1984”. The “Ministry for Truth” was responsible for propaganda lies and torture. The fact that the chief lawyer of the White House, Alberto Gonzales, legal forerunner of the torture methods known from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, will be the next Attorney General of the United States only confirms the parallels.

Entirely in the Orwellian sense, the president distinguishes the former head of the CIA, George Tenet, with the highest honorary civilian medal of the US. Although Bush made the secret service chiefly responsible for the failure in the matter of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Tenet was honored on December 14, 2004 with the “Presidential Medal of Freedom” – together with two other colleagues in war crimes. The former commanding general in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tommy Franks, and Washington’s former proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, were decorated with gold on account of their “decisive role in the great events”.

Four more Bush years mean that the “Department for Virtual Realities” will experience a boom again in the White House. The speeches about “freedom and democracy” in Iraq are written in that department along with the messages of greeting to the liberated citizens of Falluja. The assessments that “everything is under control” in

Iraq are worked out in that department together with the latest CIA report that “Iraq has become the breeding ground of a new generation of international terrorists” through the US occupation. This is regarded as proof that “we are following the right strategy” as the White House press spokesperson Scott McClellan commented January 14, 2005 on the latest disillusioning secret service report.

NEW DIMENSIONS

The presidential confusion of fantasy and reality was clear last week in two interviews that Bush gave in preparation for his inauguration festival. To the question on the ABC TV-station whether the invasion in Iraq was worthwhile given more than 1300 dead US soldiers, the billions of dollars of war costs and the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Bush replied “Oh, absolutely.” Bush dismissed the question of the Washington Post about responsibility for the mistakes made in Iraq with the claim that the American people approved his Iraq policy with his re-election. Polls show that over half of surveyed US citizens regard the Iraq war as a mistake. Despite this, Bush threatens the next war against Iran.

LAST OPPORTUNITY

As previously in Iraq, fiction and reality are also blurred in the threatened war against Iran. Bush’s neoconservative war hawks start from the “liberating effect” of an American-Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. A popular rebellion will sweep away the Mullah-regime in Teheran and bring to power a government friendly to the US.

The Bush advisors obviously consider the possible consequences of such an attack as little as before the Iraq war. The second term in office of George W. Bush appears as their last opportunity to win the “worldwide war against terror.” They want to take the offensive as long as Congress and the US population still follow the war president. In view of the increasingly powerful criticism especially from his own republican ranks, Bush’s prestige seems to have passed its zenith even before the president started his second term in office.