With every week, the American administration goes further into the twilight zone, writes Mohamed Hakki In France they say the more things change, the more they stay the same. In Bush's America they are more likely to say the more things change, the more they get weirder and weirder. Up until last weekend, the president was still talking, on his weekly radio address, about meeting the generals who are overseeing our efforts in Iraq "to discuss our strategy for victory". He continued to say: "we are conducting aggressive counter-terrorism operations in the areas where the terrorists are concentrated." He still talked about thrashing out and "hunting down deadly terrorist leaders", but he only mentioned one; this is in a war that so far cost more than 100,000 lives, and hundreds of thousands wounded. By all accounts, it was all for a pack of lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. There was no link between Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The neo-conservatives said the US troops would be greeted with flowers. But there are 2,000 young Americans lying on the ground now "as testimony to the fact that they were welcomed by something else". One of those neo-cons who sold the American people this pack of lies is Paul Wolfowitz. Still, with his familiar chutzpah, he addressed representatives of the member countries of the World Bank, talking about -- of all things -- accountability. "We will promote anti- corruption measures, accountability, good governance, women's empowerment, education, health, increased infrastructure and agriculture," he said. He asked World Bank officials to produce results, ones that have real impact in the day-to-day lives of the poor. "We stand accountable to them." Accountable? The man has no shame! In a column in The New York Times, Maureen Dowd said that Wolfowitz is having fun. "Unlike the Powell maxim, 'if you break it, you own it', the Wolfowitz philosophy is 'if you break it, walk away from it.'" Dowd asks: "where on earth are those who egged on the Iraq civil war? Richard Pearle has dropped out of sight, except to pop up, as he did at the American Public Affairs Committee's annual meeting in May, to urge a military strike on Iran." She goes on to say: "Wolfie and fellow hawks turned Iraq into a harbour for Al-Qaeda with an invasion they justified by falsely calling Iraq a harbour for Al-Qaeda. Here's the weirdest perversion: first Rummy, as President Reagan's Mid-East envoy, was photographed with Saddam Hussein, supporting him in the war against Iran. Then Rummy and other hawks rushed the US into war against Saddam and ended up turning Iraq over to Shia intertwined with Iran. And now Richard Pearle thinks we might have to bomb Iran." It looks like America has gone full circle. Four years after George Bush promised to get "those who knocked these buildings down", they are again talking about Al-Qaeda as a threat. When the Iraq war started, most of my Arab-American friends were incredulous. They thought it was madness and that American traces of reason and sanity would somehow correct it. A young Libyan-American friend was the first to predict that Bush would be remembered as the CEO who presided over the desegregation of America as a superpower. Paul Craig Roberts, in Counterpunch, is now saying the same thing: Bush will go down in history as the president who fiddled while America lost its hegemonic status. Roberts says: "Bush used deceit and hysteria to lead America into a war that is bleeding the US economically, militarily and diplomatically. The war is being fought with hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from foreigners. The war is bleeding the military of troops and commitments. The war has ended the US claim to moral leadership and exposed the US as a reckless and aggressive power." Two things are happening now: the US is so short of troops that the neo-cons are advocating the use of mercenaries paid with US citizenship. The other is that latest polls show that the majority of Americans believe the US cannot win against the Iraq insurgency. Ray McGovern, on www.anti-war.com, asks: "where do American religious leaders stand on torture? Their deafening silence evokes memories of the unconscionable behaviour of German Church leaders in the 1930s and early 1940s." He continues: "for far too long, we have been acting like 'obedient Germans'. Shall we continue to avert our eyes -- even as our mainstream media begin to expose 'routine torture'?" Words like these are in the public record. Soon words will turn to actions: efforts to hold the government accountable, including getting the truth about the failures that led up to 11 September, the real reasons for invading Iraq, the sanctioning of torture, the promotion of people with terrible human rights violations, the creation of a climate of fear, and destroying civil liberties. Are you listening Wolfowitz?
