Remora

Powers of Thought

The best American coverage of the protests world wide was carried by the Los Angeles Times. LI would bet that if ten million people around the world had protested in favor of Bush's position in Iraq, the Washington Post and the New York Times would have been alight with celebratory headlines. But no, we will give no headlines for peace marchers. Heavens.

The LA Times went with an honest report. It didn't mix protest against Tony Blair's policy in London with machine gun toting thugs marching in Baghdad as a species of the same thing. We liked these grafs in Sebastian Rotella's story:

"Leslie Druce, 70, marched in London carrying a placard that proclaimed "Bush and Blair ... Liars and Bullies."

"They treat us like we have no power of thought," Druce said. "Who are they kidding? Do they really feel threatened by the Iraqis? The U.S. could be such a power for good in the world, but Bush has chosen to be the bully boy instead. It really bothers me that Bush has used Blair as a veil of decency through all of this."

Many protesters were members of Blair's Labor Party who have broken with their leader over the war.

"We voted for Blair, but on this he's totally wrong. It's immoral," said Peter Burton, who made the 237-mile trip to London from his Exeter home along with his wife, Rita. "He has totally misjudged how dangerous this is to the Middle East and how destabilizing this has been to the United Nations. And we believe in the United Nations."

There is, in politics, one rule of success that seems pretty constant. You have to help your friends. Eventually, the consistent, serial betrayal of allies will undermine even the most secure of empires. The D.C. cenacle of belligerents has concluded that their only friends are to the right: the frothing academics in various conservative think tanks or the Likudniks at the Weekly Standard. Hence the unceasing flow of vituperation directed, for instance, at France. This has taken on a logic of its own that is undermining its objective. The creation of an atmosphere in which all impediments to war with Iraq are treated as the hostile and nasty acts of terrorists is going to make it impossible to justify retaining that closeness to Bush's administration that Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' has been trying to impress upon the world. You know that when even Chili goes against you at the U.N., something is seriously wrong.

Speaking of France...

A wonderful example of how polemical talent cannot survive its own debauch is Christopher Hitchens recent screed about Chirac, which was published, appropriately enough, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Hitchens used to know something about the deadly insult: the polemicists great truth is that truth itself must, given the moral occassion, exaggerate. But insult without the backing of truth, insult in the service of a blind and conniving power, destroys even the truths it embraces. As Mary McCarthy once said about Lilian Hellman, every word she says is a lie, including "the" and "a," So, too, in this incredibly silly piece about the ever corrupt Chirac, entitled Saddam's pal, Chirac the Rat. Among the carious verbiage we loved this passage:

"However, the conduct of Jacques Chirac can hardly be analysed in these terms. Here is a man who had to run for re-election last year in order to preserve his immunity from prosecution, on charges of corruption that were grave. Here is a man who helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor and who knew very well what he wanted it for. Here is a man at the head of France who is, in effect, openly for sale. He puts me in mind of the banker in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale: a man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.

Here, also, is a positive monster of conceit. He has unctuously said that "force is always the last resort". Vraiment? This was not the view of the French establishment when troops were sent to Rwanda to try to rescue the client regime that had just unleashed ethnocide against the Tutsi. It is not, one presumes, the view of the French generals who are treating the people and nation of Cote d'Ivoire as their fief. It was not the view of those who ordered the destruction of an unarmed ship, the Rainbow Warrior, as it lay at anchor in a New Zealand harbour after protesting against the French official practice of conducting atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific. (I am aware that some of these outrages were conducted when the French Socialist Party was in power, but in no case did Chirac express anything other than patriotic enthusiasm. If there is a truly "unilateralist" government on the UN Security Council, it is France.)"

Of course, as faithful readers of LI know, the corruptions of Chirac are entangled with the corruptions of Hitchen's great "pal," George Bush. Chirac was the first European politician to congratulate Bush after the coup in Florida -- a result that Hitchens, proceeding through his accustomed tergiversation, is surely happy with. After all, democracy has a limit. And among those corrupt supporters of Chirac, we have previously mentioned an arms dealer, Pierre Falcone. Pierre Falcone runs with a highly smelly contingent of criminals including the well known Russian-Israeli Mafioso, Arcadi Gaydamak. Gaydamak can come to the U.S. to parties honoring the likes of his friend, Ariel Sharon, and remain unmolested by the FBI, which is so vigilant, otherwise, in incarcerating brown skinned working class men who happen to speak Arabic. Falcone is in jail in France, but his wife, beauty queen, Sonia, lives in Arizona and is highly active in Republican circles.

Here's a corpwatch article that fills in the details:

"According to Global Witness, the links between Angola's corrupt government and the Bush administration are just as odorous as those linking Luanda's leadership to past and current members of the French government, both Socialist and Gaullist. In addition to the French oil giant Total-Fina-Elf, oil companies like Chevron, Texaco, Philipps Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, and BP-Amoco -- all with close links to Bush and his White House oil team -- were heavily involved in propping up dos Santos in return for profitable off-shore oil concessions.After transferring some $770 million in oil revenues to their own private bank accounts, dos Santos and his cronies became convinced that pluralism in their country would be a very dangerous thing for their future business deals. They also quickly abandoned their former Marxist beliefs in favor of the type of capitalist principles embraced by George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.

Paris, Texas

There are similarities between dos Santos' new relationship with George W. Bush and the Bush family's historical ties to the House of Saud. Both represent the murky nature of oil politics that places US economic, national security, and human rights interests far behind the priority assigned to ensuring maximum corporate profits for a tight-knit and secretive international oil fraternity.Just as Bush's past financial links to the Bin Laden family have been exposed by the media, so too have his links to Angolagate and Falcone. Falcone's wife, Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia and a friend of First Lady Laura Bush, became a big-ticket contributor to Bush's 2000 election campaign. Contributions were made to the campaign through Sonia's Essant� Corporation, a distributor of health, beauty, and sexual pleasure products (such as a cream called Entisse that Essant�'s web site says is guaranteed to duplicate the effects of Viagra). http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2576 We recommend the whole Corporate Watch article as a nice introduction to the chamber of horrors which financed the Bush campaign."

Thieves can fall out, but it takes the blind vanity of a Hitchens to take the side of one of those thieves as a moral imperative. For those who want to know more about the Chirac-Bush arms connection, read our post of 6/19 last year.