Terror tactics
Taki
Iwatched Harold Pinter on Paxman's programme and was shocked, shocked to discover how utterly useless the playwright was in defending his anti-war views. I never caught the name of the American who went up against our Harold, but it was almost embarrassing. A smooth huckster of the kind America is full of, the Yank presented his argument with brio, while the sweating Pinter was inarticulate and at times made no sense. After the American smoothie had announced for the umpteenth time how much he admired Pinter's plays but disapproved of his antiwar views. Harold interjected that he had no friends, It got so bad that Paxman had to intervene and give the dramatist a helping hand.
Mind you, I never would have thought I'd be fighting in Pinter's corner. but I was. Much could have been made of Israel's total disregard of UN resolutions, but it was hardly mentioned, even when the American made a point of how patient Bush and Blair had been with Saddam's disregard of the UN. Pinter's demented anti-Americanism has not served him well. I was as much against this useless war as anyone, but one cannot justify one's antiwar stance by denouncing everything American. Sure, I hate Big Macs, and Coca-Cola, and fast-food joints, and Hollywood, and the blind greed of capitalism gone wild, but you gotta take the good with the bad, as they say in Texas.
Let's see. After the Madrid atrocity, the warmongers are calling the Spaniards chicken for caving in to terror. American neocons are back in full throttle. David Frum, a Canadian phony and arch-publicity-seeker, has joined the infamous Richard Perle (the first to turn against his friend and benefactor Conrad Black) in demanding constant war against terror, whatever that means, Frum likes to talk tough. In an unreadable book the two swaggering cowboys, whose signatures are brown breeches, for obvious reasons, denounce everyone and everything including Europe, the State Department. the FBI, the CIA — you name it, they're against it. Perle and Frum believe in little beyond self-interest. In terror they have found a niche.
But terror has been around for a hell of a long time. Terror has been the weapon of the IRA. the Irgun. the Stern Gang. the FLN in Algeria and the Mau Mau in Kenya, ETA, Black September, Hezbollah, Hamas, I could go on and on. Lenin was a terrorist and now lies in a mausoleum, as do Mao and Ho Chi Minh, both arch-terrorists. Menahem Begin, a ferocious terrorist, won the Nobel Peace prize, as did Yasser Arafat. Not to mention Nelson Mandela, another terrorist now regarded as a saint.
With Perle. Frum and Bill Kristol as friends, George W. Bush obviously needs no enemies. The neocons have most likely made him a one-term president, just like dear old dad. But George W. Bush is not at all the reckless, inarticulate, dumb cowboy whom the Left so loves to hate. He has had the bad luck to be sold a real lemon by those smiling wallet-lifters, the neocons. He was promised a cakewalk in Iraq, the role of liberator a la Eisenhower and Truman. Instead he got Napoleon's treatment in Moscow. Now Frum and Perle are complaining that Bush should have established a government-in-exile with the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi playing de Gaulle. What clowns! Chalabi should be behind bars, yet these buffoons are blaming the debacle in Iraq on Bush's refusal to crown Chalabi King of Thieves.
If I had my way, Chalabi. Perle and the rest of the cabal who started the war would be indicted for deceiving us into a war that might end up a bigger disaster than Vietnam. But the uninterrupted career of failure that was Robert McNamara's was never tested in court. Neither will the lies and deceits of the neocons be. Yes, there will be more terror, because we have opened our borders to Muslims, and because we are at this moment occupying Iraq and our only ally in the Middle East is occupying the West Bank. The kleptocracy that is Saudi Arabia continues to finance terror, and instead of us overthrowing the crooks, we overthrew Saddam, an enemy only of his people. It was none of our business and now we are paying the piper. Pinter should have won this argument hands down, but his silences got in the way.
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