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Lying, conniving political 'leaders' cannot keep their jobs following Iraq

By James Cumes - posted Thursday, 12 June 2003


The inability to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has created a political crisis in the United States and Britain. Within the two governments there are recriminations and brutal political infighting over responsibility. Stratfor warned in February that the unwillingness of the U.S. government to articulate its real, strategic reasons for the war - choosing instead to lean on WMD as the justification - would lead to a deep crisis at some point. That moment seems to be here.

The most damning implication of all this is that people at the very top of the "democratic" pile are liars and cheats - liars and cheats to their own people.

We don't even need to point a finger at the likes of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. They are, after all, only unelected officials.

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The most important thing is that Bush and Blair knew what they were doing and they knew that what they were saying - indeed swearing to a largely gullible public - was a lie or a whole pack of lies.

To believe anything different is to stamp Bush and Blair as ingenuous fools. Nobody believes that they are.

What does this do to any belief in the integrity of Bush and Blair and, indeed, of our "democratic" politicians generally?

It's hard to believe that the elected Cabinet in Britain did not know that they were selling a package of fake intelligence to the country.
Robin Cook knew. So must all the other members of Blair's Cabinet have "known".

Only one other member of the Cabinet resigned, so far as I know.Did they know all the details? Probably not.

But they didn't deserve positions of high governmental responsibility if they did not know that there was a hidden agenda and guess, without knowing all the details, what that agenda was.

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Did Colin Powell know? Powell is not elected but he was respected.

He must have known and must have known that he was acting out a lie.

These apparent conclusions go to the very heart of responsible government and to the heart of the trust we should have in our elected governments and their officials.

Clinton was impeached for a boyish fiddle with a girl which he then denied - as most men in his position - or any position - would have done.

Compared with the monstrous lies of which his successor seems guilty, his "offence" was trivial.

It is difficult now to believe that lies and deceptions have not been practised by Bush and Blair - lies and deceptions that have cost some hundreds of American and British lives as well as the lives of thousands of Iraqis.

The cost of a war entered into on the basis of deceit has been heavy in many respects and the full cost in strategic, political, economic and social terms has yet to be fully calculated - and endured.

There is continuing evidence, too, that the corruption of a war justified by deceit has been followed by a "peace" and reconstruction based on a whole complex of further deceits and corruptions. A culture seems to exist in which corporate and political corruptions are intertwined.

If what we now so strongly suspect is true, Bush and Blair must go - and go quickly.

Whether even that will be enough to rescue the integrity of our national and international political environments must be doubted.Some more fundamental cleansing of our Augean democracies seems to be called for - urgently.

What of Bush's willing little buddy, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia?

He must have known - or, if he did not make a reasonably well-informed guess, he must be the most ingenuous nonentity ever to occupy the top political spot in a democracy of significance.

If what we now strongly suspect is true, he must be unceremoniously removed from office too - and quickly.

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About the Author

James Cumes is a former Australian ambassador and author of America's Suicidal Statecraft: The Self-Destruction of a Superpower (2006).

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