What a Cowboy Outfit

By: Les Payne

The moment (there's always a moment) came for me when, after saying that "more then 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested", President George W. Bush beaded his eyes and added: "Many others have met a different fate. Let me put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States."

We're talkin' killings here, folks. Pure Texas Rangers. Not the baseball team but the cold-blooded, bloodthirsty Texas lawmen, so-called, who became legend for dispensing justice Texas-style to "suspected" this and "suspected" that. "One by one", the President said, "the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice". Killing "suspected" perpetrators is not exactly what most Americans subscribe to as justice. That aside, one must wonder if this is any way for the world's lone superpower to bluster about the conduct of its shadier - even if warranted - global affairs.

No President has publicly spoken this bare-knuckled in decades, not even LBJ, that other Texas wrangler who made it to the Oval Office. Though Johnson inflicted cataclysmic terror upon Vietnam, he worked manfully to speak rather clinically from the pulpit. The 43^rd President, on the other hand, has a knack for all but spitting in the eyes of the unready friend or foe.

This boorish habit has been cited as an obstacle to U.S. diplomacy. Both the French and the Germans have criticized his finger-pointing, along with his religious fervor, as an off-putting gesture that further chills their reluctance to back his pursuit of Saddam Hussein. No one likes to be lectured down to, not even by allies. The lecture takes on a particular sting when it's delivered by someone unable properly to pronounce "nuclear".

Bush's State of the Union address went another step toward lathering up the republic for war. As with his brief against al-Qaida terrorists, the President struck his tough Texas Rangers' pose. "The dictator, who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons, has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured." Bush said this without reminding that the United States helped this dictator assemble these weapons of destruction in its war with Iran. Interestingly, his bill of particulars included details of horror seldom heard publicly from the White House.

Bush told of obtaining confessions "by torturing children while their parents are made to watch". He then painted a scene of jailers torturing their victims with "electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape". This technique recalled nothing so much as the old border patrol days of the Texas Rangers.

Determined to dispel any notion that he was all hat and no cattle, Bush made it clear that he is ready to storm Baghdad. He sent an ominous warning to the Iraqi people: "Your enemy is not surrounding your country. Your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation."

Tony Blair reinforced his support for the self-proclaimed liberator at the White House, Friday. Britain, therefore, may experience the first regime change should the United States invade Iraq. Australia, which will pass up no opportunity to fire off a few rounds, stands firm. As does Estonia. Most of the rest of the civilized world, while considering a U.S. invasion inevitable, does not support it. It was left to Nelson Mandela, the retired South African president, to voice the stiffest criticism of Bush's threat against Iraq.

"What I am condemning is that one power, with a President who has no foresight and who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust", Mandela told the International Women's Forum in Johannesburg Thursday. Mandela also took pains to criticize Iraq for not cooperating fully with weapons inspectors. Though he is no longer at the helm in Pretoria, Mandela said that South Africa would likely support whatever action the United Nations might direct against Iraq.

"All that [Bush] wants is Iraqi oil", Mandela said. Bush and Blair, whom he said was no longer the British prime minister but the "foreign minister of the U.S.", were accused of undermining U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "Is it because the Secretary-General of the United Nations is now a black man? They never did that when Secretary-Generals were white."

A White House spokesman dismissed Mandela's harsh criticism in favor of letters of support from "eight European leaders". The key players of Europe, as indeed the rest of the world, hold their collective breath as the Texas Ranger beads his eyes and prepares to squeeze the trigger. It cannot be said that the republic deserves this, for it was the U.S. Supreme Court that got us to this precipice.

God, what a country.