Thoughts from London

Civilising like charity should begin at home
Leaders around the world who flirt with the Bush administration or have tied themselves to George's apron strings will soon rue the day they followed this ill-conceived and short-sighted political path.

With each passing day America's stock is spiralling down precipitously, nowhere more than in the Middle East, or West Asia as we would prefer to call it. This is because the United States is saddled with a president who deludes himself into believing that he is the voice of God sent to this world on a civilising mission.

The real question is who needs civilising- George W. Bush or those who he thinks needs to be converted? At one of his rare, live press conferences in Washington last week, he was stopped in his tracks by a question. Did he accept responsibility for failing to act on information made available to him that a 9/11 kind of terrorist attack was probable? He was lost for an answer. Not because he thought it was a journalistic affront to ask the President of the United States whether he had made any mistakes and he should deign to answer it.

It was simply that this particular question took President Bush by surprise. He had never given thought to it because he only listened to those opinions that agreed with his own. So how can he admit to mistakes.

Sydney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton put it succinctly in an article last week. He wrote: "He is receptive to information that agrees with his point of view rather than information that challenges it." That shows a man fixated with his own infallibility, his own omniscience.

So the question seemed out of order, one that appeared to question the moral values that dictated how and why he acts as he does. A flustered President Bush scratched his head, fumbled over words as though buying time to find an answer that might let the leader of the most powerful nation on this planet down without an unceremonious intellectual thud.

Ultimately he gave up saying "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference………" If born-again Christian George Bush Junior was expecting something to "pop" into his head in some sudden flash of enlightenment, he must have hoped for a miracle like Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus.

If a miracle indeed is needed, it is to save the world from plunging further into the dangerous mire that the Bush policies created, particularly in the West Asia. The same week that Bush so crassly announced to the world that "as the greatest power on the face of the earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom," he was denying that very freedom to the Palestinians who have been refugees for 50 years and whose lands have been occupied for nearly 40 of them.

After talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who surely has a case to answer before a war crimes tribunal for his role in the murder of hundreds of Palestinians in the Shattila and Sabra refugee camps in southern Lebanon,

President Bush did a volte face.
He not only reversed decades of accepted US policy on the Palestinian issue but even went back on his own so-called road map for a settlement of the conflict.

By going off the road and charting a new pro-Israeli path, President Bush hopes it will save him from political perdition in an election year when the polls results are spreading gloom in republican circles.

President Bush expects to garner the important Jewish vote, especially in California that normally goes to the Democrats, by abandoning traditional US policy on the conflict and boosting Ariel Sharon's political fortunes at home.

But where does this leave Bush, internationally? He might not care right now, more concerned as he is with surviving the presidential election in November. Yet his international image is taking a severe beating and this must surely rub off on those who have sidled up to the Bush administration in recent years.

President Bush and his British side-kick Tony Blair, both relied on UN Security Council resolutions starting from 1990 to justify their invasion of Iraq. They sang from the same hymn sheet- Blair is also an ardent Christian- saying that Iraq has consistently ignored Security Council resolutions on weapons of mass destruction.

Never mind that the evangelical duo has still not found the WMDs- not even one to keep as a souvenir. The basis for the attack was Iraq's ignoring of the resolutions, not Saddam Hussein's despotism or his mass killing of Kurds, which were after thoughts.

If this was considered and is still being offered as sufficient reason to attack Iraq, why is Israel's violation of a 1967 Security Council resolution and still valid, demanding that Israel withdraw to its pre-June 1967 borders being ignored by the same Bush administration?

In fact Bush has now gone to the extent of supporting that Israeli defiance by justifying Israel's decision not to withdraw entirely from the West Bank and leave about 90,000 Israelis in Jewish settlements in the occupied land.

Up to now Washington has said that the presence of these settlements are an obstacle to evolving a solution to the conflict. Now Bush endorses their presence. That is not all. He says that Palestinians displaced from their homes and driven out of Israel, should have no right of return to Israel. That is a violation of the UN Convention on Refugees.

An important ingredient of civilised society is respect for the rule of law and fundamental freedoms. Yet it is President Bush who is the great civiliser who is destroying the basis of international law and depriving others of their freedoms.

While preaching from his political pulpit on democracy, human rights and freedoms, the Bush administration fervently supports the dictatorship, for instance, in Uzbekistan where thousands are detained for their political and religious views and dissidents are tortured as a practise.

The British ambassador's protestations against such inhuman behaviour only led to his being put on the mat by the Blair government that now finds itself having to defend publicly embarrassing US policy, but lacks sufficient moral courage to cut the umbilical cord.

The Ranil Wickremesinghe government talked the talk and walked the walk with George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives in an ill-advised excursion into foreign policy. It even expressed its support, through considered assessment or grammatical error, Washington's invasion of Iraq.

Sri Lanka found itself increasingly turning into a pet poodle of the Bush administration because some half-baked advisers with dubious qualifications took control of foreign policy. Bush's recent misadventures and U-turns in foreign policy should be a lesson to all of them that Bush has no permanent friends nor permanent foes, only self- interest based on some mythical belief in a moral righteousness that is best expressed in US dollars.

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