On to the rubbish heap you go

SURPRISE, surprise, who else do we talk about but George Walker Bush, the Forty-Third President of the United States of America, God be praised.The finest cartoonist in the whole wide world, the Guardian’s Steve Bell, got him just right: as a chimpanzee with an over-deployed muzzle, mouth always open; too-pointy ears and eyes much too close together. And, of course, the stupidest look ever on his face.One of his funniest was the cartoon in which he shows an aircraft carrier as part of an American navy battle group with three war planes flying overhead heading towards the Iranian coast. The aircraft and the carrier all had that same chimp (read Dubya) look, including the eyes and the ears. I laughed until I cried.But what wasn’t funny is the tears that Dubya brought to the world, as he did to his own country, as he went bumbling and stumbling about in his own, and setting the rest of the world alight with the fires of hate and malice, and cruelty and heartlessness of a very special kind. With a grade of idiocy, of course, that bordered on insanity. And the lies; all the lies told not only by himself, but by his handlers and keepers too, as they hurtled towards the ignominy that is theirs today.Just look at the shameless arrogance and extreme stupidity of the man when he said a day after Hurricane Katrina, that devastated New Orleans: “We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do ... The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch, heehaw.” That was President Bush, touring hurricane damage in Mobile, Alabama on Sept 2, 2005. It is another matter of course that New Orleans is, even three years and more after Katrina, not half the place it used to be.Just look at the shameless way in which Valerie Plame, a CIA employee and wife of former ambassador and good man, Joseph Wilson, was “outed” by Dick ‘The Sneer’ Cheney’s people just because Ambassador Wilson blew holes in the administration’s story that Iraq had bought uranium yellowcake from Niger for its weapons of mass destruction programme.The way the so-called ‘patriotic’ Bushies threw caution to the winds even when it came to their own CIA reminded one (and reminds one to this day!) of the shenanigans of our own establishment which too has painted people not aligned to itself in colours of its own choosing. All the time, please note, doing as it pleases, even at the cost of the country. They are true brother and sister, one as bad as the other.More and more people in America — the world had already made up its mind years ago — think Dubya was the worst US president ever. I quote a 2006 Siena College poll of 744 professors that reported the following results: “George W. Bush has just finished five years as president. If today were the last day of his presidency, how would you rank him? The responses were: Great: two per cent; Near Great: five per cent; Average: 11 per cent; Below Average: 24 per cent; Failure: 58 per cent.” Afghanistan was not yet completely out of control and the economic collapse was three years away!!But whenever we rail against Dubya we must also take to account those who acquiesced in his and his administration’s crimes against humanity: the Arab sheikhlets and our own commando leading. What makes the situation even more painful is that many of his collaborators are now crawling out of the woodwork in opposition to him and his handiwork.This is what ýKhalifa ibn Salman Al Khalifah, the prime minister of Bahrain, has to say now: that the US war on terror has destabilised the region with the war on terror advocated by the White House bolstering violence and terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq.In his own words: “The objective (of the war on terror) was to reinstate security and stability in Afghanistan and Iraq and purge terrorism. The current situation, however, runs counter to that goal.”He is not alone. The former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, Dame Stella Rimington, said on Saturday that the response to the Sept 11, 2001 attacks had been a “huge overreaction”.She is not alone either. David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, has weighed in too, in the words of The (London) Times: “The foreign secretary attacked the legacy of George Bush yesterday, branding the outgoing President’s War on Terror a ‘misleading and mistaken’ doctrine that had united extremists against the West.“Speaking in Mumbai, David Miliband said that the idea of a war on terror gave a false notion ‘of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and the organisation of Al Qaeda’. He suggested that the phrase had ‘inadvertently sustained Al Qaeda’s propaganda’ and risked magnifying the threats faced. ‘The more we lump terrorist groups together, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common,’ he added.”Somebody correct me if I am wrong but isn’t Bahrain the headquarters of the US’s Fifth Fleet? Again, wasn’t Master Miliband an important member of Tony Blair’s cabal at the time that he was ‘poodling’ to Dubya? So why didn’t the two speak up before America wrought what it did? A lot of good their saying what they are saying now will do anyone, particularly countries such as ours that have been enveloped in the flames of hate as a direct result of Dubya’s foolish policies.You are reading this on the very day that Barack Obama takes oath as the 44th president of the United States of America. People tell me nothing will change; that Obama will be ensnared by the American establishment into continuing with Dubya’s disastrous policies if only because America cannot be seen to fail so quickly. They say America will not change, for it is an imperial power.My answer to these sceptics is that America has already changed. What greater change could there be in America the Beautiful than a black man getting elected to the presidency? My answer to the sceptics is that Obama at the very least has a brain in his head, and a smart one at that. At least he knows where on the world map lies the country of Afghanistan, and who the president of Pakistan is. He at least knows that Indonesia and Malaysia are countries.While there will always be an American Enterprise, Obama will at least bring some sense to it. More than anything else, I am a great believer in faces: I like his, for it is a kind face, and a thoughtful one. I am hopeful that he will make the world a better place.May God guide you, Mr President, to always do the right thing. And on to the rubbish heap of history with you, Master Dubya.kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk
By Kamran Shafi