Maybe there is a good reason to re-elect George Bush!

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

The Guardian
John Le Carré

Maybe there's one good reason - just one - for re-electing George W Bush, and that's to force him to live with the consequences
of his appalling actions, and answer for his own lies, rather than wish the job on a Democrat who will then get blamed for his predecessor's follies.

Probably no American president in all history has been so universally hated abroad as George W Bush: for his bullying
unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures,
his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash
an illegal war - and now anarchy - upon a country that like too many others around the world was suffering under a hideous
dictatorship, but had no hand in 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction, and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the
US in a dirty war against Iran.

Is your president a great war leader because he allowed himself to be manipulated by a handful of deluded ideologues?
Is Tony Blair a great war leader because he committed Britain's troops, foreign policy and domestic security to the
same hare-brained adventure?

You are voting in November. We will vote next year. Yet the outcome in both countries will in large part depend on the same question: how long can the lies last now that the truth has finally been told? The Iraq war was planned long before 9/11.
Osama provided the excuse. Iraq paid the price. American kids paid the price. British kids paid the price. Our politicians lied to us.

While Bush was waging his father's war at your expense, he was also ruining your country. He made your rich richer and your poor
and unemployed more numerous. He robbed your war veterans of their due and reduced your children's access to education. And he deprived more Americans than ever before of healthcare.
Now he's busy cooking the books, burying deficits and calling in contingency funds to fight a war that his advisers promised him he
could light and put out like a candle.
Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil liberties which took brave Americans 200 years to secure,
and were once the envy of a world that now looks on in horror, not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but
at what you are doing to yourselves.

But please don't feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved. Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting
for you. And here in Britain, for as long as we have Tony Blair singing the same lies as George Bush, your nightmares will be ours.

© David Cornwell 2004
· John Le Carré is a novelist.