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Simplistic Hunt for Evil in a Complex World
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
By Robert Scheer
Syndicated Columnist -- LA Times

Conveniently, the drug war that obsessed this administration before Sept. 11 is now ignored. Our new enemy is not dope growers but Iraq, even though Bush has produced no convincing evidence that Baghdad has anything to do with the Al Qaeda network. The country that clearly does, of course, is that hotbed of hypocrisy, Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the Sept. 11 hijackers. The sheikdom is now being sued for $1 trillion by families of the Sept. 11 victims. But President Bush would never move against the Saudis because American corporations, some led by close Bush family friends and associates, do too much business there.

Doomed by the incoherence of a foreign policy defined largely by biblical notions of the struggle between good and evil, the Bush administration thrashes about in its hunt for the devil. Sadly, all that has produced are shopworn enemies that were once our surrogates in battles we would rather forget.

That is the case with Saddam Hussein, whose war against Iran in the 1980s was decisively aided by a U.S. eager to protect pro-Western Arab oil sheikdoms from the contamination of Iran's virulently anti-American Islamic revolution. Hussein's use of chemical weapons, now cited with horror in the Bush administration's daily demonization of Hussein, occurred early in that war and was well known to U.S. officials, who at least implicitly condoned his war crimes.

The most recent evidence of this complicity was reported Sunday in the New York Times: "A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons."

Iran, which also used chemical weapons, still is ruled by the same type of religious zealots who once seized the U.S. Embassy and kept Americans captive. But while President Bush early this year placed it in his "axis of evil," along with North Korea and Iraq, Iran is now viewed more ambiguously because Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, is dependent on Tehran for his life.
(More: Common Dreams News Source)
2002 © Los Angeles Times.

Dan