America's persistence in trying to fool the world may backfire

DURING World War II the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes had a cartoon of two American soldiers in Northern Ireland.

In the background was a particularly glum native looking out over the half-door of his thatched cottage.

"Who is he mad at Hitler?" one soldier asked. "No, Cromwell!" replied his mate.

It is often said that the British never remember and the Irish never forget. Over the centuries we have blamed Cromwell for many things. He was responsible for the outrage of September 11, but in his case it was the slaughter of around 3,500 people, including women and children, in Drogheda on September 11, 1649.

We have railed about that for over 350 years, so maybe we should be a little more understanding that the Americans have been complaining about their 9/11 for the past two years. In the circumstances, it was little wonder that they attacked Afghanistan for harbouring al-Qaida.

But the attack on Iraq was a different matter. There was no link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and any suggestion of such ties was as phoney as Iraq's supposed nuclear capacity, which was a monumental lie that it could yet have disastrous repercussions for George W Bush.

Both Mr Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair cited the canard that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Niger as evidence that he was preparing weapons of mass destruction, even though they knew this information was probably false.

When an American diplomat disclosed this ruse, his wife was exposed by a White House official as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This could yet turn out to be George W Bush's Watergate, because naming a CIA agent is a criminal offence.

Governments frequently leak information for self-serving reasons, but this was a sinister act of revenge on a civil servant by targeting the man's wife.

It certainly betrays a warped sense of justice on the part of the White House staff, but then they have perverted all sense of justice by holding more than 600 people without charge or trial in inhuman conditions at the American base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

In the process they have made a mockery of the American constitution and a number of distinguished Americans, including 18 former diplomats and a number of judges, are engaged in a Supreme Court challenge against the behaviour of the Bush administration in Guantanamo.

Those taking the case include the distinguished former Secretary of State William Rogers, who was one of the few members of Richard Nixon's cabinet to emerge from office with his reputation enhanced.

"The perception of the case abroad that the power of the United States can be exercised outside the law and even, it is presumed, in conflict with the law will diminish our stature in the wider world," Rogers and his colleague warned the Supreme Court.

The Americans seem to be challenging even the fundamentals of democracy. This week, in California, Governor Gray Davis received around 46% of the vote in a recall election.

"Since he did not get a majority of the votes cast, he was ousted from office, and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, an opportunist, who got around 48% of the vote.

If Schwarzenegger had got just 32% of the vote, however, he would still have been elected. The world would have been presented with the spectacle of a governor losing out with 46% of the vote and being replaced by a candidate with just 32%.

This demonstrates the undemocratic nature of the recall process. America would not only have a loser in the White House but also another loser in the governor's mansion of the wealthiest and most populous state in the union.

If the Americans wish to pervert their own democracy and fool themselves, that is their business, but they are also persisting in trying to fool the world.

The attack on the twin towers has been shamelessly exploited by the US, which has deliberately been trying to create the mistaken impression that Iraq was somehow responsible for the attacks of 9/11.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, wrote that many American soldiers in Iraq told him recently that they volunteered for service as a result of the attack on the World Trade Center.

He went on to recount the presentation of a piece of steel from the towers to General Tommy Franks. "This great soldier's eyes welled up with tears," Wolfowitz wrote.

OF course, he did not suggest openly that Iraq was responsible for the attack on the twin towers. It was just a subliminal suggestion.

Even though Saddam had nothing to do with the outrage, the Americans still use it as a justification for the war on Iraq.

"We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks," Condoleezza Rice of the National Security Council stated in Chicago this week.

"Yet the possibility remained that he might use his weapons of mass destruction or that terrorists might acquire such weapons from his regime, to mount a future attack far beyond the scale of 9/11. The terrible prospect could not be ignored or wished away."

The world is undoubtedly a better place for Saddam's removal from power. Bush and Blair had valid grounds for ousting him, because he was a murderous tyrant, but they grossly overstated their grounds.

He was not the major threat to world peace that they depicted. Despite their emotional rhetoric about his control of weapons of mass destruction, no evidence of such weapons has yet been found.

The Bush administration may have fooled some people but it would do well to heed the words of Abraham Lincoln, who warned that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Maybe some Americans think that the outrages of 9/11 justified the war on Iraq, but some of their country's strongest allies are obviously developing grave, and dangerous, reservations.

This is reflected not only in Blair's standing in the British public opinion polls, but also in some recent polls in Germany, which has developed into one of the strongest democracies in the world and a staunch supporter of the United States.

Although the Germans repeatedly refused to allow their troops to be used on foreign soil, Berlin actually sent soldiers to help American forces in Afghanistan.

Thus the German government was certainly not anti-Bush, but the current bestselling book in Germany is by a former German cabinet minister, Andreas von Bülow, who contends that the United States staged the 9/11 attacks to justify going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A recent public opinion poll found that one in five Germans believe that the US government actually ordered the 9/11 attacks.

The suggestion that Bush and company were responsible for the assault on the twin towers is absurd, but 20% of the German people believe it.

If that many Germans believe it, how many other people will believe such stories even more readily. Bestselling books have also been published in Spain, Italy, and France, contending that the United States is hiding the truth in relation to 9/11.

America's reputation in the world is clearly suffering, but then some of the Americans obviously perceive the danger. Will the US Supreme Court?