August, 2004

While brave Americans were struggling with murderous, hijacking fanatics on aircraft aimed at the White House, George Bush was reading My Pet Goat in Florida. Another President would have left the schoolroom and quickly on his mobile phone ordered fighter planes aloft to protect America's imperilled big cities, but he continued his kindergarten reading; better to 'show calm', he said later, better to lose the White House than show unseemly concern. And the brave Americans fought, and saved the White House, and died in flames in a field in Pennsylvania. And he, for seven minutes, kept reading.

And he's running for office as the Great Protector now. Trust me, he is saying, to defeat the terrorists, I'm on the case, I know what needs to be done. A hundred faceless foreigners cross the Rio Grande in a night sometimes, a hundred miles of Oregon coast is mostly unpatrolled, ten thousand containers which might conceal an A-bomb enter New York harbour every week, but you have to trust him, he's making America safe. He's killing people every day and some of them might be terrorists. If he keeps on killing people he'll eventually 'decapitate' their leadership and so ensure Iraqi freedom, a democratic Middle East, a safer world. Trust him. He knows what he's doing. It's going to happen. Real soon.

In my next book The Myth of Competence I plan to discuss this fantastic notion of 'security'. We can be secure from terror, it seems, without searching every car that goes into the harbour tunnel, without searching every shoulder bag that goes into the Opera House, without patrolling round the clock every reservoir and power station, without strip-searching every passenger on every suburban train. How can this be so? It can't. And if this is the case, why spend billions pretending it makes a difference?

For terrorism is not an ideology or a religious faith, but a method of waging war. And war in the end is a violent form of politics. And political questions are always answered after political discussion. Bombing towns full of women and children is not, as a rule, an answer to anything; unless, of course, as in Hiroshima, the bombs employed are very, very big. So security by force of arms is pretty much a foolish dream. The money the West spends on it in a week could buy a luxury flat in Tel Aviv for each and every uprooted Israeli settler. The money spent on it in a month could educate to university post-graduate level every Palestinian. The month spent on it in six months could halve AIDS deaths in Africa for fifty years. The money spent on it in a year (about three hundred billion) could cancel Third World debt by Christmas.

So why do we prefer killing people, and wasting, year after year, a lot of money on aeroplanes and bombs when we could solve most things by spending it wisely? I don't think any of us does, really; except, of course, for a few CEOs of Halliburton, Enron, Boeing and so on and their boards of directors and their hirelings in the White House. Most of the rest of us have got over all that, as the peace demonstrations before the present war -- the one in London the largest gathering of humans in world history -- persuasively showed.

Why it happens, I think, is because Dick Cheney and men like him have lazy minds. They're accustomed to making billions by selling to governments weapons they will rarely use, and they're accustomed to starting a war, or making war noises, now and then to showcase their products to future customers. There's no profit, for Halliburton, in peaceful negotiations. No profit in roadmaps that work. There's no wrecked country to rebuild. There's no arsenals to replenish. There's no oil industry to 'service'. No army to feed.

I guess what I mean (and what Michael Moore eventually means) is that security is not just a myth, it's also a racket. None of us can be completely safe until we live in a much more merciful, prosperous world. And we'll never live in that kind of world because security costs so much. And so the cities burn. That's where the money is. And the greedy prefer it that way.

© Bob Ellis