Marketing war

By Salama A Salama

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The mask is falling little by little. The devious ways that the US employed to invade Iraq are slowly coming to light. Democratic Congressmen and the US media are again questioning the way George W Bush has managed the war on Iraq. The US legal system is looking into the political crimes perpetrated by a gang of presidential advisers, by people who were interested in marketing this war at any price, people who did everything to persuade the congress and US allies that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and chemical weapons.

It is one of the blessings of democracy that errors by senior officials do not get forgotten. Sooner or later, someone has to pay. As the popularity of President Bush plummets over the quagmire in Iraq, some of his senior advisers are being brought to account over the leak of the identity of a CIA agent. White House officials stand accused of leaking an agent's identity as a way of punishing her husband, who was an outspoken critic of the war. Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, is at the centre of the scandal.

Much will be written about this mysterious phase in the history of the Bush administration. The administration has used dirty tricks to hurt its political opponents, misinform public opinion, and pressure friendly governments. Libby and Karl Rove are unlikely to survive the investigation being conducted by special prosecutor Patrick J Fitzgerald, the same man who put Omar Abdel-Rahman behind bars.

The problem facing President Bush in his second term is that the neo- conservatives who persuaded him to go to war in Iraq -- allegedly to bring democracy to the Middle East though actually to promote Israel's interests -- have failed to get the job done. After a war in which some 100,000 Iraqis and 2,000 US troops perished, US forces are bogged down with no exit in sight, the Middle East is miles away from democracy, and the Palestinian state remains a mirage.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who used to vie with Bush and Sharon in supporting the war on Iraq, now claims that he had often advised the US president not to embark on that military adventure. In Italy, another scandal is emerging in connection with the war on Iraq. The Italian intelligence chief is being investigated over false information he passed on to the US and the UK about Iraq's alleged purchase of uranium from Niger.

In the US, scandals don't come out all at once. They get serialised like soap operas, with the climax occurring near the end of the presidential term. This is what happened with Nixon and Clinton in the past. Regimes that have aided and abetted the Bush administration in its illegal activities should start trembling now that the world is getting to know more about torture that was conducted at illegal detention centres in East Europe, including Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. The CIA is said to have been supervising and financing such centres, as it is against US law to have such facilities at home. Arab countries are said to have been involved in similar operations. Arab intelligence services -- including those of Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia -- are said to have taken custody of some of the suspects in question.

This scandal is not going to go away. The EU has been asking member countries to address such claims and investigate related human rights violations. One cannot rule out that some Arab countries may eventually be implicated. In the US -- a country we love to criticise in this region -- those who commit crimes end up punished, however belatedly. In our part of the world, crimes still go unpunished, accountability nothing but a myth.