Brian Rudman: It's like listening to a replay of the Vietnam era

It was with some relief - and a pang of guilt - that I heard that a small group of Aucklanders had gathered at the Devonport naval base to protest against the departure of the frigate Te Mana to the Gulf. In less sedentary days I would have joined them.

It's also heartening that Prime Minister Helen Clark continues to hold out against strong United States pressure to have us join in its unilateral holy war against Saddam Hussein. For all our sakes, let's hope she doesn't weaken.

There was a revealing insight into Washington's diplomatic bullying a couple of weeks back when Trade Minister Jim Sutton talked of the Americans' "huge campaign of arm-twisting" to get New Zealand on side. The words were hardly out of his mouth than he was apologising for his "poor choice of words". He'd been sat on from a great height.

Helen Clark didn't want to provoke President Bush unnecessarily. In his and his Administration's present frame of mind, a wise precaution.

Any war leader who claims to be doing God's work is to be feared indeed. Osama bin Laden uses the same war cry, and look at the misery and havoc he has wreaked in the name of Allah.

In Wednesday's State of the Nation address, it was President Bush's turn. "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity."

Best-selling novelist John le Carre cuts to the quick in an article in the Times, London, where he bluntly declares the United States has gone mad.

"America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War."

Le Carre wonders at how "Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein" and labels it "one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history". A poll, he says, has one in two Americans now believing Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.

There are those who say President Bush's main motivation is to get his hands on Iraq's oil. There is also said to be a bit of utu involved. In 1993 there was an attempt to assassinate his father - the first President George Bush - while he was making a victory tour of Kuwait after the Gulf War. The present President Bush is convinced that Saddam was behind this attempt to blow up his daddy.

Whatever the reasoning, it's the way these imperial adventures get cloaked in a veneer of religious respectability that is most frightening. Here's the President at it in his speech on Wednesday: "As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling as a blessed country is to make this world better."

I learned my skills as a street demonstrator during one of the US' earlier mad wars to make the world safer and better.

With God on their side, they were merrily bombing half of Indo-China "back to the Stone Age", to use the words of one of the warrior Presidents in an attempt to make the people safer and happier. It was a grotesque exercise and it failed.

Now they're at it again.

In Monday's Herald there was a chilling account of American war plans. The idea is to "shock and awe" by unleashing 300 to 400 cruise missiles a day to soften Iraq up. This, goes the theory, would destroy the "enemy's will to fight".

I remember sitting in a bar in Vientiane, Laos, on the banks of the Mekong River, in 1970, listening to wave after wave of American bombers flying from their Thailand bases to drop bombs and napalm on innocent Cambodians.

On the radio you could hear President Nixon claiming it wasn't happening. Just the noise of them flying overhead was enough to scare the hell out of me.

But like the cruise missiles about to be unleashed on Baghdad, they did a lot more than the psychological damage the war planners talk about. They killed and maimed and destroyed anyone and anything in their path.

The only justification President Bush can come up with for his Iraq adventure is that he's on a holy crusade to bring American democracy to the Middle East and save the world from terrorism.

Substitute Indochina for the Middle East and communism for terrorism, and we could be listening to a replay of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon in full flight.

Near on 40 years ago, New Zealand politicians, to our shame, joined the United States in its unholy crusade in Vietnam.

Helen Clark, a dedicated internationalist with faith in the collective security ideals of the United Nations, is showing more backbone this time round. But the pressure from the US and its musket-carriers, Australia and Britain, must be intense.

If you agree with her stance, now would be a good time to let her know she's not alone.

Herald feature: Iraq

January 30, 2003:
George Bush's State of the Union speech

January 28, 2003: