Friday 30 August 2002

The Coming Firestorm

Bush's Rhetoric Sounds Like the Crazed Videotapes of Osama bin Laden
by Robert Fisk

So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasized to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in Berlin - his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, "Hitler" being the pathetic Arafat - have we had to listen to claptrap like this. But the fact that we Europeans had to do so in the Bundestag on Thursday - and, for the most part, in respectful silence - was extraordinary.

I'm reminded of the Israeli columnist who, tired of the wearying invocation of the Second World War to justify yet more Israeli brutality, began an article with the words: "Mr Prime Minister, Hitler is dead." Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war that was fought and won before most of us were born? Do we have to live forever with living, diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or Roosevelt? "He's a dictator who gassed his own people," Mr Bush reminded us for the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time, was on Saddam's side.

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