A Pigeon Among the Cats by John Maxwell - Jamaica Observer

Bush, McClellan, Cuba


A Pigeon Among the Cats
COMMON SENSE
JOHN MAXWELL
Sunday, June 01, 2008

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20080531T030000-0500_136232_OBS_
A_PIGEON_AMONG_THE_CATS.asp

When people leave cults they often turn against their former beliefs with
great vehemence. Arthur Koestler's anthology The God that Failed is the
perfect exposition of this syndrome.

Jamaican communists of the 1970s are now among the intellectual leaders of
free market theology here. The volte face of such people usually perplexes
their friends as much as or more than they baffle their enemies. The people
who have fled from the polygamist Mormon sect, the Fundamentalist Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), are as exotic to those they left
behind as if they had come from another solar system.

People like me, who have been so drearily consistent for so long, have taken
lots of flak for, among other things, our critique of George Bush even
before he was anointed president of the US. Millions of ordinary citizens in
countries round the world opposed the looming war in Iraq and demonstrated
against it. Then, the New York Times declared world public opinion to be the
new second superpower. Alas, they paid us no further attention.

I will never forget our public debate - the Hon Don Mills and I versus the
US chargé d'affaires just before the invasion. We knew the "evidence" was
invented and that the war was unjustified and wrong. For that we were
excoriated. We have now been joined by President Bush's former press
secretary who has just published his memoirs detailing how the presidency
went off the rails.

Scott McClellan was a faithful servant who seemed to be a clumsy and inept
spokesman for the administration when he stalwartly defended Bush and
deflected US media stars in their febrile impersonations of journalists.

Now he is being described as a traitor.

McClellan's book has become a political bombshell even before it comes
officially onto the market tomorrow, provoking stunned, disbelieving
reactions from his former associates.

Some of us, who have long considered the Bush administration to be a
political cult, may be better able understand what has happened.
McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, says he can't reconcile the
McClellan of the book with the McClellan who was paid to defend Bush.
"There is something about the book that just doesn't make any sense."

Fleischer said McClellan had been an "always reliable, solid deputy" during
his own White House tenure, but "not once did Scott approach me - privately
or publicly - to discuss any misgivings he had about the war in Iraq or the
manner in which the White House made the case for war."

The president's current spokeswoman said Wednesday - "For those of us who
fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are
puzzled," Dana Perino said in a statement. "It is sad. This is not the Scott
we knew."

McClellan's former associates can't understand him because they think he has
simply and unreasonably changed his mind or gone mad. What has changed is
his belief system. As they say in the Bible, the scales have fallen from his
eyes. His conscience has sprung rudely into exuberant life.

As press secretary, McClellan was speaking the truth as he received it in
the White House. Those who blame him for not making his misgivings known
then, while he was doing the job, miss the point entirely; he had no
objections then. He was still a card-carrying member of the cult - a true
believer.

Scott McClellan has literally been born again, as the cultists say. Neither
he nor his critics realise that when he left the White House he was, unknown
even to himself, heading down the Damascus road. He is no longer the man
they knew.

And what pleases me inordinately is that he now fully justifies my
contention, derided at the time, that US journalists were acting as Judas
goats to the American people. As Katy Couric (then NBC now CBS) and Jessica
Yellin (CNN) have now courageously admitted, journalists submitted to
pressure from the media owners to join the team, not to rock the boat but to
deliver a nice little war.

I'm sorry I have to say it again, but I told you so at the time.

Return of the Floating Barracoons?

Last Monday, May 26, was the 45th anniversary of Cuba's first venture into
what it calls its 'internationalism'. On that date in 1963 Cuba dispatched a
medical brigade to Algeria, then still bleeding from a successful but
incredibly bloody war of independence against France.

Fortuitously on the same date in 2008, a consignment of 4.5 tons of serum,
medicines and sanitary materials donated by Cuba arrived in the
earthquake-ravaged capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan to help some
of those injured in the May 12 earthquake.

In the 45 years between those events, the Cuban people have sent abroad as
many health workers as US troops in Iraq - 140,000 of them - to more than
100 foreign countries, some considerably richer than Cuba but all in need of
help. They range from Nicaragua to Pakistan, Venezuela to Vietnam, Haiti and
Jamaica to Angola and Bolivia. There are more than 10,000 Cubans in
Venezuela: teachers, doctors and nurses. In Haiti they were helping the
Haitians establish a medical school before they were rudely interrupted by
the US Marines - arriving in aid of terrorists and drug-dealers who called
themselves Freedom Fighters - coming to kidnap the democratically elected
president of Haiti.

The Cubans are also hosts to more than 10,000 young foreigners in Cuban
institutions learning everything from building construction to ophthalmology
and organic farming.

The Cubans have achieved these and other advances despite having been for
half a century the target of unremitting hostility from the world's only
superpower.

I happened to be in Cuba on the very day in 1960 when the US - having
already sponsored various outrages designed to destroy the Cuban revolution
- declared an embargo against them, an Act of War in international law.

The casus belli was Cuba's decision to nationalise with compensation, the
oil refineries, the sugar refineries and the enormous plantations owned by
US corporations. If it were true that the US hostility was based on its
desire to promote human rights in Cuba there is no way the Americans could
have simultaneously protected and promoted such bloodthirsty tyrants and
terrorists as the Duvaliers (Haiti), Stroessner (Paraguay), Somoza
(Nicaragua), Rios Montt (Guatemala) Mobutu (Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola),
the Cuban terrorists Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch and Santiago Alvarez, and
the apartheid regime in South Africa.

And, if human rights were the motive, there would not now be five Cubans in
American jails whose only crime was to try to warn the US against the
activities of exiled Cuban terrorists in Miami. Nor would there now be
living free in Miami notorious Cuban terrorists including those who blew up
a Cuban airliner en route from Barbados to Jamaica in 1976, killing nearly
100 young people. As Mr Bush has said, those who harbour terrorists are
themselves terrorists.

These perverted policies have allowed the US to wreak billions of dollars
worth of damage on the Cuban economy and to kill or maim thousands of
Cubans.

The Cubans have within the last two weeks exposed new US mischief against
their country. This involves official US behaviour which is illegal in
international law, in US law and in Cuban law. Briefly, the Cubans have
submitted proof that the chief American diplomat in Cuba has acted as a
banker and conduit for money and other contraband, between convicted
terrorist Santiago Alvarez in Miami and so-called human rights activists in
Cuba. He also intervened with a federal judge to secure a lighter sentence
for Alvarez, then awaiting sentencing in Miami.

One sinister collateral disclosure is that there is or was a plan to create
some provocation in Cuba, backed up by American ships parked offshore
various Cuban ports. I can imagine that if some agency were able to provoke
some hysterical panic among Cubans, the Americans would no doubt be willing
to undertake a 'humanitarian' intervention by the US navy with ships
offshore to rescue Cubans 'fleeing' their country.

It is a plan which, if applied in Jamaica, would depopulate the country
within hours. Remember the 'Russian ships' panic of 1962?

Such a plan to provoke a Cuban exodus a la Mariel would, of course, require
the assistance of the Jamaican government to allow our ports to be used as
temporary staging posts, which may be why it is a good thing that Mr Golding
has not yet been able to visit Mr Bush.

Of course, such a scenario is unthinkable. The Bush administration is much
too scrupulous to try to destabilise the Cuban government. And George Bush,
I am certain, is perfectly content to allow the Revolution to survive its
tenth American President.

He has no taste for defeat.