Melville Cooke

As tough as you think you are

We're living in a small world

- Capleton, 'Small World'

George W. Bush's world has suddenly got very, very small. For he of the vapid, yet vicious smile and somewhat vacant, "I can see this but you all can't, so I must be a visionary" gaze has gone from "you are either with us or against us" to having a Democratic (if not democratically) controlled House and Senate in almost exactly five years.

And, more importantly, the result is an indication that the U.S. public's approval for the foray of him and fellow maniacs of empire, including Britain, into Iraq has reached somewhere close to where the rest of the world was on February 15, 2003. That was when what was listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest protests ever in history took place ahead of the March 19, 2003, invasion.

They did not listen, but they have certainly felt. For while it was the American public which has figuratively changed the gung-ho chant of 'U.S.A., U.S.A.' which applies equally to basketball and wholesale slaughter and which Bush gloried in at the World Trade Centre site in 2001, to 'go away, go away,' it was the Iraqis who have voted.

It was a case of ballot by the bullet, not directly as happened in Jamaica in 1980, but by proxy.

The people in Iraq who are labelled insurgents by an American press that has, on this matter, been as independent as Jamaica's dons are of the hierarchy of the respective political parties, are the ones who have made their voices heard in a world made much smaller by the telecommunications which have carried the news of dead American soldiers back home where it hurt as effectively as they spread lies about weapons of mass destruction.

Nice, clean kill

You see, the American public does not mind a nice, clean kill, just as we in Jamaica on the other side of Half-Way Tree can live with the police taking care of matters in very questionable (to put it mildly) ways, as long as the matter (brain as well as the case) is disposed of quickly. So the 1983 invasion of Grenada had no repercussions for Ronald Reagan. The same went for the invasion of Panama in 1989, with an estimated 3,000 civillian casualties (these murders are always estimated, as invading armies do not really count the dead) was no problem at all for George Bush the bigger and brighter.

The invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the World Trade Centre attacks was over quickly and it was on to Baghdad, Iraq, being officially occupied in early April. Then it should have all been over, the American public cheering 'U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.' as the boys were welcomed with roses, tears and virgins and it would have been off to Tehran or Damascus or anywhere except Beijing, Pyongyang and such places where there would actually be a military resistance.

But some people in Iraq had very different ideas and George Bush's May 1, 2003 speech to the backdrop of 'Mission Accomplished' has been followed by over 2,300 U.S. 'hostile fatalities.' And the body count continues, much, much more of Iraqi civilians than U.S. military personnel. And as the U.S. death count goes up, so have the votes for Bush and co-empire builders gone down.

I knew that it would be a long haul for the U.S. (there is no coalition) in Iraq very soon after the occupation began, when I read about a 'cart-by' rocket attack in which two men driving donkey-driven carts stopped outside their target, took the weapons from the carts, fired, replaced them and clip-clopped away. Slowly.

Those people, in Jamaican terminology, 'naa skin teet.'

The walls of the Oval Office must feel that bit closer these days. But then, Bush is dumb enough not to realise that the noose earmarked for Saddam Hussein is made from the same rope that is closing around his political neck. Which will not snap, as has Rumsfeld's, as he would have gone anyway, but then there is the party itself.

Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.