An elderly priest on his deathbed in a Washington hospital asked a nurse to come closer, and told her that his wish is for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to visit him before he dies. The nurse promised him to take his request to the President and Vice President. When the request got to them, Cheney told Bush that sitting at the deathbed of a priest might help improve their image to the people, and so decided to visit him. When they were shown to his room, where they sat at his bedside, he held both their hands, and said that he has always tried to live by the guidance of Jesus Christ. Thus, since he was on the verge of dying, he wished to die between two thieves, as Christ did, according to the account of the New Testament of the Bible! I received this joke from a friend through the internet, when George W. Bush was still in office; what brought me back to it was the occasion of the publication of Bush's memoirs, Decision Points. For the first time in my life, I decided to review a book that I have not and will not read, although I searched for it on Amazon – where I have an old subscription – and found that the price of the book had been reduced from 25 pounds to 15 pounds (or a 40 percent discount as the website said). I will not buy the book even if it were to be sold at ten or five pounds, since the author receives a percentage of the sale price, and I do not want to give George W. Bush money, not even a dollar or a quarter. If only he were a thief as in the priest's anecdote. Instead, he is a war criminal with the blood of one million Arabs and Muslims on his hands or more, according to The Lancet, the American medical journal, the John Hopkins University, and also John Tirman, Executive Director of Center for International at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He literally said, “The evidence, then, is rather clear and compelling: Something like 700,000 or more Iraqis have been killed either through direct or “structural” violence in the period since the U.S. invaded more than seven years ago. The number could easily be as high as a million (casualties). Most were killed by other Iraqis, or the deplorable conditions that wars wreak and persist in Iraq.” George W. Bush is as insolent as he is stupid and ignorant. His memoirs, which I read more material about them than their actual size, blame Saddam Hussein for the death of innocent Iraqis. How? Bush said in his memoirs that there was only one person who had the ability to prevent the war, but that he (Saddam Hussein) chose not to use it. I remember that the regime of Saddam Hussein had presented the United Nations with a report falling in thousands of pages to prove that it abandoned its nuclear program, and I remember that the press at the time called it “the mother of all reports” because of its sheer size. However, the Bush administration opted to accept falsified evidence, and to suppress intelligence information that deny Iraq had a nuclear program or ties with al-Qaeda which justify the war. Today, there is a thousand damning evidence of the crime committed by the Bush administration. However, the incumbent administration of Barack Obama chose in its cowardice to look forward and ended up paying the price in the elections, when the war criminals – the advocates of an American empire and the Likudnik neocons – blamed the Obama administration for their losing war and the bankruptcy of the U.S treasury that unleashed a global financial crisis. George W. Bush still says that he is reassured of his role in history, and all I can say here is, “lucky are those who have some measure of intellect”! I also want to remind the reader of Bush's doctrine, which did not distinguish terrorists from the countries where they live, making the killing of civilians justified. The Bush doctrine also stipulated that threats should be confronted by striking preemptively, and on the basis of suspicion alone. According to this principle, which clearly violates international law, Bush pursued a policy of regime change in dictatorial countries in the Middle East, to transform them into democratic states with free market economies (at which point Halliburton and Dick Cheney would step in to grab the spoils). However, what really happened was that not one single regime collapsed in the Middle East following the invasion of Iraq. On the contrary, dictatorship was further empowered. The United States then lost its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the War on Terror. The Bush administration was involved in torture against prisoners, and the former president continues to defend the practice of water boarding. And of course, when his administration did not practice torture directly, it sent prisoners to Middle Eastern countries to be tortured on its behalf. I began with an anecdote and will end with one, from Bush's memoirs this time. He said that after graduating from university, he decided to spend ten years experimenting without bounds. What this means is that George W. Bush spent a decade of boozing and doing drugs in Texas, before sobering up to become President and pursue a policy that no one else is able to pursue unless he has not yet sobered up from alcohol and drugs up to this day. [email protected]
