If Nero was a madman, what can we say of Bush?

Home News Tribune Online 05/8/07

HASSAN
MAHMOUD

Tradition has it that Nero set Rome on fire and was fiddling while it burned. A naive President Bush, duped by his handlers, ignited a fiery war in Iraq that is consuming that country along with the lives of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. None of this counts the $2 trillion the war might cost our treasury before it comes to an end.

One might think that this president would show sensitivity and sorrow for the loss of lives of these young people that he dispatched into har'ms way. Sadly, it doesn't look that way. In May 2004, during the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, Bush shamelessly made a joke about the search for weapons of mass destruction. Tactlessly, he said "Nope, no weapon over there . . . maybe under here?"

Was he fiddling in his own way? Did he think at that moment about the killed or the feelings of the injured soldiers' families, or was he just dismissing their sacrifice with a joke?

Recently, on April 25, the day after the news of the killing of nine American soldiers in Iraq, the first lady said that nobody feels the sorrow of watching the casualties of the war more than she and the president. However, Mr. Bush was shown on television the same day dancing unreservedly to music by an African band in the White House.

The horrible shooting and murder of 32 students and faculty members in Virginia Tech is heart-wrenching and most despicable, and all of us mourn for that. It was right for the president to attend the memorial service for the victims and to order the lowering of the flag as a sign of respect. He attended the occasion in the presence of the victims' families. One wonders why this treatment was not afforded to the thousands of the soldiers killed in Iraq, where the president never attended any of their funerals or even allowed their caskets or funerals to be shown in the media.

Cynically, Bush cites the families' privacy. But he doesn't want to evoke the people's emotions, which would turn them against the war. Most of our dead soldiers are of the same age of the Virginia Tech victims and many intended to go to college.

Another fiddler is a Bush's minion, albeit a main Iraq war architect, Paul Wolfowitz, whose efforts in pushing for the Iraq war contributed to the loss of thousands of lives. He was rewarded by the appointment to the presidency of the World Bank after he left the Pentagon in 2005, ostensibly to fight corruption in the bank. It turned out that he was having a romantic relationship with one of the bank's employees. Immediately after his appointment he increased her salary from $132,666 to $195,590 and detailed her to the State Department to hide his cronyism. It was also revealed that when he was still under secretary of defense a defense contractor contracted this woman to go on a hefty paid mission to Iraq despite the bank's rules that prohibit its employees from participating in any work in a country under foreign occupation.

The question becomes when are we going to have an independent foreign policy in the Middle East that serves only our interests and does not create enemies who would turn into fanatic terrorists?

"Be Counted" columnist Hassan Mahmoud is a resident of Westfield.