Time for Bush to follow in fallen buddies’ footsteps

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http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=474570

Time for Bush to follow in fallen buddies’ footsteps

27 May 2007
Mohau Pheko



The funereal atmosphere surrounding the White House is palpable. It’s been bad news all around for George W Bush recently, what with the demise of allies UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, theocon Jerry Falwell and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz.

A reporter who must have been wondering why a prime minister who had never lost an election was being dumped asked Bush if he was responsible for Blair’s departure from office. Bush responded: “Could be ... … I don’t know.” A BBC political analyst made the salient point that if the US had a parliamentary system, Bush would have lost a vote of confidence and had to hand in his resignation about the same time as Blair stepped down.

There were two movements that came together in an alliance that provided the brains and the brawn behind Bush: the Bible Belt conservatives led by Falwell, who threw their weight behind “democratising” the Islamic Middle East in the “war on terror”, and Wolfowitz, described as the arrogant, narcissistic former Pentagon official who made a misleading case for war in Iraq.

As then Deputy Secretary of Defence, Wolfowitz supported a secret internal Pentagon effort to manipulate and hype intelligence that supported the case for war. He claimed Iraqis would hail US troops as liberators, and he was awarded with a medal and a plum job by the Bush administration.

Falwell, the braying fundamentalist televangelist, built a formidable coalition of the Christian Right that provided the brawn that gave Bush two presidential victories. But now he is dead and the government sustained by his faithful followers is looking like a corpse itself.

Wolfowitz, described as the cerebral neocon, the man Bush refers to as “Wolfie”, the self- appointed apostle of “good governance”, has left many sniggering about his downfall, given that it was caused by his own act of corruption and nepotism to benefit his affair with a self-confessed secular Muslim Arab feminist with a passion for fostering democracy in the Middle East.

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