Bush
-- "Take Your Time"
By Ralph Nader
23 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Open letter to President
George W. Bush:
The widespread destruction
of a defenseless Lebanon -- its civilians, its life-sustaining public
services, its environment -- is a grim and indelible testament to your
consummate cruelty and ignorance. Nearly two weeks ago when your tardy
Secretary of State met with the Israeli Prime Minister, the message
she carried was summarized in a large headline across page one of an
Israeli newspaper, "TAKE YOUR TIME."
Yes, take your time, says
George W. Bush, pulverizing fleeing refugees in cars full of families,
bombing apartment buildings, hospitals and the poor huddled in large
south Beirut slums.
Take your time, says George
W. Bush, in destroying bridges, roads, gasoline stations, airports,
seaports, wheat silos, vehicles with medical supplies, clearly marked
ambulances taking the wounded to clinics, even a milk factory .
Take your time, says George
W. Bush, while shelters are demolished with bodies of little children
together with their mothers and fathers buried in the rubble.
Take your time, says George
W. Bush, while the number of fleeing refugees nears one million Lebanese,
many exposed to hunger, disease, lack of potable water and medicines.
All this in a country friendly to the United States, which played by
your rules, protested the Syrian army back into Syria and was trying
democratically to put itself together.
Take your time, says George
W. Bush, while he speeds more supplies of precision missiles containing
deadly anti-personnel cluster bombs which will claim the lives of innocent
children for years into the future. The phosphorous bombs laying waste
to fields growing crops and horribly burning innocents come from the
U.S.A. under your direction.
Do you think the taxpayers
of America would approve of such shipped weapons were they ever asked?
Are there words in the English
language suitable for the impeachable serial war crimes you are intimately
involved in committing not only in Iraq but also now through your encouragement
and supplying of the once again invading Israeli government?
Are there words to describe
your strategic stupidity which will further increase opposition and
peril to the United States around the world and especially in the Middle
East? Your own Generals and former CIA Director, Porter Goss, among
others in your Administration, have declared that your occupation of
Iraq is a magnet attracting the recruiting and training of more and
more "terrorists" from Iraq and other countries. And so now
this will be the case in Lebanon. All this is a growing "blowback,"
to use the CIA word for a boomeranging foreign policy, that is endangering
the security of the United States.
The calibrated Israeli terror
bombing of Lebanon comes in three stages. With its electronic pinpoint
precision bombing and artillery, the Israeli government goes after civilians,
their homes, cities, towns and villages.
Then after telling some to abandon their neighborhoods, it cuts population
centers off from each other by destroying transportation facilities
into and inside Lebanon, making both refugee flight and delivery of
emergency relief efforts either impossible or very difficult. Then its
planes, tanks and artillery endanger or destroy what food, water and
relief efforts manage to get through to the injured and dying. Warehouse
food supplies are incinerated. About four hundred small fishing boats
north of Beirut on the oil-polluted coastline were demolished as well.
All the above mayhem and
much more have been reported in the U.S., European, Lebanese and Israeli
media. The bulk of the fatalities in Lebanon have been civilians. The
bulk of the fatalities on the Israeli side have been soldiers. Very
fortunately for the Israelis, the Hezbollah rockets are very inaccurate,
the vast majority falling harmlessly. Unfortunately for the Lebanese,
the precision American armaments of the Israelis are very accurate,
which serves to account for why the total casualties and physical destruction
are 100 times greater in Lebanon than in Israel.
Most of these accurate munitions
come from your decision to send them. Knowing they will be used for
offensive purposes, including the lethal demolition of a long-established
UN compound, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act which you have
sworn to uphold, places the responsibility of being a domestic law breaker
squarely on your shoulders.
There is another law that
is not being enforced -- the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act of 1996 sponsored
by then Republican Senator Robert Dole. Foreign aid is supposed to be
cut off to any nation that obstructs the provision of humanitarian aid
to another country. As one example, press reports that two tankers,
each with 30,000 tons of diesel fuel critical for operating Lebanese
hospitals and water pumping stations, are idling in Cyprus from fear
of the totally dominant Israeli navy and air force.
There are only a few days
left of fuel in Lebanon, which is heading for a larger wave of secondary
casualties. They and other critical suppliers need safe passage which
the U.S. Navy in the area can readily provide, should it receive orders
from the Commander in Chief.
You heard high Israeli officials
accurately say on the day the massive bombing of Lebanon began, followed
not preceded by Hezbollah rockets, that "nothing in Lebanon is
safe." That huge over-reaction to the recent Hezbollah border raid,
in addition to many more previous air, sea and land border violations
by the Israeli government, certainly put you on public notice.
Since you view yourself as
a reborn Christian, and since you have the power to stop the Israeli
state terror assaults on Lebanon, you may wish to reflect on Leviticus
19:16 "Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor."
Lebanon was a friendly country to you and you have stood by not just
idly, but willfully aiding and abetting its devastation.