General Suharto, Indonesia's former dictator, has died at the age of 86. He was, for many years, Ottawa's man in Jakarta.
Of course, he was also Washington's man in Jakarta. In many ways, he was similar to Washington's pre-1990 man in Baghdad. For most of their thuggish careers, he and Saddam Hussein had U.S. support, among other things, in common. Both consolidated their power after participating in bloody purges of communists and radical nationalists. Saddam purged the Left from Iraq's Ba'ath Party; Suharto took the helm after helping purge the Left from the Indonesian archipelago – the 1965 coup that overthrew the nationalist government of Sukarno was followed by the murder by death squads of up to a million activists, workers and peasants.
Both Saddam and Suharto viciously repressed political opponents and ethnic minorities; both accumulated great personal wealth and handed down top security and economic positions to their children; both illegally annexed small neighbouring states: Kuwait in 1990 and East Timor in 1975, respectively.
While the 1991 Gulf War was waged in the name of liberating Kuwait (and restoring a monarchy that denied women the right to vote), the massacre of civilians later that year in East Timor's capital, Dili, elicited no response from western media and no outcry from western politicians. During the two and a half decades of Indonesian occupation of East Timor, it is estimated that 200 000 people were killed. Suharto's regime also massacred thousands in other oppressed regions, such as Aceh and West Papua.
For all their similarities, then, the politics of empire intervened and led Saddam and Suharto to very different ends. The "butcher of Baghdad" was hanged in a rushed execution, while the butcher of Dili died surrounded by the best medical attention money could buy.
In Canada, it's worth remembering the shameful role with respect to Suharto's regime played by the Liberal Party, which claims to uphold a humanitarian tradition in its foreign policy.
Back in the 1990s, the strongman in Jakarta was respectfully referred to in our mainstream media as President Suharto. He was touted as a modernizer, a unifier, and an important ally in Canada's quest to expand trade and investment in Southeast Asia.
Canada sold weapons to the dictatorship, which then Liberal Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific Raymond Chan justified on the absurd grounds that they were defensive weapons only.
And so it was that in 1997, when Vancouver hosted the APEC summit, Jean Chretien's Liberal government rolled out the red carpet for the dictator, and dished out the pepper spray and riot squads on the activists who worked to expose Suharto's gross human rights violations and Canada's complicity.
At the University of British Columbia, where one of the main gatherings of the heads of state was held, a security fence was erected, "preemptive" arrests were made against protest organizers like Jaggi Singh, and of course pepper spray was used liberally. According to a public inquiry held after the APEC protests, in the lead up to the summit Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy had debased his office to the point of apologizing to the Indonesian authorities for a Suharto "Wanted" poster that had proliferated around town.
Seeing this spectacle up close as an undergraduate provided me with an intense and valuable learning experience about the true nature of politics. Back in the quaint days before the "war on terror," our rights to freedom of speech, assembly and dissent were quickly – automatically, really, with the justifications made up on the fly – subordinated to the needs of capital.
All the high-sounding rhetoric of human rights from the likes of Axworthy disappeared in an instant when it came to appeasing a key business partner. Subsequent Liberal foreign affairs ministers, such as Bill Graham and Pierre Pettigrew, would up the ante from complicity to outright aggression when, for instance, Canada played a key role in overthrowing Haiti's democratic government in 2004.
It's worth noting too that, back in the 1990s, it was initially only very small networks of activists on the Left who worked to bring the plight of East Timor to the public's attention in Canada. It was a tiny nation, half of an island, with a Roman Catholic majority that was occupied by the world's most populous Muslim country. Those standing up for self-determination for Palestine and Iraq today, against whom pro-war ideologues trot out Islamophobia and "clash of civilizations" nonsense, were the same people agitating for the freedom of the Timorese, who happened to be a predominantly Christian people.
At the time, the East Timor Alert Network (ETAN), with the help of the odd outspoken MP such as the NDP's Svend Robinson, did the heavy lifting to expose the Liberals' complicity with Suharto's crimes.
A statement on ETAN's U.S. sister group's website sums things up eloquently:
"Indonesia's former dictator General Suharto has died in bed and not in jail, escaping justice for his numerous crimes in East Timor and throughout the Indonesian archipelago…"
"To overcome Suharto's legacy and to uphold basic international human rights and legal principles, those who executed, aided and abetted, and benefited from his criminal orders must be held accountable."
We can be sure that current Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier and his Conservative colleagues will make some statements on Suharto's death parroting whatever comes out of Washington.
But I'd really like to hear from the likes of Chretien and Axworthy. What do they have to say for themselves and what do they have to say now about the dictator that they aided, abetted, and protected from protest?
Derrick O'Keefe is the editor of rabble.ca.
Showing posts with label world politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label world politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Invisible War
By Amy Goodman
Source: truthdig
It’s the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have died in the past decade, yet it goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in the United States. The conflict is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Central Africa. At its heart are the natural resources found in Congo and multinational corporations that extract them. The prospects for peace have slightly improved: A peace accord was just signed in Congo’s eastern Kivu provinces. But without a comprehensive truth and reconciliation process for the entire country and a renegotiation of all mining contracts, the suffering will undoubtedly continue.
In its latest Congo mortality report, the International Rescue Committee found that a stunning 5.4 million “excess deaths” have occurred in Congo since 1998. These are deaths beyond those that would normally occur. In other words, a loss of life on the scale of Sept. 11 occurring every two days, in a country whose population is one-sixth our own.
Just a little history: After supporting the allies in World War II, Congo gained independence and elected Patrice Lumumba, a progressive Pan-Africanist, as prime minister in 1960. He was assassinated soon after in a plot involving the CIA. The U.S. installed and supported Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled tyrannically for more than 30 years, plundering the nation. Since his death, Congo has seen war, from 1996 to 2002, provoked by invasions by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, and ongoing conflict since then.
A particularly horrifying aspect of the conflict is the mass sexual violence being used as a weapon of war. Congolese human-rights activist Christine Schuler Deschryver told me about the hundreds of thousands of women and children subjected to rape:
“We are not talking about normal rapes anymore. We are talking about sexual terrorism, because they are destroyed—you cannot imagine what’s going on in Congo. We are talking about new surgery to repair the women, because they’re completely destroyed.” She was describing the physical damage done to the women, and to children, one, she said, as young as 10 months old, by acts of rape that involve insertion of sticks, guns and molten plastic. Deschryver was in the U.S. as a guest of V-Day, Eve Ensler’s campaign to end violence against women, in an attempt to generate public awareness of this genocide and to support the Panzi Hospital in Deschryver’s hometown of Bukavu.
Maurice Carney is executive director of Friends of the Congo, in Washington, D.C.: “Two types of rape, basically, are taking place in the Congo: One is the rape of the women and children, and the other the rape of the land, natural resources. The Congo has tremendous natural resources: 30 percent of the world’s cobalt, 10 percent of the world’s copper, 80 percent of the world’s reserves of coltan. You have to look at the corporate influence on everything that takes place in the Congo.”
Among the companies Carney blames for fueling the violence are Cleveland-based OM Group, the world’s leading producer of cobalt-based specialty chemicals and a leading supplier of nickel-based specialty chemicals, as well as Boston-based chemical giant Cabot Corp. Cabot produces coltan, also known as tantalum, a hard-to-extract but critical component of electronic circuitry, which is used in all cell phones and other consumer electronics. The massive demand for coltan is credited with fueling the Second Congo War of 1998-2002. A former CEO of Cabot is none other than the Bush administration’s current secretary of energy, Samuel Bodman. Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan, which took over the Phelps Dodge company’s enormous mining concession in the Congo, is also in on the game.
The United Nations has issued several reports that are highly critical of illegal corporate exploitation of the Congo’s minerals. A Congolese government review of more than 60 mining contracts call for their renegotiation or outright cancellation. Says Carney, “Eighty percent of the population live on 30 cents a day or less, with billions of dollars going out the back door and into the pockets of mining companies.” An important question for us in the U.S. is: How could close to 6 million people die from war and related disease in one country in less than a decade and go virtually unnoticed?
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.
Source: truthdig
It’s the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have died in the past decade, yet it goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in the United States. The conflict is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Central Africa. At its heart are the natural resources found in Congo and multinational corporations that extract them. The prospects for peace have slightly improved: A peace accord was just signed in Congo’s eastern Kivu provinces. But without a comprehensive truth and reconciliation process for the entire country and a renegotiation of all mining contracts, the suffering will undoubtedly continue.
In its latest Congo mortality report, the International Rescue Committee found that a stunning 5.4 million “excess deaths” have occurred in Congo since 1998. These are deaths beyond those that would normally occur. In other words, a loss of life on the scale of Sept. 11 occurring every two days, in a country whose population is one-sixth our own.
Just a little history: After supporting the allies in World War II, Congo gained independence and elected Patrice Lumumba, a progressive Pan-Africanist, as prime minister in 1960. He was assassinated soon after in a plot involving the CIA. The U.S. installed and supported Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled tyrannically for more than 30 years, plundering the nation. Since his death, Congo has seen war, from 1996 to 2002, provoked by invasions by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, and ongoing conflict since then.
A particularly horrifying aspect of the conflict is the mass sexual violence being used as a weapon of war. Congolese human-rights activist Christine Schuler Deschryver told me about the hundreds of thousands of women and children subjected to rape:
“We are not talking about normal rapes anymore. We are talking about sexual terrorism, because they are destroyed—you cannot imagine what’s going on in Congo. We are talking about new surgery to repair the women, because they’re completely destroyed.” She was describing the physical damage done to the women, and to children, one, she said, as young as 10 months old, by acts of rape that involve insertion of sticks, guns and molten plastic. Deschryver was in the U.S. as a guest of V-Day, Eve Ensler’s campaign to end violence against women, in an attempt to generate public awareness of this genocide and to support the Panzi Hospital in Deschryver’s hometown of Bukavu.
Maurice Carney is executive director of Friends of the Congo, in Washington, D.C.: “Two types of rape, basically, are taking place in the Congo: One is the rape of the women and children, and the other the rape of the land, natural resources. The Congo has tremendous natural resources: 30 percent of the world’s cobalt, 10 percent of the world’s copper, 80 percent of the world’s reserves of coltan. You have to look at the corporate influence on everything that takes place in the Congo.”
Among the companies Carney blames for fueling the violence are Cleveland-based OM Group, the world’s leading producer of cobalt-based specialty chemicals and a leading supplier of nickel-based specialty chemicals, as well as Boston-based chemical giant Cabot Corp. Cabot produces coltan, also known as tantalum, a hard-to-extract but critical component of electronic circuitry, which is used in all cell phones and other consumer electronics. The massive demand for coltan is credited with fueling the Second Congo War of 1998-2002. A former CEO of Cabot is none other than the Bush administration’s current secretary of energy, Samuel Bodman. Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan, which took over the Phelps Dodge company’s enormous mining concession in the Congo, is also in on the game.
The United Nations has issued several reports that are highly critical of illegal corporate exploitation of the Congo’s minerals. A Congolese government review of more than 60 mining contracts call for their renegotiation or outright cancellation. Says Carney, “Eighty percent of the population live on 30 cents a day or less, with billions of dollars going out the back door and into the pockets of mining companies.” An important question for us in the U.S. is: How could close to 6 million people die from war and related disease in one country in less than a decade and go virtually unnoticed?
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Bloody reality bears no relation to the delusions of this President
Robert Fisk
As a bomb explodes in Beirut and Israel kills 19 in Gaza raids, Bush takes his Middle East peace mission to Saudi Arabia (and signs off $20bn weapons deal with repressive regime)
Published: 16 January 2008
Twixt silken sheets – in a bedroom whose walls are also covered in silk – and in the very palace of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes this morning to confront a Middle East which bears no relation to the policies of his administration nor the warning which he has been relaying constantly to the kings and emirs and oligarchs of the Gulf: that Iran rather than Israel is their enemy.
The President sat chummily beside the all-too-friendly monarch yesterday, enthroned in what looked suspiciously like the kind of casual blue cardigan he might wear on his own Texan ranch; he had even received a jangling gold " Order of Merit" – it looked a bit like the Lord Chancellor's chain, though it was not disclosed which particular merit earned Mr Bush this kingly reward. Could it be the hypocritical merit of supplying yet more billions worth of weapons to the Kingdom, to be used against the Saudi regime's imaginary enemies.
It was illusory, of course, like all the words that the Arabs have heard from the Americans these past seven days, ever since the fading President began his tourist jaunt around the Middle East.
You wouldn't think it though, watching this preposterous man, prancing around arm-in-arm with the King, in what was presumably meant to be a dance, wielding a massive glinting curved Saudi sword, a latter-day Saladin, who would have appalled the Kurdish leader who once destroyed the Crusaders in what is now referred to by Mr Bush as "the disputed West Bank".
Is this how lame-duck American presidents are supposed to behave? Certainly, the denizens of the Middle East, watching this outrageous performance will all be asking this question. Ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution, a Muslim Cold War has been raging within the Middle East – but is this how Mr Bush thinks one should fight for the soul of Islam?
Already by dusk last night, the US President's world was exploding in Beirut when a massive car bomb blew up next to a 4x4 vehicle carrying American embassy employees, killing four Lebanese and apparently badly wounding a US embassy driver. And while Mr Bush was relaxing in the Saudi royal ranch at Al Janadriyah, Israeli forces killed 19 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, most of them members of Hamas, one of them the son of Mahmoud Zahar, a leader of the movement. He later claimed that Israel would not have staged the attack – on the day an Israeli was also killed by a Palestinian rocket – if it had not been encouraged to do so by George Bush.
The difference between reality and the dream-world of the US government could hardly have been more savagely illustrated. After promising the Palestinians a "sovereign and contiguous state" before the end of the year, and pledging "security" to Israel – though not, Arabs noted, security for "Palestine" – Mr Bush had arrived in the Gulf to terrify the kings and oligarchs of the oil-soaked kingdoms of the danger of Iranian aggression. As usual, he came armed with the usual American offers of vast weapons sales to protect these largely undemocratic and police state regimes from potentially the most powerful nation in the " axis of evil".
It was a potent – even weird – example of the US President's perambulation of the Arab Middle East, a return to the "policy by fear" which Washington has regularly visited upon Gulf leaders. He agreed to furnish the Saudis with at least £41m of arms, a figure set to rise to more than £10bn in weaponry to the Gulf potentates under a deal announced last year – all of which is supposed to shield them from the supposed territorial ambitions of Iran's crackpot President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As usual, Washington promised the Israelis that their "qualitative edge" in advanced weapons would be maintained, just in case the Saudis – who have never gone to war with anyone except Saddam Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait – decided to launch a suicidal attack on America's only real ally in the Middle East.
This, of course, was not how the whole shooting match was presented to the Arabs. Mr Bush could be seen ostentatiously kissing the cheeks of King Abdullah and holding hands with the autocratic monarch whose Wahhabi Muslim state had only recently showed its "mercy" to a Saudi woman who was charged with adultery after being raped seven times in the desert outside Riyadh. The Saudis, needless to say, are well aware that Mr Bush's reign is ending amid chaos in Pakistan, a disastrous guerrilla war against Western forces in Afghanistan, fierce fighting in Gaza, near civil war in Lebanon and the hell-disaster of Iraq.
The bomb in Beirut, just before five in the evening, must still have come as a rude shock to the luxuriating President who has such close ties with the Saudi regime – despite the fact that the majority of hijackers in the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 came from the kingdom – that he allowed its junior princes to fly home from the United States immediately after the attacks. Two trips to Mr Bush's Texas ranch by King Abdullah was apparently enough to earn the US President a night in the Saudi king's palace-farm, surrounded by groomed lawns and grassy hills.
Heard across many miles of the Lebanese capital, the bomb devastated buildings in a narrow street in the east of the city through which the vehicle was passing, just as the US ambassador – on a different route into the city – was travelling to a central Beirut hotel reception before leaving for Washington. A State Department spokesman, however, insisted that no US citizens had been hurt. The American SUV had taken an obscure laneway close to the Karantina bridge to travel north of Beirut along the bank of the city's only river when it was struck, leading local Lebanese military officials to ask themselves if the bomber had inside knowledge of the route they were taking.
There was talk that this was a "dummy" convoy staged to distract potential bombers from the journey which Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman was taking to a reception at a downtown hotel. A carpet manufacturer's factory was smashed by the blast which tore down roofs and smashed windows more than half a mile from the scene.
For Arab leaders, Mr Bush's message to the Gulf leaders was wearily familiar. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, Washington spent its time warning Gulf leaders of the danger of Iranian aggression. Once Saddam invaded Kuwait, America's emphasis changed: It was now Iraq which posed the greatest danger to their kingdoms. But once the emirate was liberated, the oil-wealthy monarchs were told that – yet again – it was Iran that was their enemy.
Arabs are no more taken in by this topsy-turvy "good-versus-evil" narrative than they are by Washington's promises to help create a Palestinian state by the end of the year, scarcely a day before Israel publicly admitted to plans for yet more houses for settlers on Arab land amid Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian territory.
Yet to understand the nature of this extraordinary relationship with the Gulf monarchs, it is necessary to recall that ever since the President's father promised a weapons-free "oasis of peace" in the Gulf, Washington – along with Britain, France and Russia – has been pouring arms into the region.
Over the past decade, the Gulf Arabs have squandered billions of their oil dollars on American weapons. The statistics tell their own story. In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to £40bn. Between 1997 and 2005, the sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates – Mr Bush's hosts before he continued to Riyadh – signed arms contracts worth £9bn with Western nations. Between 1991 and 1993 – when Iraq was the "enemy" – the US Military Training Mission was administering more than £14bn in Saudi arms procurements and £12bn in new US weapons acquisitions. By this time, the Saudis already possessed 72 American F-15 fighter-bombers and 114 British Tornados.
How little has changed in the past 17 years. On 17 May 1991, for example, George Bush Snr said there were now "real reasons to be optimistic" about a peace in the Middle East. "We are going to continue to work in the [peace] process," he said then. "We are not going to abandon it."
James Baker, who was the American Secretary of State, warned on 23 May 1991 that the continued building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land " hindered" a future Middle East peace, just as the present Secretary of State said last week. At the time, the Israelis were reassured by Dick Cheney that the US would safeguard their "security".
The West may have a short memory. The Arabs, who happen to live in the piece of real estate which we call the Middle East and who are not stupid, have not. They understand all too well what George W Bush now stands for. After advocating "democracy" in the region – a policy which gained electoral victories for Shia in Iraq, for Hamas in Gaza and a substantial gain in political power for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – it seems to have dawned on Washington that something might be slightly wrong with Bush's priorities. Instead of advocating a "New Middle East", Mr Bush, lying amid his silken sheets in the Saudi king's palace, is now pursuing a return to the "Old Middle East", a place of secret policemen, torture chambers – to which prisoners can be usefully " renditioned " – and dictatorial "moderate" presidents and monarchs. And which of the Gulf despots is going to object to that?
As a bomb explodes in Beirut and Israel kills 19 in Gaza raids, Bush takes his Middle East peace mission to Saudi Arabia (and signs off $20bn weapons deal with repressive regime)
Published: 16 January 2008
Twixt silken sheets – in a bedroom whose walls are also covered in silk – and in the very palace of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes this morning to confront a Middle East which bears no relation to the policies of his administration nor the warning which he has been relaying constantly to the kings and emirs and oligarchs of the Gulf: that Iran rather than Israel is their enemy.
The President sat chummily beside the all-too-friendly monarch yesterday, enthroned in what looked suspiciously like the kind of casual blue cardigan he might wear on his own Texan ranch; he had even received a jangling gold " Order of Merit" – it looked a bit like the Lord Chancellor's chain, though it was not disclosed which particular merit earned Mr Bush this kingly reward. Could it be the hypocritical merit of supplying yet more billions worth of weapons to the Kingdom, to be used against the Saudi regime's imaginary enemies.
It was illusory, of course, like all the words that the Arabs have heard from the Americans these past seven days, ever since the fading President began his tourist jaunt around the Middle East.
You wouldn't think it though, watching this preposterous man, prancing around arm-in-arm with the King, in what was presumably meant to be a dance, wielding a massive glinting curved Saudi sword, a latter-day Saladin, who would have appalled the Kurdish leader who once destroyed the Crusaders in what is now referred to by Mr Bush as "the disputed West Bank".
Is this how lame-duck American presidents are supposed to behave? Certainly, the denizens of the Middle East, watching this outrageous performance will all be asking this question. Ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution, a Muslim Cold War has been raging within the Middle East – but is this how Mr Bush thinks one should fight for the soul of Islam?
Already by dusk last night, the US President's world was exploding in Beirut when a massive car bomb blew up next to a 4x4 vehicle carrying American embassy employees, killing four Lebanese and apparently badly wounding a US embassy driver. And while Mr Bush was relaxing in the Saudi royal ranch at Al Janadriyah, Israeli forces killed 19 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, most of them members of Hamas, one of them the son of Mahmoud Zahar, a leader of the movement. He later claimed that Israel would not have staged the attack – on the day an Israeli was also killed by a Palestinian rocket – if it had not been encouraged to do so by George Bush.
The difference between reality and the dream-world of the US government could hardly have been more savagely illustrated. After promising the Palestinians a "sovereign and contiguous state" before the end of the year, and pledging "security" to Israel – though not, Arabs noted, security for "Palestine" – Mr Bush had arrived in the Gulf to terrify the kings and oligarchs of the oil-soaked kingdoms of the danger of Iranian aggression. As usual, he came armed with the usual American offers of vast weapons sales to protect these largely undemocratic and police state regimes from potentially the most powerful nation in the " axis of evil".
It was a potent – even weird – example of the US President's perambulation of the Arab Middle East, a return to the "policy by fear" which Washington has regularly visited upon Gulf leaders. He agreed to furnish the Saudis with at least £41m of arms, a figure set to rise to more than £10bn in weaponry to the Gulf potentates under a deal announced last year – all of which is supposed to shield them from the supposed territorial ambitions of Iran's crackpot President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As usual, Washington promised the Israelis that their "qualitative edge" in advanced weapons would be maintained, just in case the Saudis – who have never gone to war with anyone except Saddam Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait – decided to launch a suicidal attack on America's only real ally in the Middle East.
This, of course, was not how the whole shooting match was presented to the Arabs. Mr Bush could be seen ostentatiously kissing the cheeks of King Abdullah and holding hands with the autocratic monarch whose Wahhabi Muslim state had only recently showed its "mercy" to a Saudi woman who was charged with adultery after being raped seven times in the desert outside Riyadh. The Saudis, needless to say, are well aware that Mr Bush's reign is ending amid chaos in Pakistan, a disastrous guerrilla war against Western forces in Afghanistan, fierce fighting in Gaza, near civil war in Lebanon and the hell-disaster of Iraq.
The bomb in Beirut, just before five in the evening, must still have come as a rude shock to the luxuriating President who has such close ties with the Saudi regime – despite the fact that the majority of hijackers in the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 came from the kingdom – that he allowed its junior princes to fly home from the United States immediately after the attacks. Two trips to Mr Bush's Texas ranch by King Abdullah was apparently enough to earn the US President a night in the Saudi king's palace-farm, surrounded by groomed lawns and grassy hills.
Heard across many miles of the Lebanese capital, the bomb devastated buildings in a narrow street in the east of the city through which the vehicle was passing, just as the US ambassador – on a different route into the city – was travelling to a central Beirut hotel reception before leaving for Washington. A State Department spokesman, however, insisted that no US citizens had been hurt. The American SUV had taken an obscure laneway close to the Karantina bridge to travel north of Beirut along the bank of the city's only river when it was struck, leading local Lebanese military officials to ask themselves if the bomber had inside knowledge of the route they were taking.
There was talk that this was a "dummy" convoy staged to distract potential bombers from the journey which Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman was taking to a reception at a downtown hotel. A carpet manufacturer's factory was smashed by the blast which tore down roofs and smashed windows more than half a mile from the scene.
For Arab leaders, Mr Bush's message to the Gulf leaders was wearily familiar. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, Washington spent its time warning Gulf leaders of the danger of Iranian aggression. Once Saddam invaded Kuwait, America's emphasis changed: It was now Iraq which posed the greatest danger to their kingdoms. But once the emirate was liberated, the oil-wealthy monarchs were told that – yet again – it was Iran that was their enemy.
Arabs are no more taken in by this topsy-turvy "good-versus-evil" narrative than they are by Washington's promises to help create a Palestinian state by the end of the year, scarcely a day before Israel publicly admitted to plans for yet more houses for settlers on Arab land amid Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian territory.
Yet to understand the nature of this extraordinary relationship with the Gulf monarchs, it is necessary to recall that ever since the President's father promised a weapons-free "oasis of peace" in the Gulf, Washington – along with Britain, France and Russia – has been pouring arms into the region.
Over the past decade, the Gulf Arabs have squandered billions of their oil dollars on American weapons. The statistics tell their own story. In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to £40bn. Between 1997 and 2005, the sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates – Mr Bush's hosts before he continued to Riyadh – signed arms contracts worth £9bn with Western nations. Between 1991 and 1993 – when Iraq was the "enemy" – the US Military Training Mission was administering more than £14bn in Saudi arms procurements and £12bn in new US weapons acquisitions. By this time, the Saudis already possessed 72 American F-15 fighter-bombers and 114 British Tornados.
How little has changed in the past 17 years. On 17 May 1991, for example, George Bush Snr said there were now "real reasons to be optimistic" about a peace in the Middle East. "We are going to continue to work in the [peace] process," he said then. "We are not going to abandon it."
James Baker, who was the American Secretary of State, warned on 23 May 1991 that the continued building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land " hindered" a future Middle East peace, just as the present Secretary of State said last week. At the time, the Israelis were reassured by Dick Cheney that the US would safeguard their "security".
The West may have a short memory. The Arabs, who happen to live in the piece of real estate which we call the Middle East and who are not stupid, have not. They understand all too well what George W Bush now stands for. After advocating "democracy" in the region – a policy which gained electoral victories for Shia in Iraq, for Hamas in Gaza and a substantial gain in political power for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – it seems to have dawned on Washington that something might be slightly wrong with Bush's priorities. Instead of advocating a "New Middle East", Mr Bush, lying amid his silken sheets in the Saudi king's palace, is now pursuing a return to the "Old Middle East", a place of secret policemen, torture chambers – to which prisoners can be usefully " renditioned " – and dictatorial "moderate" presidents and monarchs. And which of the Gulf despots is going to object to that?
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