Bush Still Lies, They Still Die

Anti-war bores like me are always saying that the best way to fight terrorism is to tackle the problems - including poverty, ignorance and corruption - which breed terrorists. Instead, Bush has been wilfully exacerbating the problem by attacking the symptoms rather than the causes of terrorism. This is not surprising, given that his power base is the US military-industrial complex and it is in their interest to maintain a state of war and widespread fear as long as possible.

Now the war-inflated US deficit is hitting funds already pledged to charity budgets, and Bush is breaking campaign promises:

With the budget deficit growing and President George Bush promising to reduce spending, the Administration has told representatives of several charities that it was unable to honour some promises.

The cutbacks, estimated by some charities at up to $US100million ($131million), come at a time when the number of hungry in the world is rising for the first time in years.

As a result, Save The Children, Catholic Relief Services and other charities have suspended or eliminated programs intended to help the poor feed themselves through improvements in farming, education and health.

Lisa Kuennen, a food aid expert at Catholic Relief Services, said up to 7million people would be affected.

OF course, the military is off limits to such budget cuts. One program that is certainly not going to be cut back is the semi-fictional $US11-billion-a-year "Star Wars" missile defense system, which last week failed its first test in two years. Rumsfeld dismissed the failure by assuring reporters that "at some point soon, it will have a modest capability."

President George W. Bush had promised during his re-election campaign that the system would be declared operational by the end of the month.

And here's a little note of interest. A new report called "Denial as a method of counter-insurgency warfare", prepared by Anthony Cordesman, senior fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Bush administration spokesmen had appeared to live "in a fantasyland" when giving accounts of events in Iraq. That's the same CSIS as members of the CCF (below). There's a lot of finger-pointing going on these days among the pro-war crowd.