By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committees
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
13 January 2009
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) denounces as totally reprehensible the desperate attempts of the outgoing chieftain of US imperialism, George W. Bush, to define his own eight-year record as less vile than what it has been.
He admits as one of his mistakes his premature proclamation of “mission accomplished” less than two months after the full scale US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He considers as mere disappointment that no weapons of mass destruction were found to validate what had been in the first place a deliberate lie and mere pretext for the US war of aggression.
George W. Bush vainly tries to evade the fact that he is the biggest war criminal in contemporary times. He is culpable for the biggest kind of terrorism, which is the war of aggression. This has resulted in the massacre and wounding of millions of Iraqi civilians, the destruction of the social infrastructure and US control of the Iraqi oil and other economic resources.
The 9/11 attack, which killed close to 3000 people, was heinous on its own evil account. But it pales in comparison to the far more monstrous murderous proportions of the Bush crime of aggression. The howling success of the Bush regime lies in manipulating the 9/11 attack and the wars of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan to override the frauds that made Bush “win” two presidential elections.
George W. Bush also makes a futile attempt to evade the fact that he is most culpable for the current financial and economic crisis that has swept the US and the entire world capitalist system. He tries to minimize his culpability by saying that he inherited a recession which resulted from the bursting of the “hightech bubble” in 2000 and that he generated many months of economic growth before the “housing bubble” started to burst in 2006 and lead to the mortgage meltdown and the current level of the crisis.
To bring about the present gravity of the crisis, Bush has been responsible for enlarging the US national debt at a dizzying rate and raising it to the highest historic level, for incurring the highest trade and budgetary deficits, for letting US financial and nonfinancial corporations to run wild in speculation and for pushing down the wage level further and then overburdening the American families with loans for housing, cars, daily consumption and school enrollment.
In addition to the financial crisis and the two wars of aggression, Bush must be confronted with many crimes that have been committed in the name of a “global war of terror”. These include the curtailment of democratic rights in the US and abroad, the use of extrajudicial killings, acts of so-called rendition, illegal detention and torture, arbitrary “terrorist” labelling of progressive forces and leaders, the corruption involved war-related contracts and US military interventions and sponsorship of state terrorism in the Philippines and elsewhere.
The ILPS reminds the incoming chieftain of US imperialism of the breadth and depth of the outrage of the American people and the people of the world over so many crimes perpetrated by Bush and his accomplices. Letting these criminals enjoy impunity and letting the consequences of their crimes persist under the blanket of bipartisanship can only undermine the credibility of the Obama regime and its ability to cope with the overwhelming troubles passed on to it by the outgoing regime.###
