January 15, 2003
Back Out in the Cold
John le Carre, author of spy thrillers like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, says the US is going into "one of its periods of historical madness," but, he says, "this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War."This is all Osama bin Laden's dream come true, says le Carre. "Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions. But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high."