He's still at it. George Bush is still trying to link Iraq to September 11th, 2001. In a televised 30-minute speech at North Carolina's pertinently-named Fort Bragg on Wednesday night, he cited the September 11th attacks five times. He spoke of the "totalitarian ideology" shared by Iraqi "insurgents" and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda outfit. He has a bloody hard neck.
Bush didn't mention - surprise, surprise - Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As far as his propaganda is concerned, they don't exist now. (Then again, they didn't exist when he decided to butcher Iraq.) It's clear however that Bush doesn't do apologies. Already the Iraqi dead are numbered in tens of thousands - perhaps in six figures - and 1,740 US troops have been killed there.
Mind you, polls suggest that most Americans just don't buy Bush's blather any more. Even before his Fort Bragg guff-fest, 53 per cent of respondents told a CNN/Gallup poll that it was a mistake to attack Iraq. Just 40 per cent approved of the attack, down from 50 per cent at the time of the presidential election last November. The mood in the US is finally changing.
The process is slow, of course - and worse, it's delicate. Everything would change if there were to be another attack on the US by al-Qaeda or a related outfit. Indeed, even an attack in Europe - London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, wherever - could be expected to re-boost Bush's poll figures. So, even though the United States is coming to its senses, the danger remains.
An Islamist thug or some unfortunate rendered murderous by the loss of family or friends could become a suicide bomber in an American or European city. There could be a rash of such attacks - even though the Arab world knows that there never was popular support in Europe for attacking Iraq. People in the US, smarting from September 11th, were told lies to channel their revenge.
Consider how you might feel if your son or daughter were among the 1,740 US soldiers killed in Iraq. It's one thing to die in an honourable cause but another altogether to die in a disreputable cause you believed (at least partly) because big-wigs told you lies. There's always danger, of course, in enlisting in an army and a degree of personal responsibility must be expected of recruits.
But even acknowledging that most recruits enlist for the money and the training, the lies told to these people are appalling. Whatever the truth about the line of command in Abu Ghraib prison, it's not fanciful to suggest that the abusers considered they were exacting revenge for September 11th. They had been told, after all, that Iraq was linked to the attacks.
So rather than linking Iraq with September 11th, Bush's propaganda really links him with abuse in Abu Ghraib. That's the problem with lies: they can have nasty consequences. Fair enough, Bush's deceit still doesn't exonerate Charles Graner, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harmon or any of the other US military thugs, but it shows that their behaviour was indirectly encouraged.
Anyway, Bush's performance at Fort Bragg suggests he has completely run out of ideas for his "war on terror". That's no harm, but the consequences of his Iraq invasion have increased the chances of coming to pass the reasons he claimed justified it.
Iraq wasn't a haven of al-Qaeda terrorism or a launching pad for attacks on the West - but it could be now.
That's what Bush, his cabal, his voters and his lies have done. They have made the world not less but more dangerous through policies that have hugely increased its discontent. Like every other politician, Bush represents particular interests - in his case, a peculiar blend of blue-chip corporations and redneck citizens. The striking difference is that he seems to care for nobody else.
After a brief initial numbness, the US naturally became angry as part of its grieving process over September 11th. In anger, it used its awesome military power to lash out. Afghanistan and Iraq sustained physical attacks. France, Germany, Syria, Iran and other countries took verbal lashings. In fairness, no country (perhaps North Korea excluded) wanted to draw the anger of the US on itself.
Throughout it all though, it was regular Americans who seemed angry. Bush and his neo-con cabal appeared much more cynical than that - using and fuelling public anger to sustain policies spectacularly in their own interests. Then there were the orchestrated lies disseminated through the media, which were both serious and sleazy. Ideology is one thing. Fox News is quite another.
It's clear that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and their ilk are not for turning, but the American public just might be. Since September 11th, 2001, the US has been transformed into a police state and the problem is that there may be no turning back. Still, continuously frightened by their government and elements of their media, regular Americans may start to fight back now.
At least they were genuinely traumatised by the attacks in New York and Washington. The Irish crowd who insisted that anti-Bush people were "anti-American" have no excuse whatsoever.