Scott McClellan's Road to Damascus and Cuba's
Internationalism
by John Maxwell
This article originally appeared
in Jamaica Observer.
"This is not the Scott we
knew."
When people
leave cults they often turn against their former beliefs with great vehemence.
Arthur Koestler's anthology The God that Failed is the perfect
exposition of this syndrome. Jamaican communists of the 70s are now among the
intellectual leaders of free market theology here. The volte face of such people usually perplexes their friends as much
as or more than they baffle their enemies. The people who have fled from the
polygamist Mormon sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints (FLDS) are as exotic to those they left behind as if they had come from
another solar system.
People like
me, who have been so drearily consistent for so long, have taken lots of flak
for among other things, our critique of George Bush even before he was anointed
President of the US. Millions of ordinary citizens in countries round the world
opposed the looming war in Iraq and demonstrated against it. Then, the New
York Times declared world public opinion to be the new, second superpower.
Alas, they paid us no further attention.
"We knew the ‘evidence' was invented and that the war was
unjustified and wrong. For that we were excoriated."
I will
never forget our public debate - the Hon. Don Mills and I versus the US chargé d'affaires just before the invasion. We knew the
"evidence" was invented and that the war was unjustified and wrong. For that we
were excoriated. We have now been joined by President Bush's former Press
Secretary who has just published his memoirs detailing how the presidency went
off the rails. Scott McClellan was a faithful servant who seemed to be a clumsy
and inept spokesman for the Administration when he stalwartly defended Bush and
deflected US media stars in their febrile impersonations of journalists.
Now he is
being described as a traitor.
McClellan's
book, What Happened became a political bombshell even before it came
officially onto the market, provoking stunned, disbelieving reactions from his
former associates. Some of us, who have long considered the Bush administration
to be a political cult, may be better able understand what has happened.
McClellan's
predecessor, Ari Fleischer says he can't reconcile the McClellan of the book
with the McClellan who was paid to defend Bush. "There is something about the book that just doesn't make any
sense."
Fleischer
said McClellan had been an "always reliable, solid deputy" during his own White
House tenure - but "not once did Scott approach me - privately or publicly - to
discuss any misgivings he had about the war in Iraq or the manner in which the
White House made the case for war."
The
President's current spokeswoman, Dana Perino said in a statement: "For
those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press
secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."
McClellan's
former associates can't understand him because they think he has simply and
unreasonably changed his mind or gone mad. What has changed is his belief
system. As they say in the Bible, the scales have fallen from his eyes. His
conscience has sprung rudely into exuberant life.
"The scales have fallen from his eyes."
As Press
Secretary, McClellan was speaking the
truth as he received it in the White House. Those who blame him for not making
his misgivings known then, while he was doing the job, miss the point entirely;
he had no objections then. He was still a card-carrying member of the cult - a
true believer.
Scott McClellan has literally been
born again, as the cultists say. Neither he nor his critics realize that when
he left the White House he was, unknown even to himself, heading down the
Damascus road. He is no longer the man they knew.
And what
pleases me inordinately is that he now fully justifies my contention, derided
at the time, that US journalists were
acting as Judas goats to the American people As Katy Couric (then NBC now CBS) and Jessica Yellin (CNN) have now courageously admitted,
journalists submitted to pressure from the media owners to join the team, not
to rock the boat but to deliver a nice little
war.
I'm sorry I
have to say it again, but I told you so at the tine.
Return of the floating barracoons?
May 26 was
the 45th anniversary of Cuba's first venture into what it calls its
"internationalism." On that date in 1963 Cuba dispatched a medical brigade to
Algeria, then still bleeding from a
successful but incredibly bloody war of independence against France.
Fortuitously on the same date in 2008, a consignment of 4.5 tons of serum,
medicines and sanitary materials donated by Cuba arrived in the earthquake
ravaged capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan to help some of those injured in the May 12 earthquake.
In the 45 years between those
events the Cuban people have sent abroad as many health workers as US troops in
Iraq - 140,000 of them - to more than a hundred foreign countries, some
considerably richer than Cuba but all in need of help. They range from
Nicaragua to Pakistan, Venezuela to Vietnam, Haiti and Jamaica to Angola and
Bolivia. There are more than 10,000 Cubans in Venezuela, teachers, doctors and
nurses. In Haiti they were helping the Haitians establish a medical school
before they were rudely interrupted by the US Marines - arriving in aid of
terrorists and drug-dealers who called themselves Freedom Fighters - coming to
kidnap the democratically elected president of Haiti.
"The Cuban people have sent abroad as many health workers
as US troops in Iraq - 140,000 of them - to more than a hundred foreign
countries."
The Cubans
are also hosts to more than 10,000 young foreigners in Cuban institutions
learning everything from building construction to ophthalmology and organic
farming.
The Cubans
have achieved these and other advances despite having been for half a century
the target of unremitting hostility from the world's only superpower. I
happened to be in Cuba on the very day in 1960 the US - having already
sponsored various outrages designed to destroy the Cuban revolution - declared
an embargo against them, an Act of War in international law.
The casus belli was Cuba's decision to nationalize with compensation, the oil
refineries, the sugar refineries and the enormous plantations owned by US
corporations.
If it were
true that the US hostility was based on its desire to promote human rights in
Cuba there is no way the Americans could have simultaneously protected and
promoted such bloodthirsty tyrants and terrorists as the Duvaliers (Haiti),
Stroessner (Paraguay), Somoza (Nicaragua), Rios Montt (Guatemala) Mobutu
(Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), the Cuban terrorists Luis Posada, Orlando
Bosch and Santiago Alvarez and the Apartheid regime in South Africa. And, if
human rights were the motive, there would not now be five Cubans in American jails whose only
crime was to try to warn the US against the activities of exiled Cuban
terrorists in Miami. Nor would there
now be living free in Miami notorious Cuban terrorists including those who blew
up a Cuban airliner en route from Barbados to Jamaica in 1976 killing nearly a
hundred young people. As Mr. Bush has said, those who harbor terrorists are
themselves terrorists.
"The chief American diplomat in Cuba has acted as a
banker and conduit for money and other contraband, between convicted terrorist
Santiago Alvarez in Miami and so-called human rights activists in Cuba."
These
perverted policies have allowed the US to wreak billions of dollars worth of
damage on the Cuban economy and to kill or maim thousands of Cubans.
The Cubans
have within the last two weeks exposed new US mischief against their country.
This involves official US behavior which is illegal in international law, in US
law and in Cuban law. Briefly, the Cubans have submitted proof that the chief
American diplomat in Cuba has acted as a banker and conduit for money and other
contraband, between convicted terrorist Santiago Alvarez in Miami and so-called
human rights activists in Cuba. He also intervened with a federal judge to
secure a lighter sentence for Alvarez
then awaiting sentencing in Miami.
One sinister collateral disclosure
is that there is or was, a plan to create some provocation in Cuba, backed up
by American ships parked offshore various Cuban ports. I can imagine that if
some agency were able to provoke some hysterical panic among Cubans the
Americans would no doubt be willing to undertake a "humanitarian" intervention
by the US navy with ships offshore to rescue Cubans "fleeing" their country.
It is a
plan which, if applied in Jamaica, would depopulate the country within hours.
Remember the "Russian ships" panic of 1962?
Such a plan
to provoke a Cuban exodus a la Mariel
would of course, require the assistance of the Jamaican government to allow our
ports to be used as temporary staging posts. Which may be why it is a good
thing that Mr. Golding has not yet been able to visit Mr. Bush.
Of course,
such a scenario is unthinkable. The Bush administration is much too scrupulous
to try to destabilize the Cuban government. And George Bush I am certain, is
perfectly content to allow the Revolution to survive its tenth American
President.
He has no
taste for defeat.
John Maxwell of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the
veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican
government's efforts to build houses at Hope, the nation's oldest and best
known botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize in the 2000
Sandals Resort's Annual Environmental Journalism Competition, the region's
richest journalism prize. He is also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A
Primer for Environmentalists and Journalists. Jamaica, 2000. Mr. Maxwell can be
reached at jankunnu@gmail.comThis e-mail address is being protected from
spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
Copyright©2008
John Maxwell
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