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George Monbiot
Monbiot is an exceptional investigative reporter. I missed his article “Dreamers and Idiots” when it was first published in the 11th November 2003 edition of Guardian and only came across it yesterday when doing some causal web browsing.
“Dreamers and Idiots” highlights a set of lies which some of us may not be as familiar with as the now well-known tales about WMD and Al-Qaeda link: the diplomatic options which were available to Bush and Blair prior to the war.
Deception as a principle of war has been around since before the time of Sun Tzu who wrote some 2,500 years ago in “The Art of War”, one of the most widely read military treatises in the world, that “Warfare is deception”. But once our elected government starts blurring the line between its duties in public affairs and its tactics against an enemy during wartime, we should know that our cherished democratic value is at risk. When disinformation and outright lies are tolerated in our zealous fight against terrorism, we are in effect slowly transforming ourselves into a terror state because we can no longer teach our children how to differentiate rights from wrongs.
Indeed, when Sun Tzu wrote “Warfare is deception”, he didn’t mean that deception should be used merely as a tactic to inflict casualties on an enemy. If interpreted with other passages in the book, the objective of “Warfare is deception” is to achieve what Sun Tzu considered “the acme of skill” - “to win without fighting is the acme of skill.”
And by falsely brushing off the diplomatic options that were offered by Saddam and Taliban as mere delaying tactics, we had perhaps missed the chance to win without a fight and to put Osama bin Laden in custody without risking the lives of thousands of American soldiers.
More importantly, a chance to create harmony between two huge civilizations was given up in exchange for perpetual anger and resentment and an endless cycle of revenges and counter-revenges.
Monbiot is author of the following books:
Posted on January 11, 2005 01:45 AM
Categories: People
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