Letter From Bahrain

For ten years, Alzheimer's Disease ruined Ronald Reagan as family and friends watched him fade from the world of the real. His mind collapsed like loose sand behind his ever more vacant eyes.

Now it’s finally over and the 40th American President has been layed to rest. Yet Reagan’s whole weeklong funeral was cheap, utterly distasteful American publicity. The great American media, with so much influence and time and nothing to say, compared Reagan to Lincoln and Hamilton. This is like claiming that the maintenance man wrote the Bill of Rights.

William Rivers Pitt, senior editor and lead writer for t r u t h o u t, provides this viewpoint:

“The veneer of honor and respect painted across the legacy of Ronald Reagan is a myth of biblical proportions. The coverage proffered this past week of the Reagan legacy seldom mentions impropriety until the Iran/Contra scandal appears on the administration timeline. This sin of omission is vast. By the end of his term in office, some 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, indicted or investigated for misconduct and/or criminal activities.

Some of the names on this disgraceful roll-call: Oliver North, John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Casper Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert C. McFarlane, Michael Deaver, E. Bob Wallach, James Watt, Alan D. Fiers, Clair George, Duane R. Clarridge, Anne Gorscuh Burford, Rita Lavelle, Richard Allen, Richard Beggs, Guy Flake, Louis Glutfrida, Edwin Gray, Max Hugel, Carlos Campbell, John Fedders, Arthur Hayes, J. Lynn Helms, Marjory Mecklenburg, Robert Nimmo, J. William Petro, Thomas C. Reed, Emanuel Savas, Charles Wick. Many of these names are lost to history, but more than a few of them are still with us today, 'rehabilitated' by the administration of George W. Bush.

Ronald Reagan actively supported the regimes of the worst people ever to walk the earth. Names like Marcos, Duarte, Rios Mont and Duvalier reek of blood and corruption, yet were embraced by the Reagan administration with passionate intensity. The ground of many nations is salted with the bones of those murdered by brutal rulers who called Reagan a friend. Who can forget his support of those in South Africa who believed apartheid was the proper way to run a civilized society?

One dictator in particular looms large across our landscape. Saddam Hussein was a creation of Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration supported the Hussein regime despite his incredible record of atrocity. The Reagan administration gave Hussein intelligence information which helped the Iraqi military use their chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran to great effect. The deadly bacterial agents sent to Iraq during the Reagan administration are a laundry list of horrors.

The Reagan administration sent an emissary named Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to shake Saddam Hussein's hand and assure him that, despite public American condemnation of the use of those chemical weapons, the Reagan administration still considered him a welcome friend and ally. This happened while the Reagan administration was selling weapons to Iran, a nation notorious for its support of international terrorism, in secret and in violation of scores of laws.

Another name on Ronald Reagan's roll call is that of Osama bin Laden. The Reagan administration believed it a bully idea to organize an army of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. bin Laden became the spiritual leader of this action. Throughout the entirety of Reagan's term, bin Laden and his people were armed, funded and trained by the United States. Reagan helped teach Osama bin Laden the lesson he lives by today, that it is possible to bring a superpower to its knees. bin Laden believes this because he has done it once before, thanks to the dedicated help of Ronald Reagan.

In 1998, two American embassies in Africa were blasted into rubble by Osama bin Laden, who used the Semtex sent to Afghanistan by the Reagan administration to do the job. In 2001, Osama bin Laden thrust a dagger into the heart of the United States, using men who became skilled at the art of terrorism with the help of Ronald Reagan. Today, there are 827 American soldiers and over 10,000 civilians who have died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that came to be because Reagan helped manufacture both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

How much of this can be truthfully laid at the feet of Ronald Reagan? It depends on who you ask. Those who worship Reagan see him as the man in charge, the man who defeated Soviet communism, the man whose vision and charisma made Americans feel good about themselves after Vietnam and the malaise of the 1970s. Those who despise Reagan see him as nothing more than a pitch-man for corporate raiders, the man who allowed greed to become a virtue, the man who smiled vapidly while allowing his officials to run the government for him.

In the final analysis, however, the legacy of Ronald Reagan - whether he had an active hand in its formulation, or was merely along for the ride - is beyond dispute. His famous question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is easy to answer.

We are not better off than we were four years ago, or eight years ago, or twelve, or twenty. We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matters, and be damned to the truth.”

It’s too bad Ronald Reagan’s death cannot be dismissed like the passing of the old Brylcreemed uncle with halitosis who told banal Rotary Club-inspired jokes at family reunions. An amiable dunce is relatively forgettable. Yet Reagan was not always an incompetent and incoherent stooge. The former FBI snitch had a brazen contempt for the ordinary people of the United States that made him the supreme Confidence Artist of modern American politics.

For the past few days, American media has gushed on and on about Reagan, a venal and vicious man, who was happy to slash workers' wages, see families thrown onto the street, support sadistic death squads and bomb other countries, if this was in the interests of the American ruling class.

A broadcaster recently nominated Regan as one of the 20th century’s greatest economists, a man who should have been nominated for the Noble Prize. I wanted to hurl.

Reagan's economic policies were a disaster for working-class Americans. He presided over the worst recession since the 1930s, despite the stimulus of military Keynesian policies, which created massive federal budget deficits and tripled the federal debt.

However, Reagan’s genuine legacy rests more properly on the way he subverted the Constitution over the Iran-Contra scandal involving Nicaragua. This duplicity was far more serious grounds for impeachment than what forced Nixon to resign, or what Clinton endured. Amnesia in America is epidemic. Our culture must lead the world in Attention Deficit Disorder syndrome and Ronald Reagan - from his prime years – could serve as the poster boy.

Christopher Hitchens offers some interesting insights:

“Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.)

Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched.

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you."

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible.

Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war.

Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to green light the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused the Democrats of "scuttling."

Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran.

One could go on.

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump.

Reagan could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power.”

If loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot. If there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism.
- Mark Twain, 1884


There is nothing more stirring than The Star Spangled Banner, whether vocalized by a high school student before a basketball game, or played passionately on guitar by Jimi Hendrix. For an American, the national anthem instantly evokes all the accomplishments and aspirations of our culture.

It still seems only natural to champion the ideals advanced by the Enlightenment in the early days of the American Republic, as represented by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

I believe in America's heritage of freedom: individual liberty and personal responsibility, a free-market economy of abundance and prosperity, and a foreign policy of non-intervention, peace, and free trade. I’m especially fond of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that allows freedom of speech – especially dissent.

Give me the company of Revolutionary philosopher and writer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) any day. The British-born Paine wrote the pamphlet Common Sense (1776) and argued for America’s complete independence from the United Kingdom. In 1787 he returned to England, where he wrote The Rights of Man (1791-2) in support of the French Revolution.

Give me the company of writer and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) any day. During Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond, he was jailed one night for refusing to pay a poll tax meant to support America's war in Mexico; in 1849 he published an essay on this experience, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, which in its call for passive resistance to unjust laws was to inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thomas Carlyle called it the one truly original American contribution to civilization.

Of course life has changed in America, and not for the better.

Too many Americans are content to walk around like penguins, like trained seals, like
docile maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait.

Too many Americans are content to forfeit critical thinking in favor of uninspired and
degrading Hollywood-produced entertainment.

Too many Americans are content to curse, croon, soliloquize, orate, gesticulate, wheedle,
cajole, whimper, and caterwaul about the impotency to change society.

Too many Americans are content to simply lend their voices to the sound of monkey chatter
in the topmost branches of the trees.

Too many Americans are content to join the cult of onanism and pretend nothing is
wrong.

In America, you may dream, if you dream alike. But if you dream something different you are not in America. The moment you have a different thought, you cease to be an American.

I do not reside in the country of my birth, the country of my loyalty – because of my profession, which now has me based in Bahrain.

Regardless where I reside, I have a genuine contempt for life in an "Enron-Pentagon prison," a land of ballooning budget deficits thanks to the growth of a garrison state, tax cuts for the privileged, and the creeping totalitarianism of the Ashcroft justice department.

To redress the current disastrous political situation the American Empire finds itself in, the United States must stop implementing Foreign Aid with the same disastrous effects as domestic welfare programs. The U.S. currently spends approximately $14 billion per year on foreign aid - far less than most people believe, but still a substantial sum.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has spent more than $400 billion on aid to other countries. But there is little evidence that any of these programs has significantly improved the lives of the people in countries receiving this aid. Instead, foreign aid has typically slowed economic development and created dependence.

On foreign affairs, the United States must cease all colonial-styled adventures, especially in the Middle East. Americans need to acknowledge that the road to peace in this region leads through Jerusalem, and not Baghdad. The United States must suspend its support of Israeli terrorism and work aggressively to guarantee an autonomous state for Palestine.

On domestic issues, the United States should end the war on drugs, which is nothing more than a war on minorities and civil liberties. It's time to re-legalize drugs and let people take responsibility for themselves. Drug abuse is a tragedy and a sickness. Criminal laws only drive the problem underground and put money in the pockets of the criminal class.

Secondly, the country should nationalize health care and natural resources. Equally important, voters should abolish the Electoral College, change the Constitution to make America a parliamentary democracy and break the monopoly of the "Property party," with its two wings: Republican and Democrat.

* * *

BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers was killed and security correspondent Frank Gardner seriously injured in a gun attack in Riyadh yesterday.

The shooting happened in the al-Suwaidi district, near the home of a top wanted militant, as the pair filmed a report about increasing fear among workers in Saudi Arabia and is the latest in a series of attacks on Westerners in the kingdom.

Prince Turki al Faisal, the Saudi ambassador in London, said yesterday's attack only demonstrated "the blind illogical viciousness" of the terrorists.

Predictably, the Saudi ambassador vowed to eradicate this wicked group “whose aim is to destabilise our society and our relationships with other countries.”

The House of Saud should be in supreme panic. Each passing week proves that the government can be destabilized.

On Friday, a statement attributed to Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin, who is alleged to be al-Qaeda's chief in Saudi Arabia and tops the most-wanted list, hailed the recent spike in oil prices that was partly caused by the attacks in the oil-rich kingdom and took pride in the killing of "all infidel hostages" during the al-Khobar carnage.

Three of the al-Khobar killers escaped, while a fourth was wounded and captured. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal gave credence Sunday to reports that the gunmen were allowed to escape.

* * *

Life In Bahrain:

Who Do You Trust?
A former mosque caretaker convicted of sodomising a 14-year-old boy had his sentence reduced from 10 years to three yesterday.

His sentence was cut by the Supreme Appeal Court, which said it was too severe.

The 10-year sentence would have been applicable had the man been a cleric and therefore in a position of trust, said the court.

Note: Since one cannot trust an adult mosque caretaker in Bahrain, his actions aren’t significant.


Up on the Roof
Five Bahraini teenagers are in custody after allegedly sodomising an eleven-year-old Bahraini boy on the rooftop of a building near his Manama home.

The incident is said to have taken place about two months ago. The youths then allegedly threatened the boy to keep quiet, which he did.

They came back to him on Thursday to attempt to rape him again, but this time he fled and told his uncle about the incident, his father told the Gulf Daily News.


All You Need is Love
A pregnant housemaid was jailed for two weeks yesterday for sneaking a man into her employer's house for sex.

The 26-year-old Indonesian was told at the Lower Criminal Court that the sentence would be suspended if she paid a BD1,000 [$2,700] fine.

She admitted helping the man to enter the house without permission and will be deported after completing her sentence.

A 28-year-old Indian car cleaner appeared in court with her but denied a charge of entering the house without permission.

He was convicted and fined BD50 [$135].

The woman said she later realised she was pregnant and told her sponsor last month what had happened.

He handed her over to the police and the car cleaner was also arrested.

Note: Most maids live on the premises of Arab households and have no life of their own; these women are virtual slaves. This woman was offered a jail sentence of 14 days or a fine the equivalent of $2,700. Either way, she will be deported. The Indian car wash fellow was convicted – whatever that means, and fined the equivalent of $135. Why the discrepancy in justice between a woman and a man in this culture? You know the answer: women count for nothing.