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10-26-07, 9:43 am
Growing numbers of US citizens realize that the George W Bush administration has been nothing short of a disaster for them and for their families.
The illegal war that the US president was bent on imposing on Iraq has killed a million Iraqis, trashed their homeland and encouraged sectarian divisions.
And it has also brought about the deaths of 3,838 US troops, while the financial cost to the US taxpayer is already in the vicinity of $500,000 million and could easily rise to £2,000,000,000,000 before Washington accepts that it is involved in a war that it cannot win.
At home in the richest country in the world, as Michael Moore's film SiCKO makes clear, 50 million citizens are not covered by health insurance and life expectancy is below that of Britain and elsewhere.
Child mortality figures are better for a poor Third World country such as Cuba than for Washington, the capital of the world's richest country.
The way forward ought to be clear for all but a demented warmonger and, unfortunately, it's a demented warmonger that the US has as its president.
Instead of acting rationally and ensuring best deployment of its wealth to ensure health and long life for its citizens, the White House is committed to not only continuing its catastrophic occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan but to attacking Iran too.
And rather than examining why Cuba is able to guarantee health care for its people from its, by comparison, meager resources, President Bush launches yet another bile-flecked attack on the socialist island, accusing it of holding down its citizens in a Caribbean gulag.
As he well knows, the only torture camp on Cuban territory is that set up on US-occupied land at Guantanamo Bay.
Far from holding down the Cuban people, the Havana government has armed and trained them to resist any attempt to subvert the island's independence and to return it and its people to the neocolonial status they suffered when Cuba was treated as an exotic brothel/casino for rich US holidaymakers.
The advent of socialism – the free choice of Cuba's people – has brought about changed priorities.
Cuba's internationally recognized advances in medical science, education, sport and agriculture have not simply been enjoyed by Cubans. They have been offered to the poor and dispossessed of the world.
While the US and its British ally offer a future of military domination, occupation and exploitation, the Cubans send doctors, nurses, dieticians, builders, technicians and a host of other professionals to restore the sight of those with cataracts, aid reconstruction work after the Pakistan earthquake or make available their experience in combating illiteracy.
The US attempted to cordon Cuba off from the rest of Latin America to prevent contagious communism from affecting its client states in its back yard.
It failed. All over Latin America, the neoliberalism of the empire has been compared with the socialism of Cuba and the empire has been shamed in the comparison.
Most of the US people now want rid President Bush. They should also ditch neoliberalism with him and start working with Cuba instead of hating and threatening it.
From Morning Star
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