I didn’t hear Bush this morning, I did read his talk of yesterday. . . It begins by saying that George Bush called the broader war on terror, “the inescapable calling of our generation,” warning that “human civilization itself is at stake.”

Now he doesn’t remember, because he was probably drunk at a frat party at Yale at the time, but the people around him . . . they wrote the same words for his colleagues over 20 years ago, back in 1981, when they came into office. . . and immediately opened by declaring a war on terror, which we had to battle relentlessly. And they fought that war on terror, for the first 12 years they were in office, and they’ve picked it up again.

Our friends from the FMLN [the national liberation movement in El Salvador] can tell us about it. They were one of the prime targets of the war on terror. Actually, his talk reminded me of a painting I have in my office, given to me by a Jesuit priest, who painted it. It’s a painting of the Angel of Death holding a scythe. Below him is a portrait of archbishop Romero. His assassination opened that great decade.

And El Salvador was only one target. They “only” had about 70,000 people slaughtered in the war on terror. In the rest of Central America, it added up to maybe 200,000.

. . . Somebody has a sign there, saying “Bush is the Real Terrorist.” Well, actually, he’s a convicted terrorist, and his accomplices. It’s the only government in history that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism, namely the attack against Nicaragua.. . And Central America’s only one of the places where they waged the war on terror.

They also waged it, for example, in Southern Africa. During the Reagan years there was a policy called, “constructive engagement,” with . . . [the] South African apartheid regime. During just those years of “constructive engagement,” the South African regime killed about a million and a half people. . .

HYPOCRISY IN IRAQ

As soon as Saddam Hussein came in, Britain and the United States of course immediately supported him. In 1982, the US took Iraq off the terrorist list.. . so that the US could provide him freely with arms, badly needed agricultural aid, dual use technology to produce Weapons of Mass Destruction . . .

Now you hear Bush and Blair and Rice and other hypocrites, talking about the terrible atrocities and the mass graves and so on and so forth. Yeah, they knew all about it. And they continued to support him. . . He was a valued ally. And was good for US business, as they pointed out.

Then comes 10 years of sanctions, which . . . by the most conservative measures, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, devastated the society, strengthened the tyrant, compelled the population to rely on him for survival. Otherwise he probably who have been overthrown a long time ago by the population of Iraq.

. . .The people of Iraq… I’m not talking about the bombers… I’m talking about the general population, are steadfastly refusing to be returned to the colonial status the current imperial overlord is preparing for them. And it’s quite a struggle. And the important thing for us, is that it’s a struggle [in which] we can determine the outcome . . .

The orders which open, forcefully, the Iraqi economy up to foreign takeover by US, Canadian, British multinationals – I mean that undermine any hope for authentic democracy and sovereignty, and also for economic development – those orders are coming from our governments. We can stop them.

I’ll just end by saying, as you all know, this is the second of the huge mass demonstrations against the war, now the occupation, in Iraq. The first one was immediately before the war. It was unprecedented. There had never been anything like it in the whole history of European imperialism, hundreds of years – Europe, I include the United States and Canada. . . This is the first time there had ever been mass popular protest against a war before it was launched.