George 'Macbeth' Bush?

Americans now call it "blow-back", but William Shakespeare put it much more eloquently in Hamlet some four hundred years ago: "But in these cases we still have judgment here; that we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor; this even-handed justice commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice to our own lips".

If George W. Bush is correct in blaming Osama bin Laden for the recent attack on the United States' heartland; then he has his dear old father to blame for financing and arming bin Laden's forces in the 1980s. Furthermore, George Bush senior, before becoming president of the U.S., was director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an organization whose origins lie in the recruitment of Nazi criminals to spy on Russia. The CIA has extensively sponsored terrorism and is considered to be responsible for the deaths of more than six million people around the world.

Before participating in a modern "crusade", as President Bush is, rather gauchely, calling his "war" against terrorism, he might like to reflect on the past failures of American foreign policy that have commended the ingredients of America's poisoned chalice to its own lips, before he unwisely metes out more of the same.

Macbeth, of course, lost his head much more literally than George Bush is currently losing his; but the result was that tyranny, murder and chaos came to an end. Today, likewise, we wait for the growing tyranny of Bush's deadly feud with fanatical elements of the world's oppressed, to come to a rapid end, before we can enjoy the global law and order the U.S. is so steadfastly opposing.

FRANK RICHARDSON

Tangerang, Banten