A year and a half ago, the following customer review of my biography of Peter Duesberg appeared on Amazon.
An exact analogy (August 29, 2004)
"A number of people have commented here on the similarities between the War on AIDS and the War on Terror. As I learned from the crisp and clear explanatory prose in this book, the Bush presidency and its War on Terror are, in fact, excellent analogies to the HIV/AIDS hypothesis.
Both have been obvious total disasters in terms of practical results. Both are supported by fear, economic and social special interests, shifting-sands rationales, bad data, rhetoric spiced with religious fervor, outright deceptions and worse. Both are rooted in over-specified phantom boogeymen, a harmless virus and a perhaps not so harmless, but certainly elusive Osama, and his Fu Manchu-like shadowy network of (I’ll kill ya!) Al Qaeda.
And yet, 50% of the electorate swallow the War on Terror and even want more, according to the omnipresent polls that should be heavily regulated, or perhaps outlawed since they clearly influence what they are supposed to neutrally report, like poorly designed experiments in biology. With the virus-AIDS hypothesis, it’s worse, an overwhelming majority swallow it, and many to suicidal consequences."
Today, the US Ambassador to the “free and democratic republic of Iraq” gave this assessment:
“Despite much progress, much work remains,” U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey, Jr. said in a joint statement. “The legitimate security forces must quell sectarian violence. Population centers must be secure to allow Iraq’s new institutions to take root and businesses to flourish. Finally, the people must be able to trust their leadership.”
Progress? O, Saddam is gone, one tends to forget. And Tony Fauci and his gang at the NIH have ARVs. But, really, what remains to be done seems an awful lot and does give the lie to the first bold but empty assertion.
I am constantly amazed that the conservative right, which appears to embrace HIV/AIDS criticism more easily than the left does not see this, and even more amazed that the left, which does indeed see through the soiled, tissue paper Washington writes its policies on, cannot see it either.
The Bush administration perverted what might have been a legitimate "war on terrorism" into a misguided, wasteful and dangerous invasion and occupation very much like the "war on AIDS," which should have been part of the "war on drugs" in the US and a "war on poverty" in Africa, became turned into a war on HIV, to the exclusive benefit of a variety of vested interests at the expense of the truth.
It is worth remembering that in both cases the chief device that was employed to lower the bar of proof sufficient for the pig to fly was terror itself.
April 10, 2006
