In the many Chinatowns of American metropolises, it is standard practice for the waiter to serve the so-called fortune cookies after meal, which are quite simply biscuits with a wish or a piece of advice inside.

"Legend" has it that fortune cookies originate in San Francisco, and they may not be found in China. Still, if President Bush, set to visit Beijing this week, was to be treated to fortune cookies by his Chinese host, the message for him could very well range from unlucky to downright disastrous.

When Bush and his neo-con right-hand men deemed it necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power, they trumped up the charges that the former tyrant continued to stock his arsenal with weapons of mass destruction. Flurries of US apologists went along with the hawkish argument, conveniently ignoring a warning by Professor David Campbell that one of the biggest lies in war is the oft-repeated propaganda that the only party capable of committing the most horrific crimes against humanity is the enemy.

As Bush and his PR men worldwide were treading cockily on their moral high ground and dismissing the possibility of top US officials being responsible for war crimes - any accusation as such was nothing but invidious attempt to paint the all-powerful and just nation in a bad light - the trouble was already in the making.

After the war, Bush and his allies have been having a tough time trying to substantiate the WMD claims, which are now proven to be fabricated. But this is not the worst.
On November 8, 2005, Italy's RAI News 24 ran an investigative story, Fallujah: The Concealed Massacre, which showed that the US government used unconventional weapons in a massacre in Iraq in November 2004, an allegation that is similar to the charge for which Saddam Hussein now stands accused.

RAI's revelation may be shocking, but it was not the first. As early as mid November last year, Islam Online had already reported that US troops were allegedly using 'chemical weapons and poisonous gas' in Fallujah.

Video footage

Keeping in mind an advice by many a US-friendly commentator that one must always take anti-American information with a pinch of salt, I searched for clarifications from the US government, and found that the Department of Defense categorically denied 'the use of chemical weapons at anytime in Iraq, which includes the ongoing Fallujah operation' on 9 December 2004.

This time, the Americans found it harder to refute the claims by RAI, as the TV report contains video footage, available on the BBC, of a former US soldier in Iraq, who told RAI correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci the following:

"I received the order 'use caution' because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete'. Phosphorus burns the human body on contact - it even melts it right down to the bone."

After the Independent carried the news, Robert Tuttle, the US ambassador to London, wrote a letter to the British newspaper, stressing that "US forces do not use napalm or white phosphorus as weapons".

His Excellency could not have been more wrong, as Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Venable of the Pentagon admitted to BBC Radio 4 the next day that phosphorous bombs were deployed against insurgents in Iraq last year, while rejecting claims that they were used against civilians.

The Pentagon spokesman was quite right in clarifying that Willy Pete is not listed in the schedules of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can be legally used as a flare to illuminate the battlefield, or to produce smoke to hide troop movements from the enemy. Be so as it may, it immediately becomes a chemical weapon once used directly against non-combatants.

However, white phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, ie. obscuring troop movements and 'as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes'.

So, why the denial by the Department of Defense last December?

"It was based on poor information." Venable conceded.

But when one thinks that it is the critics of the Bush administration that had been deceived, think again.

Minister lied to

Alarmed by the WMD allegations against the US, Alice Mahon, a Labour MP, asked the British Defence Minister Adam Ingram in December 2004 as to whether napalm or a similar substance had been used by the coalition in Iraq during and since the Iraq war. Ingram, in reply, dismissed all the questions firmly and categorically. He also denied the charges that the US had used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq. Like his boss Tony Blair, Ingram was a man devoid of doubt.

Six months later in June 2005, the Independent obtained a private letter of Ingram to Harry Cohen, another Labour MP, in which the minister confessed that he had been lied to by his US counterparts, as a result of which he inadvertently misled Parliament. The fact is, 30 MK77 firebombs were indeed used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003 against military targets.

"I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position." So said a rueful Ingram.

This prompted Mike Lewis of the Iraq Analysis Group, which campaigned against the Iraq war, to accuse the US of using internationally reviled weapons that Britain refused to use, while keeping British officials in the dark.

Lewis also said the British minister could have expressed his indignity earlier if not for the fact that there was a general election for Blair to fight in May this year, and, being a loyal servant, Ingram had hoped to save the prime minister a major embarrassment.

If the closest ally could have been misled, how much more so with US apologists worldwide who are not even anywhere near the inner circle in the White House?

All this of course leads to the question as to how much weight London, enchanted by the delusion of its "special relationship" with Washington, actually carries in influencing American policy.

Envoy's memoirs

Early this month, Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador to the US in the run-up to the Iraq war, published his memoirs, entitled DC Confidential, in which Blair is made out to be a vainglorious leader spell-bound by American power, "firmly wedded to the Clinton proposition that, to have influence in Washington, it was necessary to hug the Americans close and that the world would inevitably be a better place without Saddam Hussein".

But such superstitious belief in a special relationship does not necessarily translate into substantive influence on the part of the British vis vis the Americans. Rather, it would now seem that Blair is too deeply mired in the strategic morass created by the neocons in Washington that he is finding it impossible to retreat.

There is always a silver lining amidst the darkest cloud. For all his cookies of misfortune, Bush shall be glad to know that Downing Street appears determined to go through thin and thick with him. John Reid, the British Defence Secretary, has just announced that 4,800 troops will be dispatched to Afghanistan, "allegedly to wipe out the world's most lucrative opium trade and bring democracy, stability and protection to southern Afghanistan", according to Simon Jenkins of the Guardian.

But other US allies are having a second thought. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, told the media last week that he had never been convinced war was the best way to make a country democratic, and had tried to dissuade Bush from launching military offensive against Iraq. Berculsconi is set to face the electorate April next year, and public sentiments agaisnt Italian troops being stationed in Iraq could only harden following the gory clips of RAI.

And if Bush is banking on a change of stance by Germany with the swearing in of the right-leaning Angela Merkel (left) as Chancellor, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the incoming foreign minister from the centre-left Social Democratic Party has just made clear there would be no change of course in Germany's policy towards Iraq.

Nevertheless, the admission to the use of white phosphorus by the Pentagon deserves international commendation. It is better than to adhere to a set of moral beliefs which lures the Bush administration and its apologists into seeing themselves as acolytes committed to a virginal purity as they genuflect before the altar of the Manifest Destiny.

The question now is: who is in a position to put the US on trial for crimes against humanity?