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IRAQ: A Simplistic View for Simpletons

Friday, April 4, 2003
(00:52)

By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchley
Pravda.Ru

If Iraqi TV shows pictures of American prisoners of war, so does CNN show Iraqi p-o-w-s. If Bush complains that Iraqi soldiers masquerade as civilians, so do CIA operationals working undercover. Neither side is going to sport a target, fix an arrow over their heads with a sign ?Look! I-m a danger man! Shoot me!

For George Bush, or so it would seem, the war in Iraq could not be more simple. If Saddam Hussein-s Ba-ath regime is not in favour of the USA (gaining control of his country-s mineral resources by proxy and establishing a strategic stronghold in the region) then it against Washington and therefore must be eliminated as a threat to national security. This is the simplistic view, for simpletons.

In practice, it gets more complicated. For the Iraqi regime to be eliminated, it is necessary to find a pretext. There weren-t any. Therefore it was necessary to invent one, and they did. First there was Powell-s ?hard evidence¦ that Iraq had WMD (based on the infamous British intelligence report, copied from a 12-year-old text) and then it was the forged documents presented to the UNO, claiming that Niger had exported yellowcake uranium to Iraq illegally, dismissed by Mohamed El-Baradei as forgeries.

On the diplomatic front, the UN Security Council made it clear that it would not support a motion for war due to the lack of pretexts. Hard as they tried, they were not able to find a link between the Iraqi regime and international terrorism, except some obscure groups in Northern Iraq way out of Saddam Hussein-s reach and well within the no-fly zones policed by the USA.

An intelligent decision would have been to realise that there was neither a pretext for war, nor was the moment right for a coup de theatre on the diplomatic stage. However, when people of the calibre of Bush and Rumsfeld are involved, an intelligent decision is not usually forthcoming and in this case, the worst possible course of action was taken.
(More: Pravda Online)
2003 © Pravda.Ru.

I thought lil' Timmy was kinda funny. It seems there are regions of the Iraq termed as badlands, where laws simply cannot exist (because that's the way Iraq likes it). Therefore, though al-Qai'da have been found within the bourders of Iraq, they're really not there -- because Hussein says the regions are nulled -- and also make excellent test areas for his WMD (which never existed).
Dan