October 01, 2003
Beyond The Pale
Jack Straw, in trying to justify the war on Iraq despite the failure to find any WMD or any programme capable of producing same:
What we're dealing with here is hindsight. What we have to make is judgments about future events. That's what we did ... I think that it was justified then and it is justified now.
Just think for a moment what position the world would have been in and the Iraqi people would have been in if we had failed to take action at that critical moment. The authority of the United Nations would have been gravely weakened.
The Iraqi people would have suffered grievously because Saddam would have re-established his reign of terror worse ever than before.
What in the fuck is this supposed to mean?
What was "critical" about the "moment" chosen for invasion? The invaders said it was because Saddam had "failed to disarm". Who told them that? UNMOVIC? No. Quite to the contrary. In the absence of any "smoking gun" (or any other sort of proof, for that matter) the "critical moment" had nothing to do with the stated justification for the invasion. We can make guesses at what did prompt the specific timing of the invasion, in other words, but it's obvious to those with eyes to see that it was not the sudden appearance of WMD.
Using Straw's logic (maybe it's just too cruel and unusual, when all is said and done, to use the Bush and Blair Administrations' own logic against them -- it's certainly as easy as taking candy from a baby), the Anglo-Americans should have launched the invasion no later than September 24, 2002 -- the date that Tony Blair insisted before the British Parliament "that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes..."
That the Americans and British then spent the next six months dicking off even while they were (for the sake of argument) painfully aware that Saddam was ready and willing to lay an attack upon the United States at any moment should (again, by the Administrations' own logic) be considered an inact of criminal negligence.
Moving along, the assertion that if the "coalition" had not launched its invasion before obtaining Security Council authorisation then, "The authority of the United Nations would have been gravely weakened," is possibly the purest, most textbook example of doublethink ever put on display. But ever!
Finally, the claim that, "The Iraqi people would have suffered grievously because Saddam would have re-established his reign of terror worse ever than before," besides being grammatically and semantically challenged, is contrary to the evidence given in Human Rights Watch's annual country reports for Iraq -- which harshly denounced the Human Rights abuses in Saddam's Iraq, but which, if one cares to read the successive reports from the late-'80s until the time of invasion, clearly demonstrate that Saddam was either incapable of or not willing to "re-establish hs reign of terror worse than ever before".
The magnitude of his crimes steadily declined from their CIA-asset-era peak until Dubya's invasion. A period during which, it should be noted, he was able to remain in power because the Anglo-American sanctions so deprived the populace that it was completely dependent upon the state to survive. That is to say, the sanctions, in addition to killing 5,000 children per month, allowed Saddam to "re-establish his reign of terror", to the extent that he was able to, for well over a decade.
Maybe Straw was merely off his meds. If he wasn't, we can only conclude that he must've been under the influence of some sort of Martian brainwave device.
Posted by Eddie Tews at October 1, 2003 02:47 PM
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