FWers might be interested in a letter I wrote to day to the Daily Telegraph and also to the writer of an article referred to below.
Keith Hudson >>>> Dr John Casey, Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Dear John Casey, "There is no justification for waging war against Iraq" I agree with your above article in today’s Daily Telegraph. But have you not considered that the reason for the war-talk has less to do with Iraq but with the condition of Saudi Arabia? There is little direct evidence about the situation within Saudi Arabia but reports from the few who have been able to travel around the country agree on one thing: that the country is at the point of insurrection, either by the fundamentalists or by the frustrated intelligentsia (or both, initially). There are over a million young men without a job and besides being in a wretched condition are also without any possibility of saving for a dowry in order to get married. (A recent Channel 4 documentary talked of a brief uprising in Jeddah by 300 young men which was put down by the security forces.) State benefits to poor families have declined from $25,000 to $7,000 p.a. in the last few years. I believe that America is looking for an excuse to land a sizeable force in southern Iraq within the next few months in order to be on hand when Saudi Arabia implodes. Otherwise, if American troops in sufficient numbers are not nearby, Saddam Hussein would undoubtedly roll his tanks right through Kuwait to occupy the Saudi Arabian oil fields. He could probably do this within a couple of weeks. America could not employ nuclear weapons (or sufficient numbers of conventional missiles) against the Iraqi troops during the attack because they would be too dispersed, and they could not bomb the Iraqi troops when at the oil wells because because 13% of American imports come from Saudi Arabia and the US economy would thereby be in jeopardy. This seems to me to be the only reason for the recent turn of policy. Yours sincerely, Keith Hudson >>>> __________________________________________________________ “Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.” John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
