Having called on the recent Guardian article by Mo Mowlam (ex-UK Gov't Minister) in aid to my hypothesis (that an Iraq invasion is only a subsidiary aspect of Bush's Middle East policy), I'd like to call on another.
In an interesting article in this week-end's Financial Times, Sir Michael Howard, President of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and formerly Professor of Modern History at Oxford U., says much the same -- that Bush is attacking Iraq by default. That is, Saddam Hussein happens to be the handiest pretext for a generalised campaign against Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab countries. Saddam is already sufficiently of a "baddie" in the public eye to be a prime target, even though Iraq has had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda network. However, Michael Howard doesn't make a more particular point, which I think he ought to have done. This is that in raising tension to such a high pitch all over the Middle East, Bush and Co would have realised that the country that could do him the most damage is not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia. One possible consequence of landing troops in Kuwait in preparation to invading Iraq could be a fundamentalist uprising in SA and the shutting down of oil supplies to America -- which would wreck America's economy if continued for more than a few weeks. This must have been considered by Bush's strategy team, so, in that sense, Howard's hypothesis is only a slightly more generalised version than mine. Anyway, here's a short section from his article: <<<< Now [America] is poised on the brink of war against Iraq, a state whose connection with the events of September 11 is at best remote, and seems prepared to wage it against the advice, not just of its western allies and most of the other states normally taken to be the "international community", but virtually the entire Arab world. Even in Britain, America's most loyal ally, the widespread doubts expressed by experts in the fields of military and international -- not to mention legal and ethical -- affairs suggest that any participation in such a war would divide the nation as profoundly as did the disastrous Suez adventure in 1956. So why is the US apparently operating on a different wavelength from the rest of the world? There is one very simple answer. Ever since September 11, Americans have felt themselves to be at war. Their emotion is not just the stunned anger felt after Pearl Harbour. It has more in common with the high-minded spirit of crusade that swept the nations of Europe so disastrously in August 1914. But it is not enough to be at war with an abstract entity described by their president as "Terror". They need a specific adversary who embodies the spirit of evil against whom national sentiment can be mobilised, as it was mobilised against Hitler in 1941. Osama bin Laden proved too evasive and evanescent a figure to provide the necessary catharsis, but prominent among the usual suspect was Saddam Hussein. There was little evidence to link him with this particular crime, but he was a bad guy, with whom many members of the Bush administration had unfinished business. [Saddam] was in default of his UN obligations; he was almost certainly manufacturing chemical and biological, if not nuclear, weapons that might fall into the hands of the Al Qaeda or its associates; he treated his own people abominably; and he was a clear danger to America's ally, Israel. [Saddam] was, in short, the most powerful and dangerous figure among the declared enemies of the US, which in itself gave them the right -- indeed the duty -- to destroy him. >>>> Keith Hudson ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
