In a message dated 23/12/2002 00:26:18 GMT Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< People say this will make America hated even more within the Arab world, but I don't agree. Saddam is loathed almost universally. He has no support among Islamists, and very little elsewhere - some support in Jordan, some in Palestine, but really it is minimal. People know what he's like. >> This may be true, and it is largely irrelevant. Does anyone believe that bombing a beleaguered country, causing the death of who knows how many civilians, is a way of raising the popularity of "The West" among people in Muslim countries? What if Saddam Hussein isn't killed or deposed (after all he wasn't last time)? How long does the bombing have to continue? When will be enough? Does anyone have any good information as to what a post-Saddam regime might look like? Anyone fancy Saddam's son Uday as the next head of state? Thought not. And as to the idea that deposing Iraq's dictator would inspire people in other nations to rise up and throw off their chains, that is simply laughable. I don't claim to have the answer; my contention is that bombing Iraq isn't it. One suggestion is that we stop selling arms to countries like Iraq. It won't help the situation in Iraq now, but it might help in the future. Then again, that wouldn't ensure votes any time soon, so that's not gonna happen, is it? The UK's economy relies to a very depressing extent on the so-called defence industry. And people in that line of business are very good at denial about the consequences of what they do (and I'm not talking completely out of my hat here, I know someone very well who used to work in the arms trade until very recently). Oh, and the best suggestion I heard about trying to get a good inventory of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" (why don't we use that term about our own weapons) was to check our own records - after all, The West sold most of them to Saddam. That's enough politics from me. Time to get back to slagging off Travelogue... Azeem in London
