Before President Reagan bombed Libya in 1985, he announced that America “had no quarrel with the Libyan people.'’ Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the Father told the world that the United States “had no quarrel with the Iraqi people'’. Last year Bush the Son, about the strike at the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, told us he “had no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan”. And now that frightening mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr Bush said – absolutely none – with the Iraqi people. So it’s flak jackets on. Continue reading…

…sitting in the United Nations General Assembly last week, watching President Bush Jr tell us with all his Texan passion about the beatings and the whippings and the rapes in Iraq, you would have thought they’d just been discovered. For sheer brazen historical hypocrisy, it would have been difficult to beat that part of the President’s speech. Saddam, it appears, turned into a bad guy when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Before that, he was just a loyal ally of the United States, a “strong man” – as the news agency boys like to call our dictators – rather than a tyrant. Continue reading…

Tony Blair’s “dossier” on Iraq is a shocking document. Reading it can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof - if the contents are true - that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam’s building of weapons of mass destruction are correct - and I will come to the “ifs” and “buts” and “coulds” later - it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us, for nothing. Continue reading…

A point for point response to Bush’s proposed war resolution. Though the text of the passed resolution differs slightly, this analysis remains current and extremely valuable. Read more…

The draft resolution Bush has presented to the Perm Five at the UN Security Council is clearly designed to prevent UN arms inspectors from beginning their work, to encourage Iraq to back away from its commitment to unfettered access for inspectors by significantly raising the bar of what would constitute compliance. It is crafted to make a U.S. or U.S.-British military attack inevitable and cloaked with some kind of United Nations imprimatur. As one European diplomat described it, “This isn’t a resolution for inspections. This is a declaration of war.” Read more…