In all of Bush’s 30 minutes of anti-Iraq war talk yesterday – pleasantly leavened with just two minutes of how “I hope this will not require military action” – there wasn’t a single reference to the fact that Iraq may hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stand to gain billions of dollars in the event of a US invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war. We must ignore all this before we go to war. We must forget. Continue reading…

Saddam can open his country to the inspectors; he can open even his presidential palaces. But if he doesn’t accept the use of “Security Council” forces – in other words, US troops – on Iraqi roads, we can go to war. There’s also that other paragraph: that “any permanent member of the Security Council may request to be represented on any inspection team.” In other words, the Americans can demand that their intelligence men can return to become UN inspectors, to pass on their information to the Israelis (which they did before) and to the US military, which used them as forward air controllers for their aircraft once the inspectors were withdrawn. Continue reading…