What the hell is wrong with us?
As I said I'm in favour of the war. We had to do it and someone should have done it years ago. And it's a great result. Allied troops have freed a country in less time than it takes those greasy bastards at the UN to decide on a menu for one of their expense-account banquets.
Still, three weeks or not, it's been a nightmare. And while I can just about bear the thought
of people being killed and maimed so that other people won't be tortured or killed by chemical and biological weapons,
I can't bear the thought of people making a profit out of these things, and I don't particularly want it to happen again if it can possibly be avoided.
So it was with - disgust? Despair? A jaded sense of quelle fucking surprise? - that I read that Britain has exported possible chemical weapons precursors, night-vision equipment, and any amount of guns to Syria. Saddam is thought to have smuggled in many of the ingredients for his WMD programme via Syria, and night-vision equipment is exactly what the Syrians are accused of supplying to the Iraqis in the middle of the present war. So British troops could well have been facing an enemy armed with British-made weapons. And as it is we were facing one armed largely by our supposed friends in France, Russia and Germany.
Enough already. What is wrong with us that we continue to put up with shit like this? The British government not only encourages the arms trade, it accepts huge political donations from the industry and showers honours on arms sellers, and it's the same story in other Western countries. Cynics say that exporting arms to noxious regimes brings us influence with them. As the past few months have shown, it doesn't, and as the past few weeks have shown, the only influence worth a damn is that which comes from having better weapons than the other bastards.
Anyone who sells arms to any country other than his own is a fucking traitor and a profiter from death and should be shunned by civilized society. Any politician who has any connection with them is scum and should not get anyone's vote. Any country which exports arms should be treated as international pariahs.
At the next elections one question should be put repeatedly to all politicians: are you for or against the arms trade? And if the latter, what do you intend to do about it?
And I trust that one of the freedoms the Kurds will now be able to enjoy is access to lawyers, and I hope they launch a big fat class-action suit against any companies that helped Saddam build his chemical weapons and any politician who permitted it.
The horror, the horror
'I have seen some sights in this war but nothing which has sickened me as much as this. I watch in disbelief while American troops stand by and do nothing as the people of Baghdad steal paper-clips from the office of the former head of the Secret Police. My stomach churned in revulsion as smiling Iraqis tooled gormlessly around abandoned palaces in mobs of two or three, not even wiping their feet as they entered, and stole house-plants and ashtrays. Saddam may have been a dictator, but what did his furniture do to deserve falling into the hands of uncultured oafs such as these? I asked an American Colonel what he intended to do about this holocaust. His answer? "I couldn't give a flying fuck, you deranged fucking bastard." The only bright side of this apocalypse is that the Iraqis have so far confined their looting to the edifices of their former oppressors, but it can only be a matter of time before they start breaking into private houses and eating the occupants. This is Rageh Omar for the BBC, with a Kurtz-like whisper of "Exterminate all the brutes.'' '
11th April 03
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