2003-02-21 10:47 pm

No U Turn

I'm sick and tired of Blair's piecemeal moralising, and I'm sick and tired of the man setting himself up against Saddam and asking us who we would rather listen to, or blame. People in the anti-war movement spend more time criticizing Blair than Saddam because we have higher expectations of Blair. It's not because we think Saddam is kind of hard done by, or a "nice chap really, if only we'd listen to him". That freak Rumsfeld has been coming up with some choice ones lately, as well. His pseudo-macho rejoinder "I don't do numbers" when asked about how many troops were in the Gulf was about the most perspicacious thing I've heard the man say. He certainly doesn't do numbers, doesn't countenance them, or hides from them. Certainly he'll be hiding from the number 1,000,000 - the estimated number of under five year olds who will die when war destroys the fragile aid network that our sanctions have forced on the innocent Iraqi population. Presumably when Blair was weighing up the moral pros and cons of war he said to himself:

"Well, OK. Here on the cons side we have a/ 1,000,000 dead children, b/ Hell, there's probably more but that's enough to go on for the moment. On the other side, the pros ... well, we have the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein, half of which is caused by the tyrant himself, and half of which is caused by our sanctions (better not mention that) which render the population dependent on the very government that we ought to be trying to free them from (but it's Saddam's fault the sanctions are in place - if he'd just change then they wouldn't need sanctions, and if he'd just change then the war wouldn't happen - no, hang on, can't say that, the "Saddam can change" argument is the woolley religious view ... better not mention why the sanctions are there at all). And if the Iraqi people are not dependent on the UN/Iraqi government for their food and basic living essentials, then at the best they're too weak and concerned with the struggle to get from one day to the next to mount anything approaching an effective opposition movement. OK, so that's the pros sorted. What were the cons again? Don't seem to recall ... I'm sure they were very reasonable, after all, nobody wants war, least of all me."

Angry angry angry. I know this is all rant. I feel sick, and ashamed to be a person. How egotistical of me to suppose that how I feel makes a flying fuck of a difference.

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