Here We Go Again

I know we shouldn’t expect the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to sud­denly start acting in a rea­son­able and thought­ful manner, but today they’ve taken things to another level. I mean, even if we set aside, for a moment, the fact that they’re going to ignore the United Nations as and when it suits them, even if we pass over the hap­haz­ard cut-​and-​paste flavour of the evi­dence of Iraq’s weapons pro­gramme [see below], the pro­pa­ganda still doesn’t make any sense.

The thing is, it’s prob­a­bly because the pro­pa­ganda war isn’t their main con­cern any­more; they’ve moved up a step. When you have Donald Rums­feld openly con­demn­ing broadly sym­pa­thetic UN allies such as France and Ger­many, and with Saudia Arabia asking that all Amer­i­can troops be with­drawn upon the ending of mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion of Iraq (which they are cou­pling with some inter­est­ing reforms which might make some moves towards a sem­blance of democ­racy), it doesn’t seem too far fetched to sup­pose that the U.S. want to enter Iraq and install a favourable regime as quickly as pos­si­ble, given that Saudi Arabia might well revise the timescale for the removal of Amer­i­can troops. And the last thing that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion needs is a poten­tial con­flict with Saudi Arabia.

As for the pro­posed regime change, there’s a wor­ry­ing famil­iar­ity about the pro­pos­als. The fact that the sug­gested mil­i­tary gov­er­nor might be Gen­eral Tommy Franks (who pros­e­cuted the “war” in Afghanistan), is wor­ry­ing enough, but not as dis­con­cert­ing as the pos­si­ble “civilian” gov­er­nor favoured for the second phase of Amer­i­can involve­ment in Iraq: Norman Schwarzkopf. Yes, that’s the man who played a major part in killing count­less num­bers of Iraqi cit­i­zens in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. (Although at least they didn’t pick Colin Powell, who, when asked what he thought of the number of Iraqi cit­i­zens killed in the first Gulf war, replied that “It’s really not a number I’m ter­ri­bly inter­ested in”.)

And while we’re on the sub­ject of The War, read and then book­mark the war ticker. (Thanks to The Rub for that par­tic­u­lar link.)

Posted at 11pm on 09/02/03 by Leon McDermott to the politics category.
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