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Lefty Brit Reporter Visits Iraq. He Sez, "Screw Saddam".
I got this via Tim BlairJulius Strauss was sceptical about the merits of war - but then he met some of Saddam's victims. Strauss apparently writes for Daily Telegraph, but I got this from an Aussie newspaper. There is something singular about a man who has been severely tortured. Maybe it is the way he struggles against failing eyesight caused by repeated blows to the kidneys. Or his lopsided posture, the result of multiple broken bones that have failed to mend properly. Sometimes there is a tremor in the hands or a twitch, a minuscule outer sign of the torment within. The man who sat opposite me in a small, bare room at the Kurdish border post last week had all the symptoms of a man who had been systematically broken. Slowly, sometimes reluctantly, he relived for me the terror of the 21 months he spent in Saddam Hussein's torture chambers... When I came to autonomous northern Iraq - which, since 1991, has been protected from Saddam's reach by American and British warplanes â I was intensely sceptical of the wisdom of Washington's insistence on deposing Saddam. Its claims of links between al-Qaeda and Baghdad seemed tenuous. As for the assertion that Saddam will soon have the bomb, well, the evidence was pretty flimsy. Indeed, I could have reeled off a host of counter-arguments. At a time when the Western world is entering a long drawn-out struggle against Islamist terrorism, it made little sense to fritter away resources to oust a man whose regime was weaker than ever. A war also risked alienating tens of millions of moderate Muslims whose support would be essential if the threat of Islamist extremism was to be neutered. I agreed with the quietly spoken Muslim men I met in Pakistan, Afghanistan and central Asia who said a Middle East peace deal was a greater priority than ousting Saddam. As long as Palestinians continued to die in the streets, they said, the fires of Islamist extremism would keep burning. I have not renounced these arguments entirely. But after little more than a week in northern Iraq, my eyes have been opened to the sheer scale of savagery that Saddam has unleashed on his people... As the drums of war beat ever louder, I am still unsure of the strategic wisdom of opening a second front in the war against terror. But of the moral rectitude of such a course, there can be no doubt. I guess I can forgive this guy the "drums of war" cliche
Posted by: Patrick Phillips 2003-03-05 |
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