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Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Fisk: We are being set up for a war against Saddam
(Robert Fisk, The Independent, 04 December 2002)
asked me when America would go to war in Iraq. I told her to watch the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post for the first smear campaigns against the UN inspectors. And bingo, right on time, the smears have begun. . . . One of the UN inspectors, it's now stated – a man appointed at the behest of the State Department – is involved with pornography. Another senior official, we're now told – again appointed at the urging of the State Department – was previously fired from his job as head of a nuclear safety agency. Why, I wonder, did the Americans want these men on the inspection team? So they could trash it later? . . . Now President George Bush is banging on again about the Iraqi anti-aircraft defences firing at American and British pilots – even though the no-fly zones have nothing to do with the UN inspections nor, indeed, anything to do with the UN at all. The inspections appear to be going unhindered in Baghdad. And what does George Bush tell us? "So far the signs are not encouraging." . . . What does this mean? Simply that America plans to go to war whatever the UN inspectors find. . . . And yet again, the Americans are trying to establish links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in a desperate attempt to hitch the "war on terror" to the war for oil (which is what, of course, the Iraqi "crisis" is all about). Vice President Cheney has been parroting all the same nonsense about "terror" leaders and Saddam, even though Bin Laden loathes the Iraqi leader. No one – absolutely no one – has produced the slightest evidence that Saddam had anything to do with the international crimes against humanity of 11 September. . . . Take Kenneth Adelman, who is on the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board. He's been saying that for Mr Bush to call Islam a peaceful religion "is an increasingly hard argument to make". Islam is "militaristic" in the eyes of Mr Adelman. "After all, its founder, Mohammed, was a warrior, not a peace advocate like Jesus." . . . Jerry Falwell, one of the nasties of the religious right, called the Prophet a "terrorist", while Franklin Graham, son of the same Billy Graham who made those anti-Semitic remarks on the Nixon tapes, has called Islam "evil". And Graham, remember, spoke at Bush's inauguration. . . . We ignore all this dangerous rhetoric at our peril. Does Mr Blair ignore it? Isn't he aware that there are some very sinister people hovering around George Bush? . . . No, I rather think that we are being set up for war, that Britain will join America in invading Iraq, whatever the inspectors discover. In fact, we are being prepared for the awful, incredible, unspeakable possibility that the UN inspectors will find absolutely no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That will leave us with only one conclusion: they were no good at their job. They should have been in the oil business.

posted by Lorenzo 1:02 PM