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Anorak News | Blood For Grease

Blood For Grease

by | 7th, October 2004

‘NOT an elastic band that could have been used to fire paper pellets, not a broken comb that could have acted as a makeshift saw, not a rotten egg that could have let off noxious fumes.

Basra’s branch of Scud U Like closed in 1991

The final report into Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction was published yesterday and the verdict is damning to those who used the supposed threat of these weapons as a pretext for war.

For the past two years, the Guardian says, 1,625 inspectors have searched 1,700 sites in Iraq at a cost of more than $1bn…and have found precisely nothing.

What is more, they have concluded that Saddam eliminated his stocks of WMD in 1991 to try to get UN sanctions lifted (although he did order officials to keep the “intellectual capacity” to produce them if and when sanctions were lifted).

Not only that but, according to the Independent, the Iraqi dictator was less of a threat in 2003 when US and British forces invaded Iraq than in 1998.

Not much there to comfort President Bush and Tony Blair – although we should congratulate Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for at least trying.

The report, he said, “highlights the nature of the threat from Saddam in terms of his intentions and capabilities in even starker terms that we have seen before”.

Another way of saying, we were wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

However, the anti-war countries like France and Russia are not likely to be gloating unduly at the publication of the 1,500-page report either.

The Telegraph says the report explains how Saddam diverted money from the oil-for-food programme to bribe senior politicians and businessmen around the world to try to secure an early lifting of sanctions.

And he focused most of his attention – and cash – on the aforesaid two countries, both of whom are members of the UN Security Council.

“There are a lot of active members of the Security Council who were violating the resolutions that they passed,” a US official tells the paper.

And we can expect US and British to come back to this again and again over the next few days, taking the same line as the Telegraph does in this morning’s editorial.

“If the British and Americans were duped by Saddam,” it says, “the Russian and French had their palms greased by them.”

Or one lot has blood on their hands, the other has grease…’



Posted: 7th, October 2004 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink