Betalogue

It is becoming clearer and clearer that the US and UK administrations have little or no evidence to support their assertions that 1) Iraq has a massive arsenal of arms of mass destruction; 2) Iraq has ties with terrorists groups such as al-Quaeda.

On Saturday, a report in The Guardian revealed that the “evidence” used by British intelligence to justify claims that Saddam Hussein has been trying to import uranium for a bomb was fake.

“UK nuclear evidence a fake“

What this kind of stuff is telling us quite clearly is that the US and UK administrations are lying to us. I understand that there might be evidence that cannot be shared with the general public for security reasons — but the US and the UK claim to have shared it with the administrations of other Security Council nations. Yet these other nations remain strongly opposed to war — which would indicate that whatever secret evidence that they might have shared with other administrations is not very convincing, to say the least.

What I find mind-boggling is why these other nations don’t say quite clearly: Look, your evidence is inconclusive/fake/made up. If you want to convince us that this is a just cause, you need to come up with something else.

Instead, they continue to argue about this and that, and the US administration continues to repeat the same unsubstantiated assertions that “Saddam has not disarmed” and “Saddam has ties with terrorists”.

Why don’t people just respond: “OK, then prove it to us!”

If “diplomacy” cannot make room for such simple, obvious questions, then what’s the point of even discussing anything?

Once again, it is clear to me that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator. But it is also quite clear to me that the US and UK administrations are lying to us and giving us reasons that are not valid.

You want to rid the world of evil dictators? OK, cool. Then let’s start a list. Let’s discuss how we go about doing this. Let’s agree on a united approach. Why should you get to decide who’s more evil than whom? Is your goal world peace, or world domination? These are not quite the same…

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, March 12th, 2003 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.