It's war, apparently

(Written 1/10/2002 - before the invasion of Iraq. In hindsight, I wish I'd circulated it more widely than just within the small group that I contribute to. Even if he'd read it, I doubt Tony Blair would have been influenced, but at least there might have been more people shouting "You're a liar!")

Be honest, did you think I could keep quiet?

Tony has delivered the dossier, and it proves that a certain S. Hussein (a butcher of Baghdad) is a very dangerous person. Except.... we've been watching Iraq via satellite and spy plane for some years now. Whenever the Iraqi military have made a move, we knew. If a plane took off, we knew. Whenever a factory seemed to produce something that it shouldn't, we bombed it.

If Saddam has managed to build up "weapons of mass destruction", he's been damn clever, and the US and UK security services should be handing in their resignations en masse.

A little thought, divorced from the rhetoric that has been handed down, might set things in perspective, I feel. Maybe I'm wrong, always happy to be, but even my rudimentary knowledge makes me uncertain about some of the "facts" we've been handed.

Like - nukes? Forget it. Plutonium can't be bought, it's the most expensive substance in the known Universe, it can't be moved without extensive precautions and quite a lot of people knowing. Satellites spot it quite easily. Uranium isn't too hard to buy in "yellowcake" form (5% uranium in some other crud), it takes several years to process into plutonium, and any dictator wishing to do so would need a large plant, a huge supply of electricity, lots of specialist machinery (cyclotrons are best, that's why cyclotrons appear on the list of "things that Iraq may NOT order from scientists"), and quite a lot of security measures - guards, barbed wire, searchlights, regular patrols, that kind of thing.

Crikey, if we've missed an installation that size, we ought to be asking for our money back from Satellites-R-Us...

He can make chemical weapons though, can't he? Well, if he can, the list of "things that Iraq may NOT ask Boots to deliver" needs updating. After the Gulf War, the weapons inspectors proved that Hussein had Sarin and VX available, and also reported that he'd bought the raw materials from Germany - really, the Germans ought to have known better... The weapons inspectors destroyed such stocks of chemical weapons that they could find. And nobody ever wondered why Hussein chose not to deploy them during the Gulf War. Nobody except me, it seems.

It wouldn't have been from humanitarian grounds, after all, he used them on his own people, apparently. That leaves me thinking that:

1) He didn't have a targetable delivery system – wait, I’m getting to that – or

2) They didn't work.

Still, he's got the biological stuff - except that he doesn't have the technology to make any more of it, 'cos we bombed all his technology, and continue to bomb anything that looks like a weapons factory. The biological weapons he may have had suffer from degradation (military talk for "bacteria tend to eat each other when confined to a warhead with nothing else to eat"), so if he has old biological weapons, they're filled with gunge. Fairly safe gunge, too.

Mind you, I’m told he's got all these underground factories that the satellites can't see. Goodness knows what's being made down there!

Er - made by people who have to be fed and watered. So they need supplies. Even I can recognise that a road that stops in the middle of nowhere must lead to something. Especially if lots of lorries go down it, stop for a while, then go back. If the people who are watching Iraq haven't noticed that, they should be issued with white canes.

Hussein is a bad person. He's killed and ordered the killing of many people, seemingly indiscriminately. But when I'm handed propaganda of such a farcical nature, I wonder why there is such a desperate need to convince me that "the free world" is in danger. So he's got 20 Al-Hussein missiles? They can reach Cyprus... but they can't be targeted, so he couldn't hit Cyprus if it was nailed to a barn door.

I refuse to add my voice to those who would call for an attack on Iraq until Blair and Bush stop treating me like a stupid person. If Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction, he'll need to have a delivery system. If he's developing rockets, they have to be tested somewhere. On the ground, they'd be spotted immediately. Underground, the exhaust gases have to be vented somewhere - where they'd be spotted immediately. And how can you test for targeting without a ground to air test?

Of course, he could send suicide agents to the US, the UK, or any other country, bringing "dirty nukes", anthrax sprays and the like in their suitcases. However, it would be a great deal easier to send those agents in unarmed and get them to put together the bombs/sprays in the country of his choice. So searching Iraq for WMD would be useless - it would be like searching Afghanistan for the 9/11 conspirators in the days, weeks or months before that tragedy.

As we move towards war (Bush needs to do it for his Daddy, and the oil companies that would dearly love to have a stake in the Middle East, Blair knows what the Falklands did for M Thatcher in her second term) I have a question that doesn't seem to have been asked.

What happens after Hussein has been got rid of?

Free and fair elections? That will be a novelty in a country that has never embraced democracy and chooses its leaders on the "last one standing when the smoke clears" principle. And, given their numbers, what if the Kurds get power? Ooh, Turkey will love that. Will members of the Hussein family be allowed to stand for election, I wonder? Hussein heads a political party, what if they are elected and invite him back?

Even if Iraq has nukes, whatever happened to "mutually assured destruction"? It worked with the USSR.

Oh - but they didn't have much oil.