THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Actually I do care Dys. Despite my reputation here on A2K as a rapid partisan, I decide, and vote, on principles, not labels. I advocate the same for everybody.

Sweeney is like malignant cancer

We've ignored a cancer for years, and it's exploded into our system. Joe Sweeney's been around for 25 years, running for office as a Republican, a Democrat and under other political parties, but always the same sickness.

Sweeney regularly uses insulting terms for Jews and Mexicans such as "wetbacks," "little monkeys," "Bolshevik Zionism" and other terms right out of the fever swamps of racial hatred. The hatred is foul, but the sheer ignorance is absolutely insulting. What have we allowed to grow?

Sweeney beat a fine man, Lou Muñoz, in the District 7 primary to face Rep. Raúl Grijalva. He won by keeping silent and letting residual name-identification work for him. Also, Sweeney knew the newspapers would ignore him the way they always have.

The Star endorsed Muñoz but was largely silent on Sweeney. Journalism failed its calling. And we've all failed by ignoring the tumor in our midst.

I denounce Sweeney and everything he stands for. Sharing a ballot and a political party with Sweeney repels me. I consider him an ignorant racist and wonder how he got this far.

Bill Heuisler

Candidate for Pima County assessor, Tucson

I guess what I'm saying is, I take letters like Hueisler wrote with a grain of salt until it is affirmed by other sources. Mesquite may already know of such affirmation; however, the rest of us, unfamiliar with the issues, don't.

The only congregations in New Mexico that have been reported as signing up voters to vote along with instructions of who to vote for have been minority churches and it has been Kerry supporters leading those initiatives.

As for the Pope, he's between a rock and a hard place isn't he? Against abortion and against the war. Gonna be tough for him to take a side.

As for the 700 Club and other television programs, I wonder if Revel has as much problem with Hollywood types organizing to defeat Bush....they have a lot more influence and a much broader forum to exert it. Or is it just Christians who aren't supposed to have an opinion or point of view?

And Ican, the only thing I can figure is that the only moral war is one that the Democrats start and run.

The Wrap: A worm's eye view

Monday October 11, 2004

Andrew Brown is shocked by the latest revelations about Saddam Hussein's behaviour
Hold the front page! Like the Times and the Telegraph, I am shocked almost beyond words, and certainly far beyond thought, by the discovery that Saddam Hussein was so unimaginably depraved that he not only gassed his enemies, tortured his victims, killed millions of innocent people, and had a thriving programme to manufacture programmes of capability related to weapons of mass destruction, but he was also prepared to use money to further his evil aims.

This, surely, is the real scandal. As the Telegraph puts it in a leader: "If the report is embarrassing for the British and US governments, for those of Russia, France and China, it is damning. Saddam used cash stolen from the UN's flawed oil-for-food programme to induce these permanent members of the security council to thwart their Anglo-American allies. The motives of those states that went to war emerge as far less tainted than those that opposed it. If the British and Americans were duped by Saddam, the Russians and French had their palms greased by him."

This makes a number of things immediately clear. First, that Saddam himself was entirely responsible for the war: he duped us into attacking him, overthrowing his regime, killing his sons and imprisoning him, and we are powerless to prevent the final triumph of his plan to dominate the Middle East, which will come when the Allawi regime has him executed. A plan of such fiendish cunning makes it obvious that the world is better off without him. How lucky we are to have in George W Bush a leader who is fully his equal in strategic planning.

More important is the unprecedented evil of his attempt to bribe foreign governments and politicians in order to further his foreign policy. We don't know whether any of these attempts actually succeeded. But we know they were made, because the accusations come from a source with a proven track record: Ahmed Chalabi, whose men seized these records from Iraqi government ministries back when he was the Pentagon's man in Iraq, and have kindly made copies available to anyone interested.

The UN hasn't, of course, examined the originals. No outsider has. But Mr Chalabi's credentials as a supplier of intelligence are a matter of historical record and heartfelt testimonials may be obtained on application from the CIA, the Pentagon, the Iraq Survey Group and the government in Tehran.

The Telegraph, at least, has no more doubts over the story of Saddam's attempted bribery than it once had over the information that Mr Chalabi supplied about Saddam's WMD: "If anything, the report reinforces the case for regime change, by demonstrating the malign influence that Saddam's Iraq exerted over the entire international system. His capacity for genocide had indeed decayed, but by 2003 ... Saddam was more dangerous than ever before."

When you look around the promoters of this war, it is easy to understand how none of them could have imagined that Saddam would stoop to using bribery to further his ends. After all, their experience is almost entirely as recipients of this kind of thing rather than as distributors.

There are exceptions to this rule: there was an aid package to Turkey just before the war broke out, which the Telegraph reported at the time was worth GBP10bn. But since the Turks declined to enter the war, it was never paid. So that's all right. Pakistan is getting about USD3bn in aid agreed since September 11. But at least none of this is paid in slimy oil.

No one with any experience of American politics could suppose that the Halliburton corporation expects any favours from vice-president Cheney, or that any of the corporate contributors to political campaigns act except from patriotism or are rewarded except with virtue. The career of our own Sir Mark Thatcher shows how ludicrous is the idea that influence could be exchanged for cash, and no Englishman could even understand it, let alone seek to profit from it.

Indeed, the Telegraph's leader writer need only look at the owners of his own paper, and consider how greatly the moral authority of Lord and Lady Black has grown and with how much more respect their views are heard now that they have only the force of argument to recommend them, and are not clouded by the several hundred million dollars that they once appeared to own.

The thought that this kind of corruption might penetrate to the heart of the Anglo-American alliance and that men like Richard Perle or Henry Kissinger could take money from foreign governments would be terrifying, were it not so absurd. But if there were ever the slightest danger that this might happen, we would have to exert our utmost force to defeat it.

If ever an argument was needed to show conclusively that Saddam Hussein was such a danger to civilisation that he must be overthrown at once, the Iraq Survey Group has provided it. I can't imagine why it took so long for the Telegraph to realise this.

* Andrew Brown is the author of The Darwin Wars: The Scientific War for the Soul of Man and In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. He also maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog

JOHN KERRY IS A PURVEYOR OF FAIRY TALES (I.E., KERRY IS A CHARLATAN)

John Kerry spent at least the six months preceeding the first debate claiming in both speech and TV ads that George Bush is a liar. When asked in the first debate to explain this claim of his, he declared he never accused George Bush of lying. Two days after the first debate, John Kerry released a TV ad claiming Bush was a liar.

Some nice reading from the Guardian's online (subscription) edition:

Quote:

nothing like a little perspective, eh, walter?

thanks !

Al Qaeda in both countries trained people to murder innocent people.