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EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
day: ‘They are everywhere, and they are going
off periodically. We don’t even have to touch
them – they just go off by themselves, especially
as the temperature rises throughout the day.’”
Why do Iraqis resist?
WHY would some Iraqis not be jubilant, or put
another way, why has there been continued
resistance despite reports and rumors of Saddam’s
demise by decapitation strike. United
Press International (UPI) carries this report
from an Indian businessman who knows Iraq
well. File this report in the department of unexplored
news angles: “Why should the Iraqi people
feel any gratitude or loyalty to President
Saddam Hussein? You would not know it from
anything that has been written in the U.S. or
British media, but there are very good reasons.
“I was commercial counselor and deputy chief
of mission at the Indian Embassy in Baghdad
from 1976 to 1978. During the interregnum
between two ambassadors, I was also for a while
the Indian charge d’affaires. This explains why I
had more than one occasion to stare into Saddam’s
expressionless grey-green eyes – straight
out of ‘The Day of the Jackal’ – while shaking his
hand at various official banquets and other ceremonial
occasions.
“Saddam ran a brutal dictatorship. That, however,
caused no concern to the hordes of Western
businessmen who descended in droves on
Iraq to siphon what they could of Iraq’s newfound
oil wealth through lucrative contracts for
everything. Everything – from eggs to nuclear
plants. Because technically, from the end of the
Turkish Empire over Iraq in 1919 through the
British mandate, which lasted till 1932, and the
194
effete monarchy masterminded by Anthony
Eden’s buddy, Nuri es-Said, right up to the Baath
Party coup of 1968, there was virtually no
progress at all.
“It was Saddam’s revolution that ended Iraqi
backwardness. Education, including higher and
technological education, became the top priority.
More important, centuries of vicious discrimination
against girls and women were ended by one
stroke of the modernizing dictator’s pen.” Etc.
Etc.
Were journalists murdered?
JOURNALISTS in Iraq continue to steam at the
U.S. officials who expressed “regret” at the
killings of reporters and cameramen and then
moved on. Robert Fisk asks: “Was it possible to
believe this was an accident? Or was it possible
that the right word for these killings – the first
with a jet aircraft, the second with an M1A1
Abrams tank – was murder? These were not, of
course, the first journalists to die in the Anglo-
American invasion of Iraq.
“The U.S. jet turned to rocket al-Jazeera’s
office on the banks of the Tigris at 7.45 am local
time yesterday. The television station’s chief correspondent
in Baghdad, Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian-Palestinian,
was on the roof with his second
cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting a
pitched battle near the bureau between American
and Iraqi troops. Mr. Ayoub’s colleague
Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards that both
men saw the plane fire the rocket as it swooped
toward their building, which is close to the-
Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two American
tanks had just appeared.
“On the screen, there was this battle and we