July 2003

This is the last of the bits and pieces recorded on scraps of paper that I’ve been able to find one year later.  I have no idea what happened to whatever I may have written between the end of July and December.  I must have had a “brainstorm” and thrown it all away.

July 17 –  Tony Blair made an eloquent speech before a joint session of Congress today in which he justified the American-British invasion and takeover of Iraq as based on solid but unspecified intelligence of Saddam Hussein’s murderous, bellicose intentions against the free world, his neighbors and his own people and that the solidity of this intelligence was indisputable.  He is much better and more skillful at defending himself than Bush who, by comparison comes across as inarticulate, overly defensive, boorish, brutish and ill informed.  Too bad Bush didn’t get all that practice standing up before Parliament and defending a position as a matter of civilized debate.  First, Bush is the playground bully insulting and smearing friends and enemies alike.  Now he’s the playground excuse maker – it’s someone else’s fault.  In either role, we seem to have a child for a President who doesn’t seem to understand why many thoughtful people believe that he or his managers and handlers have manipulated and/or outright lied to obtain a short term political end – the 2004 election.

All the “intelligence” appears to be old as in from the 1980’s or early 1990’s:

“We stand by that intelligence,” he said. “In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s, we know for sure that Iraq purchased around about 270 tons of uranium from Niger.”

The 1980’s was when Iraq was a client state of the USA, so presumably the purchase, if it took place, came to be with our tacit permission at least.  No one at the press conference questioned the validity of Blair’s statement when viewed in the context of 20 years later.
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July 22 – The news says that the sons of Saddam Hussein have been killed in a firefight in Mosul and that their bodies have been identified by Iraqis who knew them.  There was a $1.5 million reward that was evidently collected by a cousin.  We’ll see if it all turns out to be true.

The news also reports that David Kelly, the British microbiologist and UNSCOM inspector who was an expert on biological weapons has committed suicide in England because of the extreme pressures placed on him by the publication of reports that he was the source for information that people in the Blair Government exaggerated (“sexed up”) their intelligence findings on Iraq’s WMD.  He was 59 years old.  His family, his country, and we seem to have lost a solo voice of common sense and sanity in the midst of an orchestrated roar of propaganda.