Best Case Scenario? Not Bloody Likely
Can the UN disarm Saddam without a war? Thanks to a spectacular feat of political ju-jitsu by the Iraqi government, we may get a chance to find out. More likely, the Bush warmongers will shift tactics again and we'll start seeing "proof" that Saddam consorted with the 9/11 terrorists, with a few timid, muted questions about why such information wasn't made available months ago if it really existed. Obviously the war faction has occult reasons to be spoiling for a fight with Saddam - reasons they know the rest of the country, or the world, would not support if they were made known. Oil, politics, revenge, covering up for previous failures... we all know the list. Hopefully circumstances will continue to deny them a "legitimate" pretext so that we may eventually get to the heart of the matter.
On a related issue, since I've been writing extensively about the Iraq situation recently, I figured it might not be a bad idea to gather a little bit of information on the subject. Yes, I know that with that appraoch, I'll never make it on Fox News, but hey, I just can't help myself. The last few days I've been plowing through Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War by Adel Darwish and (the pseudononymous) Gregory Alexander. I'm sure there are better books on the subject - I just happened to have this one on the shelf already.
Unholy Babylon was popular around the advent of the first Gulf War in 1990, and recounts events leading up to the US counterstrike. I give it a qualified recommendation: it provides a great deal of detailed factual information on the history and politics of Iraq in the context of the Middle East since WWI, including copious details on Iraq's weapons program in the 70s and 80s. This stuff, particularly the history of Iraq's ambitions in the region and the political ideology of the Ba'ath party vis a vis other forms of Arab nationalism and Islamism, are extremely valuable in understanding the current situation. However, the narrative is disorganized to the point of incoherence, many anecdotes treated as fact are given without citation, and the Egyptian author cannot conceal a pervasive anti-Isreali bias colored by irrational prejudice (for example, explaining the Six-Day War as a manifestation of the "well-known Zionist ambition of a Greater Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates"). In light of these problems - caused no doubt by the rush to get the book on shelves before the US bombs started falling in 1991 - it is difficult to credit some of the otherwise-convincing material. Perhaps there's an updated edition available these days that corrects these problems.
9:48:09 AM 
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