Moving goalposts...

The ongoing "rebranding" of the Iraq invasion has taken another new twist today with Tony calling Iraq a "Crucible of global terrorism". He really should try to keep better track of who we're at war with and why:

We went to war with Afghanistan to combat global terrorism. Thats because although 17 out of 18 of the 9/11 suicide pilots were Saudi Arabian, the other one was Afghani and their leader Osama Bin Laden, who is still on the loose, and who is also Saudi Arabian, was rumoured to be hiding in a cave in Afghanistan. We didn't find him so we don't know if that's true but we did bomb the cr*p out of Afghanistan and then by pure co-incidence installed a president who was an ex-employee of Unocal and long before anyone had time to organise elections we got him to sign an agreement so we could build a big oil pipeline through the country in exactly the place that the old regime had said we couldn't.

Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden aren't friends, actually they pretty much hate each other. If they had any connection at all it would be through their mutual friend George W Bush, whose Dad installed one and armed the other (ok armed both...).

Now we went to war with Iraq because Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction and we needed to overthrow his evil regime and free the Iraqi people. We did find Saddam but we didn't find any of these weapons and actually in the end we decided that there weren't any there and that we just hadn't read the reports carefully enough before we started.

So when did Iraq become the "Crucible of global terrorism"? Well actually probably around the time that we started bombing the cr*p out of them. Of course what we should remember though is that this is "new" global terror - it has nothing to do with Al Qaeda or any such thing, this is terror which we have created. Also its not very global, what Tony is talking about is bombs and hostage-takings within Iraq, focussed on the foreigners who are part of the military and administrative occupational regime which came in uninvited to their country and killed thousands and thousands of people.

I wonder if Tony has ever read "The Crucible"?