"The finest and most perceptive blog in the entire Universe" - Jayson (not Tony) Blair


Email me *
How easy is it to recognise irony.
A. Pedant
Big boys (& girls)


British Journalism Review*
The Guardian*
Melbourne Age*




Worth a look


Charlie's Diary*
The Feral Eye*
Green fairy*
I live on your visits*
Jak - Vancouver*
Junius*
Quantum Tea*
Reflections in D minor*

---

Drabness is a state of mind
A. Pedant

 
Credit where credit isn't due

Curiously, only the other day, I was thinking of one of Private Eye's funniest covers, based on what is arguably Phil’s most famous utterance. The Duke of Edinburgh is saying to Brenda

‘Our children have all done pretty well,' he says.
‘Yes, they’ve all become princes or princesses,’ Brenda amplifies.

Lo and behold, this great perception has just been trumped by Dick Cheney:

In his first television interview since the presidential election in November, Cheney displayed no regrets and gave no ground to his many critics within America and around the World. He summed up his record by saying: "I think, given the circumstances we've had to deal with, we've done pretty well."

You can read the full article here. Here is some more from the sage Cheney

He referred to a comment from Hillary Clinton likening him to the Star Wars character Darth Vader. "I asked my wife about that, if that didn't bother her. She said, no, it humanises you."

Some human!

But his lack of any introspection over the decisions made under his watch – in contrast to Bush who recently said he had been sorry about the false intelligence over Iraq – will renew Cheney's reputation as a combat[ive] and uncompromising vice-president.

Though no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, he insisted that Saddam Hussein had had the capability to produce them.

"He had the technology, he had the people... We made the right decision," he said.

As a point of information, in no meaningful way is this quoted assessment correct. It never was. It's probably best to let one of the former Weapons Inspectors – Scott Ritter - deal with another of Cheney's more extreme, self-serving remarks. This comes from Ritter's Grauniad piece titled 'Dick Cheney's fantasy world'

Cheney defended the invasion and subsequent removal of Saddam from power by noting that "this was a bad actor and the country's better off, the World's better off with Saddam gone". This is the argument of the intellectually feeble. It would be very difficult for anyone to articulate that life today is better in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra or any non-Kurdish city than it was under Saddam. Ask the average Iraqi adult female if she is better off today than she was under Saddam, and outside of a few select areas in Kurdistan, the answer will be a resounding "no".

I have been saying this sort of thing for many years, haven't I Myfanwy?

Invading Iraq and removing Saddam, the glue that held that nation together as a secular entity, was the worst action the US could have undertaken for the people of Iraq, the Middle East as a whole and indeed the entire World. For Cheney to articulate otherwise, regardless of his fundamentally flawed argument on WMD, only demonstrates the level to which fantasy has intruded into the mind of the vice-president.

Here's the link to Ritter's full article. People who claim that Iraq under the religious nutcases is better than Iraq under Saddam, in virtually any way at all, have serious perception problems. Or is it that they actually enjoy lying?

Labels: Dick Cheney, Iraq, Saddam, Scott Ritter

posted by josh at 1:42 pm