As often as not a shorthand, pencil-sketch article from a streetwise tabloid columnist with a conscience will be worth several close-packed pages of erudite broadsheet analysis. If I want that sharp, acerbic perspective on whatever's fronting the news, I'll read the 'Stotty on Sunday' column by Richard Stott in the UK Daily Mirror. For once what it says on the tin - 'Biting but brilliant' in this case - has it taped.
As a diehard anarchist little of the crooked double-dealing that is passed off as realpolitik by the perpetrators shocks me greatly. But the following report both chilled & angered me simultaneously. It places neatly inside the proverbial nutshell why I don't want to see American & British troops inside Iraq.
YOU CAN'T HIDE THE FACTORIES
Just occasionally, very occasionally, we are given a snapshot of the slimy side of the people who dictate our lives & order our deaths.
For the most part we are led by the nose, conned, ignored & manipulated by the politicians who constantly claim the higher ground & the moral certainties.
Mrs Thatcher is revered. Mrs Thatcher is admired, Mrs Thatcher is sought out by Tony Blair, her views on the looming war in Iraq faithfully relayed. Tony Blair is right, she says. We must be rid of Saddam, he is a monstrous dictator. It is a righteous war, the Prime Minister has adopted a just stance. Lady Thatcher has spoken and the government mood music is that this should be enough to quell the doubters. One brave war leader salutes another.
But at the height of her premiership Mrs Thatcher was a strong supporter of Saddam Hussein, he was a man with whom she not only could do business, but did. In 1985, in the full knowledge that Saddam gassed his own people, Britain backed the building of an Iraqi chemical plant we knew was likely to be sued to manufacture mustard gas.
The decision, based on Thatcher's policy, was taken by Trade & Industry secretary Paul Channon in spite of protests from the Ministry of Defence & the Foreign Office minister Richard Luce. He did it, he said, because "a ban would do our other trade prospects in Iraq no good". Channon, however, wasn't prepared to put his head too far above the parapet - he insisted the deal be kept secret & Luce, now the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, agreed.
At the time Britain backed the deal Saddam had already gassed more than 8,000 Iranians & Kurds. After the plant was built he killed another 18,000 the same way. The ways & means to such dreadful weapons of mass destruction were not only provided by Britain, but underwritten, fought for and hidden from the world in order to keep Saddam in power. Such is the moral bankruptcy & icy indifference to death portrayed by our leaders.
Of course none of this can be laid at Tony Blair's door - can it? Well… at the very least three ministries knew of our backing for this chemical plant. So when this same factory at Faluja was pinpointed by the Prime Minister's dossier as a reason for war, surely he told of its history. Number 10 refused to answer the question. We are to draw our own conclusions.
Underwriting the plant was a deeply shaming, disgusting, cynical & inhuman act. If the |prime Minister named Faluja as a reason for war in the full knowledge we had actively backed building it in the first place, his credibility is seriously compromised. Yet Tony Blair remains unabashed. He still insists on asking our servicemen to die in a moral war, quite possibly poisoned by mustard gas we not only helped manufacture but a British minister had actually fought for.
At a time when we crave transparency, honesty & truth we are presented with cover-up, duplicity & evasion.
What a comfort it must be for our troops, facing the prospect of being gassed in the desert, to know Paul Channon, the man who quite possibly signed your death warrant, is sunning himself in the Caribbean.
© Richard Stott/The Daily Mirror
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