Learning from the West

ggest that the weapons inspectors in Iraq should have been given more time before the rush to war! He says:

‘…American thinkers and intellectuals warned Bush before the war that everything he needed to guarantee America’s security by removing weapons of mass destruction – assuming they existed – was at his disposal, that all countries were with him when it came to inspections, and that America’s interest did not require him to launch into a groundless war with unknown repercussions. But the black gold blinded him and he put his own private interests ahead of the American public interest….’

The above statement is like a microcosm of the trendy liberal argument against the war in Iraq: we should have let the weapons inspectors continue their job (bin Laden for Blix!) but because Bush is so addicted to oil (the ‘black gold’) he went ahead with the war anyway. Bin Laden even worries about the war having ‘unknown repercussions’, an echo of debates in the West about the unpredictability of war in Iraq and the concern that it might make all of us less rather than more safe. No wonder bin Laden namechecks ‘American thinkers and intellectuals’ – he got his political position on Iraq directly from them.

By the time of Iraq, bin Laden – who started out as a Saudi obsessive who wanted to make Saudi society even more chokingly religious – has become a fully-fledged Bush-basher, virtually indistinguishable from a new generation of journos and bloggers who see Bush as the most evil president ever and Iraq as the wickedest war of all time (they have short historical memories).