From Ralph

01/26/03

BLIX IN A FIX

I have this ridiculous image in my head of Hans BLIX and his crack team of UN Weapons Investigators staggering about in loose dry sand, in the desert, with buckets and spades, looking for Weapons of Mass Destraction (sic!) to give the US Administration some, any!legitimate excuse to wage war on Iraq.

A fair number of the world's population have, at some time or other, tried walking along a stretch of dry sand beach, beachcombing, looking for shells, sea shells, that is, or just walking.

We take one step forward and slide back two. But it passes the time, the sun is shining, sea breezes waft the healthy glow on your face, and it's good exercise. We usually find nothing but empty plastic bottles, driftwood, sun-bleached condoms, polythene sandwich wrapping and lengths of tangled and matted blue nylon string - it is usually blue, not dyed by the sea- and it's tied around a parched stick.

Our chosen patch of beach is rarely more than a mile long and 50 yards wide, otherwise you lose your belongings and anyway, you are supposed to be relaxing, and anything that floats is conveniently washed up right where you are, or not, as the case may be.

So you decide to explore a bit. You move off your beach, about 100 yards inland, which more than likely puts you in a thicket of spiky bracken and snake grass and you search for something that you are certain someone has maybe lost, or even hidden. Most probably you will find nothing, but even if there were something, it would be secreted in some God-forsaken place, like down a rocky ravine, crawling with scorpions and full of broken glass. You are hot and sweaty now, away from the sea, so, in human terms, you sort of give up, take another swim, or throw a frisbee, even though you are certain that there is something there. It could be a bit like having 200 acres of land, and buying a metal detector, because you are also certain, that by the same token, sometime over centuries, someone dropped something valuable in the grass and you are going to find it.

Imagine that area multiplied, say, fifty thousand million times to the size of Utah- or Iraq. And you have got your orders- to scour the landscape for vital life or death evidence, but euphemistically speaking, you are still on the beach, a sandy place.

Hypothetically, using our concentrated land strip theory, and line of least resistance, we must scour the coastline from your holiday beach, probably in the Mediterranean. We take a short cut through the Suez Canal, along the Red Sea, around the coast of Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, Oman, and along the western shore of the Persian Gulf, right up to its Northern tip. This is the only place where Iraq nearly touches the sea,incidentally, right next to Kuwait on the same beach. We have travelled a distance which compares to half way around the world, and circumnavigated a landmass the size of India. We haven't even begun to go inland- and what we are looking for, though we are not quite sure has just been moved back somewhere we have just passed anyway- so we won't be looking there again. That would be pointless!

Is it any wonder that the Weapons Investigators were so relieved, and ecstatic, to find some empty missiles which had been designed to carry Nuclear Warheads or Nerve Gas phials, and which were probably meant to be found. Of course they were empty! - like the plastic bottles we all find on our imaginary beach, but there were no concentrated strips of land like that, where such a find was possible. These guys are wandering around in a wilderness of limitless arrid expanse.

Can you imagine how exhaustibly mind-warping such a task would be? The President, with a willing Tony Blair in tow, who is following him, carrying the bucket and spade like an excited child, is pitching his whole strategy on such an impossible pretext.

Bush has committed a squillion dollars of National Taxes and God knows how many back-up public services, and agencies, to mobilize a massive offensive military machine in the hope that Dr. BLIX and his squad of Weapon Inspectors will unearth a full plastic bottle of something. Just one clue! that's all- and Saddam better watch out.

George W. Bush has put the whole reluctant world into a state of nervous alert, mobilized most sane people to stage vast anti-war demonstrations, while convincing himself that it is those blasted Terrorists who are at the bottom of it, and trying to convince us all that he is only going to blow the whole Iraqi nation to Kingdom Come, to protect our freedoms, our 'democracy', and to demonstrate his good intentions, unseat a vile Dictator, and hold the oil under Iraq in trust for the Iraqis whom he will have just blown to bits, along with all the UN Resolutions that were enshrined to prevent just such acts of unprovoked attack. Lewis Carroll couldn't have invented a more sublime piece of nonsense, for whoever stole the tarts, or not, the verdict will still be-'Off with his head!!'.

I guess there will always be leaders of one kind or another, un-elected, like Bush, or otherwise. It is where they have the power to lead us that worries us all.