From the Bristol Evening Post
Wednesday 26th March 2003:

According to the British government those of us not in favour of war are morally inadequate because we are not backing the liberation of the Iraqi people.

How soon we forget. Just two weeks ago the British Government was saying, to quote Jack Straw: "I don't regard Saddam Hussain staying in place as optimal but it is not part of this resolution to change the regime".

In other words, this was to be a war to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

The British and American claimed to have secret information that proved Iraq had a revived nuclear weapon programme and vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Already, we are being prepared for the possibility, indeed likelihood, that no serious capability of any of this kind will be found.

Tony Blair yesterday said: "British security services have tried to search out weapons dumps of the IRA for 30 years - not with a great deal of success."

It is worth recalling that a key element of the British Government's "proof" turns out to be stolen from an American student's essay passed off as British Government intelligence.

Another key document which supposedly shows Iraq importing uranium from Africa has been declared fake by United Nations weapons inspectors.

One more piece of the picture which is being ignored is the role of previous British governments in contributing to Iraq's weapons programmes. Under Margaret Thatcher, Britain backed the building of chemical plants which they expected would be used to make chemical weapons. This was at a time when Iraq was gassing Iranian forces. Soon after the Iraqis went on to gas the Kurds.

We ought not to forget what this war is meant to be about - and we shall see if claims of Iraqi weapons programmes are actually justified.

Of course, the liberation of the Iraqi people from the rule of Saddam Hussain is something we would all welcome.

But we should not lose sight of the fact that this was meant to be a war to protect us from the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.



Taken from the Tuesday 25th March edition of the Bristol Evening Post:

DR ERIC HERRING SAYS US AND BRITISH TROOPS MAY FACE A LONG WAR TO TAKE CONTROL OF IRAQ

11:00 - 26 March 2003


Dr Eric Herring, senior lecturer in International Politics at Bristol University, says US and British troops may face a long war to take control of Iraq THE last time American forces fought the Iraqis, in 1991, the war on the ground was over in three days. We are only five days into this war but there appears to be no prospect of it being over soon.

Why are matters different now? Twelve years ago, the Americans preceded the ground war with a month of air bombardment - this time there has been none of that.

The coalition forces have half the number of troops that were committed to the Gulf War in 1991.

The first Gulf War was marked by combat in open desert, which made it much easier to target Iraqi forces. Today, the coalition forces face combat in towns and cities.

Most importantly, in 1991 the objective was simply to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait - this time the aim is to capture all of Iraq.

Why did the United States launch the war in this way? It appears that they hoped for a quick Iraqi military coup to get rid of Saddam Hussein, followed by surrender.

They also hoped that they might kill Saddam in a missile attack.

The question then is, where is the war going to go from here?

There are three possible outcomes - two of which are nightmare scenarios for the US and British.

The one they hope for is that there will be a sudden Iraqi coup or mass surrender.

The second possibility is that they will end up laying siege to Baghdad, a city of five million people, and Basra, a city of nearly two million people.

Water and electricity supplies will not survive and civilians will start dying in their thousands.

This is what happened last time. Already, in Basra, lack of water has put most of the city's population at extreme risk.

The third possibility is street fighting to take these cities at enormous cost to both sides. They would not only have to fight the regular Iraqi army but also the elite of the Iraqi military - Saddam's Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard - which in 1991 quickly withdrew from Kuwait.

The most feared outcome for the US and British from the second and third scenarios is that they would have to negotiate with Saddam Hussein.