4 ~ Sunday, January 20, 1991- North Shore News Let Bush correct his own mistakes AMONG THE pelitical blunders that led to the cre- ation of Saddam Hussein’s war machine, what stands out is the way the Ameri- cars and the Russians and the French and the West Germans and Italians in particular contributed to the Iraqi dictator’s ascendancy to power and his accumula- tion of weapons of mass destruction, right up to the edge of having The Bomb. The Americans at one stage backed the Kurdish rebels in Iraq by providing them with small - arms. The support was provided to keep Baghdad slightly distracted until it became expe- dient for the White House to drop the cause of Kurdish independence in order to allow the Iraqi military to concentrate its full attention on checking Iran’s Islamic fundamen- talist revolution, The moment the CIA, guided by the ‘‘brilliant’’ Henry Kiss- inger, decided to abandon the Kurds to their fate, a vengeful Saddam Hussein threw chemical weapons at the hapless Kurds, killing 4,000 men, women and children in the town of Halabja alone. It didn’t matter that nearly a million people died in the fran- lraq war. They were Arabs, after all, not Westerners. It was good, in fact. It kept them preoccupied and off the streets, as it were. The Soviets had their own agenda, of coitrse, to do with maintaining a client state in the Mideast as a hedge against Western and Islamic influence on the Soviet empire’s flank. As for the hundreds of West German and French arms mer- chants and manufacturers and chemical suppliers who were busy during all this time shipping ex- pensive weapons and poisons off to the Iraqis, Iranians and anyone else who could put up the oil money to buy such toys, it would be an utter waste of breath to condemn them for diabolical im- morality, just as it would be to decry the callousness of the Italian bankers who were the middlemen in the funnelling of $3 billion worth of loans from the U.S. to finance the Iraqi military build- up. For all these eager en- trepreneurs, it was — and remains -—~ simply business as usual. ht should be easy enough to un- derstand that there are no ab- solute heroes in the Mideast, and virtually anyone who gets involved gets stuck in a moral tar baby sit- uation, corrupted by the need to take sides, because there is no such thing as a clean side. The one group that enjoyed wide support in the West, based on what seemed like a com- prehensible if absurdly ethnocen- tric set of values, was the Israelis. But they have long since forfeited any claim to tran- scendent virtue by their brutal suppression of the Palestinians and their wholescale adoption of a policy of theocratic imperialism, Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL which has turned out to be almost as unlovely to behold as the Arab tyrannies from which they seized their promised land in the first place. In a word, the Mideast is a snakepit. Fanatics, racists, bigots, tyrants, torturers, oppressors and religious zealots struggie ceaselessly among themselves like grotesque figures in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Bruegel the Elder, their ambitions and obsessions fed by the merchants of death from the industrialized world. It is useful to keep this realpolitik picture of the region in mind as an antidote to the stream of patriotic and ideological doubletalk that will be spewing forth from Ottawa in the dark days to come. . We are going to be told ad nauseam that Canadians will be dying in the skies, waters and sands of Arabia in the name of a lofty United Nations-inspired principle, namely the containment of tyranny. The fact that we will be — al- ready are — allied with a gaggle of despots from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, the Unit- ed Arab Emirates and Qatar should make it abundantly ob- vious that we are as much on the side of tyranny as we are in op- position to it, but this fine point will be ignored as Brian Mulroney positions himself on all fours to service his masters in Washington any which-way they want. It frankly made me want to throw up, listening to Mulroney’s unctuous baritone as he declared it Canada’s *‘moral duty” to fight Saddam Hussein immediately, ut- terly ignoring the fact that Hus- sein is in large measure the cre- ation of Mulroney's boss, former CIA director George Bush. Let Bush correct his own mistakes, | say. Why should Ca- nadians die because the White House bungled its geopolitical game to protect its own strategic interests in the Mideast? And, anyway, who in his right mind gives a fig about restoring the Emir of Kuwait to the Allah- given luxury of his bed with 40 wives? Fighting tyranny, my ass! Suck- ing up to the Americans is what this is all about, like everything else Mulroney does. et CANADIAN CLOSET Bm Free home estimates m 986-4263 1385 Crown St., N.Van. Elegant Cuisine Afterneon *« Evening * Catered Affairs * 926-8922 RESTAURANT "445 13th Street West Vancouver When you're buying a new home, there’s an important point to consider: resale value. 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