A few more assorted items
One last barrage of links and then I'll go to bed.
The International Herald Tribune warns:
Of all the eruptions that a U.S.-led war on Iraq may unleash, none is more urgent to address than that between Iraqi Kurds and their Turkish neighbor. Turkey stands poised to enter Iraq with military might to prevent the Kurds from making any move toward statehood, with control of the city of Kirkuk and its oil-rich environs seen as the key. The Kurds, in turn, have threatened to transform their native land into a graveyard for Turkish soldiers. Whether the United States will be able to keep them apart is an open question.
All sorts of interesting historical stuff here, though I don't know what this publication's biases are so I don't know how much to believe statements like this:
Iraq's 1988 Anfal counter-insurgency campaign, in which an estimated 100,000 Kurdish men, women and children were systematically murdered by the Iraqi regime, is barely known to anyone but regional experts.
And speaking of the question of accuracy of information, an ArabNews article discusses various likely courses the war might follow, along with questions about the amount of control the government will exert over what journalists can and can't report.
Then again, an Australian pro-war liberal (in The Age again) writes:
I can feel no confidence in George Bush. However, I do see reason to trust Tony Blair—because ever since coming to power he's been pushing at international conferences for more foreign aid, debt forgiveness and other ways of lifting poor countries out of poverty.
She goes on to talk about the Congo and Rwanda:
In Congo an estimated three million people have been killed in the past five years of war. More are killed there every month than in the past two-and-a-half years in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....
The five permanent members of the Security Council are the five biggest weapons sellers in the world.
Let me tell you about that gently spoken peacemaker, Kofi Annan. At the time of the Rwandan genocide he was head of UN peacekeeping operations. When the killings started, urgent diplomatic cables were sent from Rwanda to his office, telling of bodies littering the streets and begging for more UN forces. He ignored them. Did not even pass them on to the Security Council. He has never explained why.
Maybe there are no good guys. Sigh.
Of course, that author thinks the war is about saving American lives, and figures even if there isn't a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, there might be later. Meanwhile, AlterNet (which definitely has a bias) discusses the unlikelihood of there being any connection; for example, a British Defence Intelligence Staff report noted:
We believe that Bin Laden views the Ba'ath as an apostate regime; his aim of restoration of an Islamic caliphate, whose capital was Baghdad, is in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq.
At any rate, no matter how you slice it, it appears that Saddam Hussein (I still don't know which of those is his family name) is not one of the good guys. One question that one might legitimately ask: why not just assassinate him, and not do all the killing of other Iraqis that seems to be on the agenda? Well, the US did more or less just try that (with the opening missile salvo being an attempt at a surgical strike on his location, if I'm understanding the news stories right), and for all I know it may've succeeded (since Hussein's broadcast message may've been prerecorded before the attack). But in case anyone's wondering about the legitimacy of assassination as an activity of the US government, take a look at the Council on Foreign Relations's informative article "Assassination: Does It Work?" That phrasing came out sounding sarcastic somehow, so I'll note explicitly that it wasn't sarcastic; I think it's a really interesting article, and answers several of my questions on the topic.