This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow: It should be apparent to any reasonably bright seven year old that we are being lied to. Most recently, there was the UK’s plagiarised out-of-date dossier, the forged uranium purchase documents, and the aluminium tubes which were found unusable for uranium enrichment. All three of these findings denounce some crucial arguments in Colin Powell’s speech to the UN and in President Bush’s State of the Union address. Do not forget that the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, another cornerstone supporting the call for an Iraq war, is a claim on which both the FBI and the CIA disagree. Given that these supporting claims are false, what other key arguments are waiting to be uncovered as distortions?

Anyone who has been keeping tabs on this impending war on Iraq has probably noticed how much its focus has changed. First it was disarmament, then regime change with a smattering of “freeing the Iraqi people” on the side. As Tom Tomorrow points out, a similar thing happened during the Gulf War. As many will remember, that war was first a response to aggression, then a tool for the liberation of the people of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein. After the war was over, it became clear that it was all about the oil.

The liberation of the Iraqi people was a large part of the Gulf War. Back then, President George Bush urged the Iraqi people to rise up and defeat Saddam Hussein. The repressed Iraqi citizenry did what anyone in their situation would have done if egged on by a formidable power: they revolted with the belief that the Americans would come to their aid. That never happened. Instead, both sides in the Gulf War signed a cease-fire, the uprising was quickly crushed and tens of thousands of people were slaughtered. Who is to say that the US would support the Iraqis this time around, either during a war or after a military victory?