Iraq 1 Italy O

Stephen Farrell in Baghdad

Video Diaries:         Checkpoint Roulette    In a Black Hawk

Haifa Street     From Hell to Paradise (Sq)    Welcome to Hell

There are ways to avoid a direct question. There are ways to ignore it. To fudge it, deflect it, invert, parry, mock, rebut, minimise, personalise, contextualise, legalise, duck, weave, circumvent, sidestep, misunderstand, dissemble, lie, cheat, fib, ad hominem, be economical with the actualite, run out of time, plead the fourth, fifth (or whatever it is), bluster, pretend not to hear and storm out.

Or you just kill the question. Stone. Parrot. Dead.

A masterclass in Plan B was given in Baghdad in recent days when Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister gave a rare roundtable interview to western journalists - a handful of Americans, The Times, and the Italian journal, Corriere della Serra.

An Islamist Shiite who lost more than 60 close relatives to Saddam's regime and was at that moment sitting in the former home of Saddam's cousin Kamal Hussein, he was about to be challenged on the former dictator's unseemly execution, and he knew it.

Seated first right as we went clockwise around the table, the Italian journalist got to ask first question, and it was a zinger.

"Prime Minister, President Bush said the death of Saddam ....looked like revenge, a sectarian revenge. And in Italy the Prime Minister, Mr Prodi, condemned the death penalty and asked you to cancel it. Can you comment on that?'

There was a pursing of Islamist lips, a 15-minute justificatory address in Arabic, all par for the course.

Then the killer coda.

"I would like to remind Prime Minister Prodi about Mussolini and the way Mussolini was dealt with."

All thoughts in the room turned to an upside-down Italian dictator and his mistress hanging from piano wire in Milan's Piazzo Loreto. Both manifestly un-legal-processed and riddled with machine gun bullets delivered by - depending on who you believe - Italian partisans or British intelligence agents.

Sniggers from the Americans to the left. Shia imperturbability straight ahead. And I think I even detected a half-muttered 'ciao.' It might have been 'ouch'. Hard to tell.

Next question.

Comments

[donkykemore]

Bush 's yearning for war with Iran.
As a social theorist rather than a historian the academic of tomorrow will look and wonder how America went blindly into Iran.
It is searingly obvious that as each day passes their president is pulling more demonic rabbits from the hat; yesterday is was that Iran had nuclear arsenal ; today it is that Iran supplied the insurgents in Iraq with weaponary to shoot down US soldiers.
The irony is probabaly thet the weaponary which has thus far slaughtered most US combatants is US made , having been supplied to Saddam when he was the putative puppet , and his was the regeimen thought to cause most menace in the Middle East in the US 's favour.

Future generations will judge us all less kindly as we in the West have presided over this disturbed president and his deluded machinations . It is within the grasp of Congress , one hopes to at least refuse to finance any overt move against Iran; we can only pray that they will be more resolute in their determination and decline to facillitate Bush's latest percieved mission .
But the wory escalates by the day ; Now Bush is turning to Lebanon again to aportion blame for the unrest there on Iran; it may well be that Iran has it's many sympathisersw in the Shiite community ; so much the pity but the Lebonese elected the Hammas party to rule ; and this must be factored in to any political resolution; Even the Saudis appreciate that to take the Bush line and keep taggeting Iran in Lebanon is just tautology .
It is more ; it is tendentious .
It is the mercilless beat of the war drum .
Could Israel be persuaded to carry out a preemptive attack ? It would be convenient for the administration , but with Israel still smarting from its recent debacle in Lebanon it would seem to be an unlikely development .
With a Russian Putin desperately trying to throw up a smoke screen over his alleged involvment in the killing of his former spy Litvinenko with polonium in London it seems probable that he will supply Iran with some hardware ; most likely planes in order to counter US air supremacy in the region.And this in turn may feed in to the president's paranoia , which may for a time seem justifiable.
Again and again we must face that axiom that war is the failure of politics, diplomacy , civilisation.
But this time we are edging closer to a conflict which will spread far beyond the Midddle East , will destabalise oil supplies, and in turn world economics.
It may even be of such a scale as to eclipse the concern about global warming for a generation.
Who said '' I dont know what the next war will be fought with ; but the one after will be fought with bows and arrows.''

[Mrrice]

Donkyemore,
You know nothing of history, nothing of polotics, nothing about forign affairs and you have no idea what kind of man or who President Bush is.
Your simple and full of hate!

[Bruce Rheinstein]

"Say what you may but the donkeyman speaks the truth."

You mean like where he states:

"The irony is probabaly (sic) thet (sic) the weaponary (sic) which has thus far slaughtered most US combatants is US made , having been supplied to Saddam when he was the putative puppet"

If Saddam was such an American puppet, then why was his army equipped with AK-47 rifles, T-72 tanks, Mirage and Mig jets, and other assorted inferior Russian and French-made hardware? Specifically what U.S.-made hardware do you allege is being used by the insurgents?

[Amos]

The idiot won't answer that question, Bruce. I've heard the 'we armed Saddam' clam a dozen times by leftists, when I ask how come his entire army was equipped with Russian gear they look suddenly like rabbits caught in headlights and are reduced to sputtering, indignant incoherence.

In every case that fact had simply not occurred to them, they believed Saddam was an American military client as some sort of incontrovertible point of faith in their stupid, weird leftist religion. He was evil therefore Imperial AmeriKKKa had to have created him, end of story, and that’s as deep as most of these dumbasses are.

[Shaikh]

What everyone keep forgetting is that American Government is a war machine intended to kill, kill and kill.