From Toronto Sun conservative columnist Eric Margolis, a pulling together of various American hawkish ideas about sweeping “region change” in the Middle East, all of which would, if ever effected, turn the region into a vast, cut-rate American gas station. Yesterday’s Elliott Abrams appointment to the National Security Council is a good indication that the mad urge to radically reshape (and in essence recolonize) the region, under the label of bringing the big D, democracy, to Arab lands, is close to the heart of administration thinking. Tom
Bush’s Mideast plan: Conquer and divide
By Eric Margolis, December 8, 2002, The Toronto SunNEW YORK — Arms inspections are a “hoax,” said Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, in a forthright and chilling interview with ABC News last week. “War is inevitable.”
Aziz is the smartest, most credible member of President Saddam Hussein’s otherwise sinister regime – my view after covering Iraq since 1976.
What the U.S. wants is not “regime change” in Iraq but rather “region change,” charged Aziz. He tersely summed up the Bush administration’s reasons for war against Iraq: “Oil and Israel.”
Aziz’s undiplomatic language underlines growing fears across the Mideast that U.S. President George Bush intends to use a manufactured war against Iraq to redraw the political map of the region, put it under permanent U.S. military control, and seize its vast oil resources.
These are not idle alarms.
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