Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
That champagne is still causing me problems this morning. Evil stuff.
There was another program last night where the audience were able to ask questions of Tony Blair. Most of the discussion was cantered around justification for war with Iraq, about UN resolutions, and why we couldn’t wait any longer, and whether we were just following the US. One comment (which looking back has probably already been mentioned) which was interesting was that so far all the terrorist activity that has caused us to look at Iraq hasn’t used weapons of mass destruction at all. They’ve used fertilizer, guns and aeroplanes. There was one nerve gas attack in Japan a while back, but as I recall that was a very different motive (a doomsday cult as I recall), and not really linked with Al Queda and the like.
Now Blair’s response to this statement (which is entirely true) was that given the present situation, the terrorist is using normal weapons, but that if Iraq is able to continue developing, and then selling on weapons of mass destruction, then the terrorists will be better armed to do more damage.
IMHO what that leads to is the need to do two things. One is to prevent either the construction, or the sale of weapons of mass destruction, so that things aren’t made worse than they are. But that alone won’t solve the problem. It won’t stop terrorists doing what they’re already doing.
To do that we need to look at stopping the terrorists from using normal weapons, either through stopping them getting hold of them, or stopping them through capturing them, or perhaps through dialogue.
But the one thing this brings about is the realisation that a war with Iraq won’t make the terrorist situation any better, it will just reduce the chances of it getting worse. To improve the situation we need to do even more.
Posted by Phil on March 11, 2003 07:08 AM | Categories: Thoughts