Jim Nolan on Iraq

A couple of nights ago Jim Nolan spoke in Sydney to the city's Fabian Society. This is part of his address:

Was anything said about Saddam untrue? It is beyond dispute that Saddam was a genocidal fascist psychopath whose crimes against his own people were legion - including a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. In addition, he committed major acts of environmental vandalism against the habitat of the Marsh Arabs and the Kuwaiti oilfields. Iraq's President Talibani recently reminded us that Ba'athist Iraq was the longest lived fascist regime in history. Hitchens rightly described Saddam's Iraq as a 'charnel house above ground and mass grave below'. All of this was widely known before March 2003 yet, disingenuously, Saddam's crimes were sidelined when the debate on the war broke out.
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George Orwell once wrote in another, not unrelated, context: "The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it... There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them." Reminding his appeasement minded comrades of the atrocities in pre war Europe, Orwell said "These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened."

Read the rest.