WARMATH 2: Mark Thomas in the New Statesman points out that the US government's USD15million set aside for post-war aid to Iraq works out at sixty-five cents per head. That's assuming the precision US bombing doesn't remove too many heads, of course.

 
WARMATH 1: MediaGuardian.co.uk reports that the Blair War special newsnight gave the programme its "largest audience for eight years" - although that it went out at nine o'clock in the evening rather than at ten thirty after BBC1 has already picked off a lot of the news hungry may have had a little more influence, we think...
Still, Blair can take comfort in pulling in four million viewers. Saddam on Channel Four could only scrape 1.5 million, and that was with the benefit of inheriting viewers from Hollyoaks.

 
NATION BUILDING A WORLD OF FREEDOM:The focus on Iraq has apparently saved us the need to worry about the mess left behind in Afghanistan - thank god there's another war to worry about, otherwise we might start to wonder how the defeated Taliban managed to kill 18 people by blowing up a bus, for example; or blow up Medical Centres and kill soldiers while at prayer or... but we make our point, I think.
Doubtless the riposte will be "these are the last hold outs of the Taliban/Al Qaeda, who are going to take a while to flush out" (you might remember the anti-war commentators in the west being yelled down and jeered at when we predicted - before Bush waded into Afghanistan - that it would take almost forever to defeat the Taliban in the mountains. What we didn't realise, of course, was that 'defeating the Taliban' actually only refered to those members of the Taliban who lived in the cities); Clearly, of course, the Afghan people are far better off with the open, democratic, new government. That would be the government, of course, who have already banned Cable TV because it's "anti-Islamic" (nothing to do with controlling the flow of information, of course.) Of course, it must be better to be living under a regime which only tries to control what you watch on TV but does let you choose whether to grow a beard or not, but we're not entirely sure this is quite what we were meant to be fighting ("bombing the crap out of civillians") for, was it?

 
DAMMIT, I KNEW WE SHOULD HAVE HELD OUT FOR TAM: The other big televisual set-piece of the week was Tony Benn meets Saddam. It was an interesting set-up; Saddam hasn't exactly popped up very often to chat - oddly, he never did the Jimmy Young show in all his thirty-four years in charge - and while it would have been as unlikely for him to say "Yup, we've got huge bombs here; full of lung-gas and nuclear crack" as it would have been for Powell to have told the UN "Baghdad's got a clean bill of health; the stuff we sold them during the 80's was shit, anyway" it was interesting to see his side of the story.
What was disappointing, though, was Benn. It was possible to come away with the feeling that Benn actually got confused about the point of being against the war - i.e. that thousands of innocent lives will be put at risk - and seemed to think that the peace movement he speaks for is interested in protecting Saddam. That the questions were not, apparently, pre-vetted makes Benn's inability to ask anything with any guts to it - about Marsh Arabs; about 100% elections; about the whole of the thick dossier of human rights abuses - somewhat discouraging. Maybe he didn't want to appear rude. Maybe next time we should send Peter Tatchell.

 
THE PRIME MINISTER MEETS HIS SUBJECTS: So, an unusually squirmy Tony Blair on Newsnight last night, facing a semi-hostile audience and, to be fair, apparently listening to what was being said to him - he seemed surprised that people would rather trust the UN than Bush.
There was no repeat of the classic Thatcher on Nationwide/Belgrano moment, but then, as we say, he did at least pretend to be listening. He made himself look a bit foolish on a couple of occasions - trying to argue that although the Weapons Inspectors weren't actually thrown out last time, they were, nevertheless, thrown out, but what was most interesting was his complete failiure to engage with the simple query "If the US had photos showing a suspect location had been purged, why wasn't it suggested to the weapons inspectors they look elsewhere?"
No answer came; or rather, the answer had nothing to do with the question.
Which raises one of two possibilities - first is that the pictures Powell showed at the UN aren't what he claimed they were. Secondly, that they were genuine, and the Americans chose to let Blix's men go and poke about at a site they knew had been cleansed before they arrived.
Now, why would they do that? Maybe the Americans wouldn't want to alert the Iraqis that they were observing them from the skies - unlikely, since it's hard to believe that the Iraqis are so dim they wouldn't have known about the US spy satelites over their heads.
Or maybe the Americans are happy to watch the Inspectors wasting their time. Let's assume for a moment that Iraq does have Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Inspectors find them. What would happen then? A contrite Iraq could find a bunch of reasons why the government didn't know about the barrels or phials - not implausible, if British-made anthrax phials can go astray and wash-up on the beaches of the English Riviera, or American universities suddenly realise they don't know what they did with all those bottles of black death they had. A big old destruction could be held, verified and watched and certified by the UN. Saddam could be all co-operative. He'd probably shoot some people for developing these things behind his back. Under those circumstances, it'd be very difficult for Bush to find any reason to attack Iraq.
It might be that, for the US, the discovery of WMD would be far, far less pleasing than the continued empty returns.

 
RESEARCH IS EVERYTHING: While it's amusing that the government have done the equivalent of buying a term paper from the back of Rolling Stone - we'd imagine that we can expect the bulk of reasons for entering the Euro to be lifted from this year's GCSE French translation papers - what's curious is the differences, rather than the similarities, between postgrad student Ibrahim al-Marashi's original and the diligently photocopied British Government dossier. Not only did Ibrahim attempt to back up his claims by providing fully referenced footnotes, his language was a lot more measured than when it was put through the Whitehall news sausage machine - thus 'monitoring' became 'spying' and so on.
Now we know why Powell was so vague about the sources for his claims at the UN this week - how stupid would he have looked saying "According to some stuff I read in Weekly World News this week, Saddam's got weapons the size of trees..."
Thanks for the link to Alan Hamilton.

 
PAYRISES: Is the larger-than-inflation payrise for soldiers that's just been announced linked to productivity? Is the government expecting to be losing some of the workforce soon?

 
YOU CAN'T TOUCH ME, I'M STATE OF THE UNION: Thanks to Graham Swallow for bringing Responses to Bush - a blow-by-blow sceptical analysis of George W's State of the Union bombast.

 
WE'D LIKE TO HELP: Since yesterday we discovered that some drawings of lorries can be considered evidence of evildoing, we'd like to offer the White House inarguable evidence that Saddam not only has nuclear weapons, but has disguised them as cows.

 
IN SUMMARY THEN: Saddam deals with quite nasty people. He's been incredibly awful in the past to his own people and his neighbours. There's some stuff here that may suggest, depending on how you look at it, that he might be trying to put together some new weapons.
So far, so unsurprising. But what's your proposal? Where's the plan? What do you think we should be doing? What - if we fight - are we meant to be fighting for? You've reiterated what you believe is the reason to fight, but where is the cause for which you want us to fight? To disarm Iraq? To remove Saddam? To punish Saddam? There's a lot of stuff about what's wrong with Iraq - precious little about what the alternative would be.

 
HUMAN RIGHTS: It would be wonderful to believe that this was all about the terrible abuses of Human Rights under the Saddam regime. It would be wonderful to believe that the war aim was to bring democracy and freedom to the people of Iraq. It would almost be possible to support such a just war. But the very fact that the People Of Iraq turn up as a footnote to Powell's presentation - there isn't even a slide for them - demonstrates again that the human rights angle is little more than a desperate attempt to confer morality on the adventure. But if it was about human rights, how could the US even have considered saying it would be acceptable for saddam to be allowed to go into exile? If Human Rights is such a concern, how come the british government cheerfully sends asylum seekers back to Iraq with a chipper letter saying "don't fret, there's a solid justice system in Iraq"? Is the Human Rights situation in Iraq so bad it requires military intervention, or is it good enough to make anyone saying they've fleed for fear of their lives a liar? It can't be both, surely?

 
TERRORISTS AHOY: Again, maybe America shouldn't be too quick to bang on about Iraq providing seedcorn funding for terrorist organisations, should they?
When did ricin become the Big Bad? Is this because its the only poison that doesn't get traced back to the CIA?
More seriously, I might be missing the point here, but if there's all these Al Qaeda people in North East Iraq, isn't that the safe haven that's meant to be looked after by the west anyway? And if there is a large number of Al Qaeda sympathisers in the country, can the US guarantee that unseating Hussein won't create a power vacuum in which they rise to the surface?
The Zarqawi network being outlined by Powell is terrible and alarming, but they seem to be spread out right the way through the world - will there be an attack on France next?
Ah - Saddam sent people to train Al Qaeda, did he? Yes, but didn't the CIA do that, too?

 
UM...: So, Saddam's got an incredible secret nuclear program which is being successfully hidden from the view even of spy satelittes, and yet he's constantly banging on about his nuclear scientists in the Iraqi press? That's not very secret, is it?
It could just be that he's afraid of the Iraqi scientists defecting, and as such is desperate to shower them with praise, couldn't it?
Still, Iraq does seem to have been importing a load of stuff that it shouldn't have had in the last couple of years - maybe Clinton was wrong to tell the Arms Inspectors to get out of Iraq after all...

 
JUST A THOUGHT: If the US are so sure about all these dual-use factories and chemical weapons being made in places which could be mistaken for a toy factory or whatever; why don't they give the addresses to the weapon inspectors?

 
AH, DRAWINGS: Well, if he'd told us straight out he was going to show us artist's impressions, I would never have been so cyncial in the first place. Trucks. I see.

 
OPPS: News 24 tried to pull the 'watching the report' trick again, and blew it; knocking the sound off the air.
Interestingly, our political leaders in the House of Commons are busily debating the Police Grants bill rather than watching Powell. Perspective.
Powell is currently waving his little phial of anthrax about - dangerous ground there, surely, when five times as much anthrax from US sources ended up in the postal service than there should have been in the country in total. Still, nice to try and make a vague link between the anthrax poisonings and Saddam.

 
IT'S THE BIGGEST POWERPOINT PRESENTATION IN THE WORLD: "Of course, it's really difficult to make any sense of these pictures, so you'll just have to take my word for it" explains Powell. We're not even sure what we're meant to be looking it - the smoking gun is that they had a big van parked outside a small building? Uh?
With the earlier phone calls - let's just stop and review this there - a lot of the weight on these converations between whoever it was, whenever it was, about whatever it is was depends on interpretation.
Maybe Powell should just post a list of what Rumsfeld sold Hussein instead?
This isn't a Adlai Stevenson moment. This isn't a smoking gun. This is just re-iteration of what we've been told already. It's an omnibus edition. Saying things are "facts" don't make them facts, Colin.
News 24 just did a spooky cut to people watching Powell on TV - apparently on BBC World - in Baghdad. Yikes.

 
NOW YOU CAN USE YOUR COMPUTER TO HELP THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: A new project is calling on computer users to let their computer downtime help find a cure for Smallpox. You'll remember, of course, that Smallpox had been almost entirely eradicated until, whoops, somehow those darn scientists let it fall into The Wrong Hands. Anyway, this time, it's going to be The End for Smallpox. And there won't be anyone in any country - Evil or Otherwise - using their computers to come up with a mutation that beats the cure. Oh no.
Talking of the Pox, what's become of the US' plan to vaccinate as many people as possible against Smallpox? You'll remember, of course, that The President was first in line to get a shot - we're only guessing that it was more likely to be neat gin rather than smallpox vaccine, because even the notoriously clumsy White House wouldn't have risked killing their president with Smallpox Vaccine. And then the little phials were going to be rolled out through the army - presumably to leave the soldiers free to be killed by anthrax, ricin, nuclear fissible material, friendly fire and so on. Then - the general population would be next. But its gone a bit quiet on that front, hasn't it? Maybe someone remembered the Phillipines where, while it was a US colony, mass forced vaccination of the people managed to get the rate of smallpox down from one in ten to, um, 25 to 50 percent infections. A 1920 report concluded "From the time in which smallpox was practically eradicated In the city of Manila to the year 1918 (about 9 years) in which the epidemic appears certainly In one of its severest forms, hundreds after hundreds of thousands of people were yearly vaccinated with the most unfortunate result that the 1918 epidemic looks prima facie as a flagrant failure of the classic Immunization towards future epidemics." Reassuring, isn't it?

 
HANG ABOUT... WHICH GUN WAS MEANT TO BE SMOKING?: We're all waiting for the Adlai Stevenson Moment, of course, but we're getting a bit confused about what we're meant to be waiting for, exactly. Wasn't last week's promise that we were going to be shown proof linking Iraq to Al Qaeda? Only now, it seems, the clincher is a transcript of a conversation where an Iraqi official is supposed to say "How did the weapons inspectors miss that?" Right... so, we're going to go to war on the basis of a typed-up translation of a telephone conversation by people unknown. It's not even like they're saying "the weapons inspectors managed to miss our weapons programme entirely." Hmmm.

 
BENN UPDATE: Ah... so it turns out that the sudden yanking of Tony Benn from the screen was due to a cock-up; the 'live' footage of the press conference suddenly being rewound while it was on-air...

 
AND WE'LL HAND YOU OVER NOW...: Obviously, at a time like this, everything starts to look a little odd. For instance, last night News 24 was carrying a live feed of Tony Benn's Iraq press conference, and suddenly the screen goes blank. Now, every time this has ever happened before since I started watching the channel, there's usually a moment of fluster as the anchor attempts to discern from the gantry (a) what's happened and (b) if the live feed is going to return. When Benn disappeared, however, the London newsroom reacted so smoothly, it was almost as if they'd been expecting it...
Talking of N24, we were bemused by their coverage of the Australian plane crash the other day - although pleased it's the first loss of life since Sep'Ven that hasn't triggered the T-word in the instant speculation. They dropped HardTalk to cover the story, and by the time it was clear there wasn't much to report it was too late to go back to the recorded show; instead, they ploughed on with half an hour of Breaking News. Unfortuantely, they only had one minute of footage. Which they showed for what appeared to be the whole half-hour on a constant, nausea-creating loop. Not even so much as a map of where the crash was, or a cut back to the studio, to break the monotony. Very odd indeed- were all the available staff tied up with Newsnight and the Ten O'Clock?

 
THE HOME FRONT: So, a suspect device is found in a Manchester Novotel, and investigating police get radiation suited to investiagte it. Because they think there's a real risk of a dirty bomb in North West England, or because we need to be made to think there is? Either answer is pretty disturbing.