'Pretty Straight Guff' [Unrated]

[ringmasterrob]

* thegreatcritique.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/pretty-straight-guff/ *

HStorm's latest article, a little different to the others in that it is a book review. Well, more specifically it is a rebuttal to a specific part of Nick Cohen's Pretty Straight Guys. Please offer any constructive criticisms along with your rating out of ten in here.

[Naselus]

I've read about half of 'Pretty straight guys', and I have to say I don't think it's particularly good. Cohen, as Storm says, has completely missed the point of opposition to the Iraq war. He doesn't even bother to mention, for example, that the war was illegal, which is enough to undermine all his other points straight away. He skims lightly over the fact that the war was sold to the public on a bed of lies and nonsense. He rants and raves about how Saddam should have been removed from power after the first gulf war, when (strictly speaking) he'd done nothing wrong there at all. He was attempting to remove a dictator from power, and Kuwait probably would have been considerably better off as part of Iraq anyway. The vast majority of the people there wouldn't have noticed the difference.

The main point is that Cohen's argument can bve boiled down to this: I disagree with Saddam's government, so it's perfectly acceptable to invade his country and dipose him. Interestingly, he makes no such damning criticism of the Saudi dictatorship, or the Kuwaiti dictatorship.... You have to wonder if Saddam's upset him in some way. Hell, he's actually pretty much on-side with the aforementioned monarchies, citing them to back up other statments without seeming to think about, say, the Saudi's human rights record being as bad as Iraq's, or Kuwait's slant-drilling to steal Iraqi oil (the reason for the first war).

His claim that the war was 'nothing to do with oil' is patently absurd as well. It certainly had cock all to do with WMDs, as we all know, and it's not about humanitarianism either. If we wanted to stop evil dictators, why go for Saddam? North Korea, Iran, ANY of Africa's various tinpot blacklist countries... all far more dangerous than poor crippled Iraq. Could it be that Iraq sits on the vast oilfields of the middle east? Perhaps the reason US and British troops secured the oilfields so quickly was that they were sent to do that before anything else? Why would that be, if this war is about saving people from their wicked dictator? And why did we have to bomb the shit out of the cities (full of those people we're saving), yet we don't dare fire anything larger than an M16 in the oilfields? Why was the first order of business for the new regime in Iraq signing the various contracts Cheney and Bush brought in to shift as much oil as possible to the States? It's just not adding up in Cohen's favour.

All in all, Cohen's book is somewhat disappointing. He tries to claim anyone against the war was essentially supporting Saddam, which is such a black-and-white picture that any political commentator would laugh themselves sick to hear it.