Arab News Column

I don't normally bother to read Arab News, which is basically a mouthpiece for the Saudi establishment in practice if not in fact. But via Somewhere On A1A, I saw this editorial by a columnist saying he was wrong to oppose the U.S. invastion of Iraq. A key graf:

"Look, I have no illusions about the shenanigans and hypocrisies of a big power like the US, including its neocon ideologues, who are more cons than neos. Lest we forget, at the height of Saddam’s bloody reach in the 1980s, which saw the Halabja atrocities, Washington not only uttered nary a word of criticism of the Iraqi leader, let alone called for his overthrow, but provided him with political, military and economic assistance that, in effect, underwrote his survival and made possible the very repression that American officials now claim they want to banish forever from the land.

"All true. Yet, the US may, just may, end up doing in Iraq what it did in war-ravaged European countries under the Marshall Plan. And if it doesn’t, well, what would Iraqis have lost other than the ritual terror of life under a dictator who had splintered their society into raw fragments of fear, hysteria and self-denial — a man who insisted that third graders learn songs whose lyrics lauded him with lines such as 'when he passes near, the roses celebrate.'"

I wonder if this is an aberration (this guy is clearly on the liberal side of the spectrum), or the start of a possible trend. I suspect the future course of our Iraq policy will have a lot to do with that.

By the way, Arab News is widely linked to because of the name, but if you want higher quality English-language Arab news sources, the ones on my sidebar are all much better choices.