31 January 2003 The Time-Table By Gwynne Dyer If we could sneak a look at US Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld’s agenda for the next month or so, it would probably go a bit like this: 16 February — Attack Iraq. Special Forces to seize oil-fields. Drop off dry-cleaning. 19 February — 10th Mountain Division enters …
23 January 2003 Week of Decisions By Gwynne Dyer By this time next week, we’ll know whether the chief United Nations arms inspectors in Iraq, Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei, have asked the Security Council for another 60 days to go on looking for Saddam Hussein’s elusive ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (almost certainly yes). …
18 January 2003 Iraq: The Schedule Slips By Gwynne Dyer It gets quite warm in Iraq between May and September, and the last conqueror of Baghdad, General Sir Stanley Maude, avoided the worst of the Mesopotamian summer by leading his British and Indian troops into the city in March of 1917. However, the Arab warriors …
28 December 2002 2002: Year-End Review By Gwynne Dyer The past year has been dominated by a US obsession with Iraq which, remarkably, only seized the Bush administration three long months after the terrorist attacks on the United States in September, 2001. In my year-end survey twelve months ago, just after the US occupation of …
26 December 2002 Iraq: Will They Fight? By Gwynne Dyer “If they come, we are ready,” Saddam Hussein told his most recent biographer, Con Coughlin, last September. “We will fight them on the streets, from the rooftops, house to house. We will never surrender.” To anybody who recalls Saddam’s hollow threats about the coming ‘Mother …
16 December 2002 Syrian Survival Tactics By Gwynne Dyer Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad is only a second-generation dictator, not the original, blood-stained model, which may explain why he escaped inclusion in the ‘axis of evil’. But he is, like Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, a member of the Baath Party. He gives office-space in Damascus to …
12 October 2002 A Question of Motive By Gwynne Dyer Bring enough cynicism to the task, and you can usually figure out some rational motive (though often a shameful one) for almost any policy advocated by a politician. In the case of President George W. Bush’s policy of bringing about ‘regime change’ in Iraq, however, …
26 September 2002 The Arsenal of Evil the Cat By Gwynne Dyer Cartoon villains have no need of complex personalities or even motives; they’re just evil, that’s all. From the Joker in the old Batman comics down to Evil the Cat in ‘Earthworm Jim’, they seek to destroy our hero and conquer the universe simply …
PAPERS THAT HELD THE ‘SADDAM’S OPTIONS’ ARTICLE BECAUSE OF THE MONDAY LETTER TO THE UN MAY WISH TO USE THIS UPDATED VERSION. ALL CHANGES ARE IN PARAS TWO AND THREE. 17 September 2002 Saddam’s Options By Gwynne Dyer Put yourself in Saddam Hussein’s boots. What are his options now? There was a global sigh of …
March 9, 2000 Oil Prices in the Sanctions Balance By Gwynne Dyer United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has publicly told Hans von Sponeck, until recently the U.N. official responsible for coordinating humanitarian aid to Iraq, to shut up about the horrendous impact of sanctions on that country so long as he is drawing a U.N. …