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 …
20 December 2002 Did Peace Really Win in South Korea? By Gwynne Dyer “The presidential election will decide whether the nation faces a future of war or peace,” said South Korea’s presidential candidate Roh Moo-hyun, suggesting that his opponent (and Washington’s favourite) Lee Hoi-chang was the war candidate. He also implied that US President George …
19 November 2002 What Is Nato For? By Gwynne Dyer In the end, they solved the problem of Alexander Lukashenko’s determination to attend the Prague summit of NATO on Thursday and Friday by simply refusing him a visa. Lukashenko, the president and in practice the dictator of Belarus, reacted in typical fashion by threatening the …
17 November 2002 Bad Dreams By Gwynne Dyer I had the dream again last night. This time, it was about Orthodox Jews who were praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, ambushed in a narrow alley on their way back to their one-square-block ‘settlement’ in the middle of Hebron city Twelve Israelis are killed, mostly …
15 October 2002 Media Phenomenon By Gwynne Dyer The final death toll is not yet known, but over half of those killed in the terrorist bombing in Bali on Sunday were Australian, so Australia (with about one-fifteenth of the US population) has suffered a loss of life of roughly the same order as the United …
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 …
5 September 2002 Why Did the Target Change? By Gwynne Dyer Beyond grief and anger, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States should raise a question in the minds of Americans: when and why did the target change? Later this year or early next, unless the Bush administration changes course radically, there …