Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-04-Speech-3-042"
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"en.20020904.1.3-042"2
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"Mr President, I wish to begin by saying that I served in the American Army in the 1950s, so I have a little knowledge of the horrors of war. I also want to say that George Orwell would find it difficult to create characters like Rumsfeld, Cheney and Ashcroft.
It is very important to ask ourselves what precisely do we mean by weapons of mass destruction. Are we talking about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Cambodia, or even Korea, where I served in the American Army? What precisely is our definition, and what are they and where are they?
A unilateral attack on Iraq would be moral madness. The 22 million Iraqi people have already suffered enormous pain and loss. They are now threatened with a full-scale invasion by a so-called Christian power, resulting in countless dead. It will be seen for what it surely will be: a crusade by the West against Islam. We are told that Israel will use nuclear weapons in certain circumstances. Yet we have no evidence, as has been constantly repeated in this House this morning, that Iraq has weapons of the kind referred to by the hawks in the American Government. US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is proclaiming that Iraq is giving refuge to al-Qa'ida terrorists. Nobody but a fantasist would suggest such a thing.
Another bombing of Iraq would be mass murder. The American Government talks about saving civilisation – a 200-year-old civilisation or a 5000-year-old civilisation? One has to really ask the question: who is the American Government really out to save? The American Government could be boosting the armaments or the oil industries at home or it could be geared towards the re-election prospects of President George Bush, à la Margaret Thatcher. We will certainly see a rise in Islamic fundamentalism and individual attacks on Western targets will continue unabated, even on a freelance basis, should this war take place.
I urge the Iraqi regime to change course and allow UN inspectors to be readmitted to Iraq now. Finally, I ask the media to examine their conscience and ask: why now, why not then?"@en1
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