MARK COLVN: …What are
the most worrying aspects of the Blix report? For instance, I'm looking here
at a section about VX gas. Are you particularly concerned that Iraq may not
have destroyed its VX gas and its VX gas project?
RICHARD BUTLER: Oh absolutely. Let me tell you, one of the main reasons that
Iraq threw me and my team out four years ago, was my insistence to them that
they had to come clean on VX.
VX is the most potent of the nerve agents; Iraq began their history with us
in the past by saying that it had never made any of the stuff. We were able
to prove that was not true. Then they moved from denial to minimisation, and
said well we only made 200 litres of the stuff.
We were then able to prove they'd made four thousand litres, four tonnes of
VX, and they said oh well, we lied.
One of my last demands upon them, in 1998, was to come clean about the whole
extent of the production of VX. They got extremely angry about that, and
refused to.
So it's completely unsurprising to me that Hans Blix is saying we still need
to know the truth about VX.
Meanwhile, Janet Albrechtsen in The
Australian
flays all the silly church leaders who no longer know right from wrong.
For all its ecumenical consensus, the
churches' Iraq stance has a peculiarly godless, and therefore hollow, ring
to it. Their "no need for war" world assumes all people are basically good
people. In that world, there is no need for God to set down moral standards.
This frees the priests from the arduous task of making moral judgments.
Instead they play feel-good politics whose main aim is not to offend.
When asked on ABC Radio last year whether
Saddam Hussein was a dangerous man, Anglican Primate Peter Carnley
said: "Everybody says he
is, and there have been reports that he has been involved in . . . the
elimination of people, including members of his own family. So, on the basis
of that kind of report, you would have to say he is a morally suspect
person."
The Iraqi dictator has invaded two
neighbours, launched missiles against two others, tortured and butchered his
own people, violated UN resolutions for years, paid off Palestinian suicide
bombers and, for Carnley, he is merely "morally suspect".
I
wrote last year of
how Peter Carnley had blamed the Australian government’s stance on Iraq for
the Bali bombing, then later denied having said that.
Finally, with the bells of war tolling
ever more loudly, religion commentator
Joseph Loconte
notes in
the New York Times:
Many of today's war
critics hail Jesus as "the Prince of Peace," while forgetting that the Bible
also calls him "the Lion of the tribe of Judah," the one "who judges and
wages war."
January 29th, 2003
