What expression can I make that delivers my sentiments about last night's Bush speech? Let me count the ways. The Internet is crackling today with eloquence, and I've honed in o­n o­ne of my current favorites, John Pilger, also a favorite of listmember Wade Frazier (himself another of my favorites). Wade sent this today:

“Here is the first great response I have seen to Bush's little talk last night, and it fittingly came from John Pilger, o­ne of my favorites. He shows how Tony Blair is playing Mussolini to Bush's Hitler. It is not wild rhetoric, for the current plans for Iraq are exactly the greatest crimes the German leaders were prosecuted for at the Nuremberg trials.”

PILGER: BLAIR IS A COWARD

Here are some quotes:

Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack o­n Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I o­nce watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds. They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the “long box” pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a “box” was presumed destroyed.

When I reached a village within the “box”, the street had been replaced by a crater. I slipped o­n the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.

I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in that “media war” I never saw images of these grotesque sights o­n television or in the pages of a newspaper…

I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I traveled in Iraq two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards of children similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf war in 1991. She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed o­n grey little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes. More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British. Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes cancer. In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable. For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields. It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the south…

Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America and Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down o­n its people 800 cruise missiles in two days. This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.

A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.” The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud inventor. He said: “You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.”

What will his “Hiroshima effect” actually do to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14? The answer is to be found in a “confidential” UN document, based o­n World Health Organisation estimates, which says that “as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries”. A Bush-Blair attack will destroy “a functioning primary health care system” and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population. There is “likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions”…

“Endless war” is Vice-President Cheney's contribution to our understanding. Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons “if necessary”. o­n March 26 last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons”. Such madness is the true enemy.