Iraqnophobia

I hate doomsday scenarios.

Unashamed end-of-the-worldliness was all pervasive in the run up to the millennium. Silly movies where major public buildings exploded like firecrackers, and everything from meteorites to Godzilla himself threatened the free world with Armageddon.

It was if the fall of the Berlin wall and pulling back of the iron curtain had robbed us of the bogeyman.

And then a handful of evil thinkers - with a dramatic evil-minded gesture straight out of Hollywood - made the fiction real. Suddenly the enemy was brought into focus. He was young, Middle Eastern. Fanatic. Clerical. And the previously ill-focussed high-tech armies locked in on the new targets and took aim.

I spose that's where we are right now.

Once again there's a reason to waste millions of quids on war stuff. Good and Evil. Black and white. Right and wrong. Righteous types like Blair and his idiot brother George Dubya love colour-by-numbers morality. The lines are drawn already, and all they have to do is fill in the blanks.

Blair made another firm speech about standing up to tyrants, but surely he must have been rattled by the sheer bulk of people milling about in London this weekend. A bunch of flat-earth fox-botherers are one thing, but a couple of million of his hard-core voters must have left him wondering if his ballots are showing.

I'd love to believe that in this day and age people-power counted for something in the 21st century.

That Iron Tony will suddenly become the touchy feely warm and fuzzy Prime Minister he was back in the Dianarama days.

That George Dubya will crawl back into the bushes and America would finally put a man with integrity and vision and purpose in the White House.

But the march towards war seems inevitable, and the War for Oil looks like kicking off regardless. Its like the bad old days when governments didn't give a crap about the opinions of the people.

It doesn't help that Saddam Hussain is playing the cartoon villain with gusto. Every time I see the guy strutting about in his military uniform I'm suddenly looking around for a tank.

How a bright, positive, sophisticated people can end up being run by such a fool. It's as if he took lessons of great dictatorship from Chaplin and Groucho Marx and didn't get the jokes. It's hard to rabble rouse the conscience of a nation when the object of popular hatred is such a soft target. In comparison Fidel Castro comes across like Fozzie Bear.

It's less than cricket to see our leaders fail to stand up to jackbooted little nazis like Bob Mugabe, leaving our beleaguered sportsmen to take the moral stand. Then in the next breath expect us to admire their tough stance putting Saddam over the oil barrel.

All this to keep the gas guzzling Americans behind the wheels of their huge shinyass sports utility vehicles. A dollar a gallon down the local Exxon is what this is really all about. The freedom of the Kurds to farm their lands without fear of a blood Ba'ath is irrelevant in the face of that.

B