Martin Amis

[Otto]

Indeed a very fine article:

"The imponderables of the proliferation age were becoming ponderable. Once a
nation has done the risky and nauseous work of acquisition, it becomes
unattackable. A single untested nuclear weapon may be a liability. But five
or six constitute a deterrent.

>From this it crucially follows that we are going to war with Iraq because it
doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. Or not many. The surest way by far
of finding out what Iraq has is to attack it. Then at last we will have
Saddam's full cooperation in our weapons inspection, because everything we
know about him suggests that he will use them all. The Pentagon must be more
or less convinced that Saddam's WMDs are under a certain critical number.
Otherwise it couldn't attack him. (...)

I said earlier that America's war aims remain partly undisclosed. The frank
answer to the question "why now?", for instance, would be the usual jumble,
something like: a) to pre-empt Saddam's acquisition of more WMDs; b) in good
time for the next election; and c) before the weather gets too hot. Without
his war, Bush is an obvious one-term blowhard; and he listens to his
political handler, Karl Rove, at least as keenly as he listens to Donald
Rumsfeld. The supplementary motivation, hatched at the thinktank and
prayer-breakfast level, is, I fear, visionary in tendency. It has been
noticed that a great deal of the world's wealth is in the hands of a
collection of corrupt, benighted and above all defenceless regimes. The war,
as they see it, will not be an oil-grab so much as a natural ramification of
pure power: manifest destiny made manifest, for the good of all. (...)

We contemplate a kaleidoscope of terrible eventualities: a WMD attack on
Israel, and a WMD response (conceivably nuclear); civil war in Iraq. and
elsewhere, together with all manner of humanitarian disasters;
fundamentalist revolutions in Egypt and Jordan; and, ineluctably, an
additional generation of terror from militant Islam. Meanwhile, common sense
calmly states that an expanded version of the present arrangement
(inspectors, monitors, full exposure to world opinion) is sufficient to
contain and emasculate Saddam until pressure builds for a coup; and that the
"war on terror" can start only with the dismantling of the settlements in
the territories occupied by Israel."

I can only agree with this. Mr. Amis is a fine writer.

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Romeo" <romeocheeseburger at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 10:50 PM
Subject: Martin Amis


> piece in today's Guardian should be anthologized
>
> rich
>

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