Gilligan says "war was just"
Interesting entry from
Eurosoc blog
Not that
Gilligan - this
Gilligan
(Brief refresher in case the link goes away -- from the BBC:
Lord Hutton's report, 328 pages in all, criticised the reporting of BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, saying that allegations he made against the government were "unfounded". )
Gilligan is now singing quite the different tune:
bq.
Gilligan says “war was just”.
“One year on (since the war began), however the most important fact is that nobody’s worst fears on that wakeful night have come true. The vast majority of us, Iraqis, journalists, and Tony Blair alike, survived. Fedayeen guerrillas struck the coalition with small numbers, but there was virtually no real fighting with Sadam’s regular forces. The bombing of Baghdad looked scary on TV, but it didn’t even begin to approach the daily tonnage dropped on ,say, Hanoy during Vietnam, London or any German city during the second world war.
bq. ‘Shock and awe’ lasted an hour and a half, rather than the promised three days. And with only a few ghastly exceptions, the targeting, in the capital at least, was very precise. Colleagues who arrived after the war was over kept asking us where all the destroyed buildings were.
bq. There never was a military stalemate, a refugee crisis, a hundred thousand civilian dead…” He goes on: “That old doom-mongers favourite, the revolt of the “Arab street” across the Middle East, has remained as much of a mirage as any weapon of mass destruction.”
And we will probably find the WMD (or what ever they were - he
was working on
something) in Syria (remember the truck convoys we let pass) or buried in the desert.
Posted by DaveH at March 22, 2004 9:42 PM