Colleagues

For the many of you who went on the Sunday 16 Peace March this info is
redundant.  For those who missed it the annecdotes below may be
informative.

The massive crowd over-stretched the organizers plans and schedules.
I caught the train from Epping, but had to squeeze into what felt
like a cattle train, so packed was it with unprecedented numbers of
first-time protesters.  Of the people around me, most had never been
to anything like this before.  The mood was anger, resentment and
rebellion -- this from housewives, pensioners, teenagers, granparents,
and (yes!)  university students.  Anger about being taken for fools,
resentment against arrogance, and rebellion because the PM lied and
continues to lie to them.  You all know about how public transport
was unable to cope with this enormous groundswell of protest.  On my
way home, across the ailse from me on the train were two men dressed
immaculately in blazers festooned with military medals, and across
their left pockets were prominent labels proclaiming "Hornsby RSL
Against the War".  I overheard one saying to a couple of students,
"Johnny Howard has been conned into this, and it will be another Vietnam.
My mates died in Vietnam because Menzies lied to us.  Now all the Yanks
want are the oilfields."  Peter Slezak's mother-in-law (whom Peter
describes as being to the right of Pauline Hanson) in Cessnock  and her
friends in the Ladies Bowling Club marched against the war in Cessnock.
Blair and Howard may pooh pooh this groundswell, but OK, let's see when
they next go to the polls.  A pensioner on the train with me also lives
in Epping.  I don't know her, but she said, "You and I live in Howard's
electorate of Bennelong.  If this war goes ahead, thousands of innocent
Iraqis will die.  Next election I will be carrying a placard saying
'John Howard -- Butcher of Iraq'".


If you are already pissed by the arrognat way Howard and Blair dismissed 
the rage in the nationwide protests in Australia and Britain, read no
further as you already know what I am going to say.  If not, read on:

I heard Blair on TV tonight.  Here is how he dismissed the 1 million
marchers in London.  "Even if there are 1 million of them, that's less
than the number of people Saddam has killed".  Granted that if Saddam
has killed that many, do you see how the grounds for attacking him keep
shifting?  First it was his nuclear weapons.  None found, and the CIA
itself says he doesn't have any left.  Then it was his biological
weapons (hey, guess who sold him the stuff to make them years ago?).
Now, even Richard Butler says 90% of it was destroyed, and he has no
capacity to make any more.  Then it was the Al Qaeda link.  Hmmm, the
CIA says it ain't there, and even Colin Powell not so long ago confirmed
the CIA intelligence, and more recently so did British intelligence.
Now it is because he is so mean and cruel to his people that we are
obliged to liberate them, of course also incinerating large numbers of
them in the process.  Hmmm, I did not see this kind of solicitous urge
to liberate the people of Cambodia from Pol Pot (he killed 1/3 of his
people -- the history of that can be traced to Nixon's and Kissinger's
machinations in Indo-China).  Nor to liberate Chileans from the Facist
depradations of Pinochet.  And certainly not to liberate the Chinese
from the insanities of Mao's senility.  So, Blair, tut-tut, such
hypocrisy!  

Let's find some other way to remove Saddam, and indeed all tyrants
anywhere.  Maybe the first to go should be those who cheat their way to
the Presidency by rigging votes and fixing the Supreme Court.