WAR ON IRAK

Independent: Robert Fisk: The wartime deceptions: Saddam is Hitler and it's not about oil
The Israeli writer Uri Avnery once delivered a
wickedly sharp open letter to Menachem Begin,
the Israeli prime minister who sent his army to
defeat in Lebanon. Enraged by Begin's constant
evocation of the Second World War – likening
Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Hitler in his Berlin
bunker in 1945 – Avnery entitled his letter: "Mr
Prime Minister, Hitler is Dead."
How often I have wanted to repeat his advice to
Bush and Blair. Obsessed with their own
demonisation of Saddam Hussein, both are now
reminding us of the price of appeasement. Bush
thinks that he is the Churchill of America,
refusing the appeasement of Saddam. Now the
US ambassador to the European Union, Rockwell
Schnabel, has compared Saddam to Hitler. "You
had Hitler in Europe and no one really did
anything about him," Schnabel lectured the
Europeans in Brussels a week ago: "We knew
he could be dangerous but nothing was done.
The same type of person [is in Baghdad] and it's
there that our concern lies." Mr Schnabel ended
this infantile parallel by adding unconvincingly
that "this has nothing to do with oil".

For we will be in occupation of a foreign land.
We will be in occupation of Iraq as surely as
Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza. And with Saddam gone, the way is open
for Osama bin Laden to demand the liberation of
Iraq as another of his objectives