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f78837b "Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?" war nuclear weapons-of-mass-destruction wmd David Mitchell
9139cf6 "Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?" -- war nuclear weapons-of-mass-destruction wmd David Mitchell
4dcb552 So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being 'nationalized,' had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad. (Post-Kuwait inspections by the United Nations had uncovered a huge nuclear-reactor site that had not even been known about by the international community.) I had seen with my own eyes the evidence of a serious breach of the Genocide Convention on Iraqi soil, and I had also seen with my own eyes the evidence that it had been carried out in part with the use of weapons of mass destruction. I was, if you like, the prisoner of this knowledge. I certainly did not have the option of un-knowing it. ba-athist-iraq crime-family genocide-convention nationalisation nuclear-reactor-technology privatisation wmd national-socialism militarism psychopaths serial-killers genocide oil bill-clinton ba-ath-party invasion-of-kuwait iraq kuwait united-nations iraq-war stalinism fascism Christopher Hitchens