Brits and the BBC

Tony Blair's government is in a war of words with the BBC. The BBC acts like an angry exwife that keeps haranging you while you are writing checks to her for alimony. It is a govenment owned, but not a government run media outlet.

The BBC is news with an attitude. The attitude is both arrogant and condecending. During the war in Iraq, BBC officials critized the Fox News Channel, for wanting the coalition to defeat a despot and tyrant. At the same time, Fox was presenting a much more accurate picture of what was happening in the war. At one point, the BBC was chastised by one of its reporters at Centcom. Some of the Brits who were actually fighting in the war turned the BBC off on their aircraft carrier.

The current war of words is over who put what in a dossier prepared by the governemnt to persuade people of the need to liberate Iraq. The BBC seems to be controlled by people that opposed the liberation of Iraq for any reason. They are particularly upset about the reason given by the government--WMD, because little evidence has been found to date.

As a rational for war the WMD was a pretty easy case to make because, Iraq had either admitted it had them or weapons inspectors had said they had them, and the Iraqis were wholly incapable of carrying their burden of proving they destroyed them. The BBC is attempting to shift this burden back on the the coalition that liberated Iraq. The coalition will continue it search for the weapons, not to make the BBC unhappy when they are found, but to make sure they do not fall into the hands of terrorist and rogue states.

The real weakness in the WMD as a rationale for war, is that if Saddam's regime were more competant, they could have avoided the war by producing proof of the destruction of the prohibited weapons. This would have put them in the position of not only avoiding war but having the sanctions lifted. The money would roll in and they would rebuild the prohibited weapons and threaten the peace as well as make the weapons available to terrorist. This danger was avoided when the Iraqi regime not only failed to produce evidence of the destruction of the weapons, but acted like a regime that was still trying to hide the weapons. Whatever their reason for acting in this manner it led to their demise, and no one, not even the BBC should have any regret about their demise.

The current BBC rant, as well as that among some Dems in this country is that the lack of WMD finds proves the reasons for going to war is fraudulant. The Dems are hampered in this argument by the fact that they had been saying the same thing the Bush administration said about Saddam's WMD since at least 1998. They just were not willing to take action to do anything about it. The BBC and the rest of the Euro leftist simply did not want to do anything to liberate Iraq, until Saddam used the weapons.

By focusing so obesessively on the WMD issue, the BBC and the UK left over look the other rationales presented for liberating Iraq, including the beastly way Saddam treated his own people. The mass graves uncovered since the war should be enough for anyone who really cares about human rights to justify the war.

The BBC and other leftist have also challenged the links between Saddam and al Qaeda. They completely ignor, the substantial evidence found including the arrest of al Qaeda oberatives by US forces. They seem to require some evidence that Saddam was responsible for the 9-11 attacks. He may have been, but if he was, he has so far suppressed the direct evidence of his involvement. However, there was evidence found in intelligence files of a meeting in Baghdad with a representative of bin Laden in a time frame that could have included planning for the 9-11 attacks.

As Simon and Garfunkle say in their song, The Boxer, "a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."

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