Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar
Would you buy a used Tomahawk from such a president?
Such is the country which asks the world to trust them with nuclear
weapons! Only one good has come of this totally unjustified and
unprovoked aggression against a still-legitimate regime of a sovereign
country recognised as such by the United Nations, of which it
is a member-state.
It is that Clinton has been able to blunt the
edge of the complaint of the US general accounting office (the
equivalent of our auditor and comptroller general) that, notwithstanding
all the hype about the technological brilliance of George Bush's
1991 war on Saddam, the performance of US missiles were 'overstated,
misleading, inconsistent with the best available date, or unverifiable.'
By bombing Saddam once again, the US air force has apparently
sought to persuade the accountants that the new, improved Cruise
missiles 'were about 30 per cent more accurate.' Is this
why Clinton went to war with Saddam last week? Would you buy a
used Tomahawk from such a president?
There was a time --- specifically, till May 21, 1991 -- when India's
would have been the first voice raised against this demented manifestation
of the arrogance of power. It has, however, been demeaning for
me as an Indian to find the Washington Post cite everyone from
Russia's Primakov ('the US action cannot be supported by
anyone at all, except those who put domestic politics -- including
re-electoral situations --- above all else') to Spain's Matutues
without thinking to tell what India thinks. Possibly because India
does not know what it thinks.
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