peripathetic

Tired of getting stuck into Tony Blair?
Want to display your considered (if largely fake and posturing) indifference to the shady mechanics of how the war in Iraq was won? Want to stop getting stuck into people for the sake of it, and start concentrating on the big issue that Saddam is gone? Here's how: just get stuck into someone else! Someone nobody would ever have thought you'd attack. After all, there must be a reason you'd do that, right?

How many Iraqis has Robin Cook killed? Not by the favoured Baath Party means of feeding them into plastic shredders or gassing them in their villages, but indirectly through the policies he endorsed? It's hard to be precise - the body counters in Saddam's Iraq always needed more time - but the death toll must run into five figures and hits six if you believe the more gruesome claims about the effects of the sanctions he enforced.

And so Nick Cohen takes a running jump at Robin Cook. And then, inexplicably, moves away for the rest of his article to tell the story of sanctions against Iraq. The sanctions were Bad Things, he tells us. True. They killed people. True. Saddam was still able to torture people and carry on his disgusting tenure even though sanctions were in place. True.

Cohen's comment comes down to this: Robin Cook was Foreign Secretary at the time the sanctions were put in place by the agreement of the UN; the sanctions were wrong; a dictator can carry on with sanctions in place. But he never comes up with an alternative. Content with naming a political celebrity, he launches into a mix of imcomplete narrative and a hash of an argument, and never reaches a conclusion.

The standfirst? "Quick to damn others, Robin Cook is lamentably slow to accept his part in the deaths of many Iraqis". Hehe. Might I suggest a revision? "Quick to damn others, Nick Cohen is lamentably slow to accept his part in an incoherent, posturing op-ed piece".