BBC - Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction

At least according to Mr. BBC himself Jeremy Paxman.

This is a long article but a must read as it shows just how hypocritical and anti-American the BBC are.

Be sure and read the whole article but here is the "why".

1. How on earth could the BBC cover the Iraq war in the manner that it did, when one of its top reporters had just published a book such as this?

How could the BBC, after one of its major reporters had published this damning description of Saddam's WMDs in late 2002, go on to produce a series in late 2004 called The Power of Nightmares to argue that

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.

The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.

In a new series, the Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion.

It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.

To realize what a stunning piece of hypocrisy this is, you have to understand the position of Jeremy Paxman at the BBC. He is as representative of his network as Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather have been of CBS or as Peter Jennings or Ted Koppel have been of ABC. How dare the BBC cop a "Blair lied!" attitude when Paxman, Mr. BBC himself, was publishing the same argument at the same time as Blair?

2. That leads us back to a question I posed at the beginning of this post: Why the sudden 180-degree turnaround in Paxman/BBC attitude on the subject of Saddam's possession of WMD?

The answer, I think, lies in this excerpted sentence from Chapter 11: "For twenty years, Iraq, under Saddam's leadership, has held up Caliban's mirror to the West." In late 2001, when Harris and Paxman were apparently doing most of their writing, to August 2002, when the book was published, the notion that Saddam Hussein had kept his stockpiles of WMDs and was an immediate threat was not yet an argument in America's and George W. Bush's interest; it was still, at that point, an argument with which to indict the West.

In Harris and Paxman's telling, Western civilization was the Frankenstein that produced the monster Saddam. And not only was the West to blame for creating Saddam; but the history that Harris and Paxman relate is one of the monster repeatedly outsmarting his creator, rendering his creator impotent to stop him.

As the months wore on into the autumn and winter of 2002-03, however, and it became clearer that Bush was making essentially the same argument that Paxman and Harris were making but that Bush was using it to build a case for war, it rapidly became less an anti-Western argument and more a pro-Western one. Even worse, it became a blatantly pro-American and pro-George Bush argument. Anti-Western feeling may be rampant at the BBC, but it pales beside the BBC's anti-American feeling. And so, virtually overnight and without missing a beat, the BBC and the media in general became corrosive skeptics on the subject of Saddam Hussein and current stockpiles of WMDs.

I hope the bloggers can bring down Paxman and the BBC in the same manner they brought down Rather and CBS.
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