Conrad/#1 Peasant, as someone who has, on balance, welcomed your imput here, I've got to say I'm with Larry/InOBU one hundred per cent on this. At least you're worth arguing with, which is more than can be said for one or two other posters in this thread.

Much is made of Saddam gassing "his own people," less of the fact that he gassed Iranians before that. (The UK and US gave him the means to produce his gas, with the intention that he use it on the Iranians. Rumsfeld of course was right there in Baghdad shaking Saddam's hand while some of the Iraq-Iran atrocities were under way.) Nothing at all is said these days about the USA's use of nepalm, or the fact that the British were the first to gas Iraqis, way back in the 1920s. Nor that America's allies Pakistan and India boast WMDs and have tested them in defiance of international treaty.

And there has been little mention of the response by Zanu PF secretary Dydimus Mutasa to the fact that nearly seven million Zimbabweans face starvation: "We would be better off with only six million people who support the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people." Such remarks would be treated with alarm if the "never again" response to the holocaust had meant anything. But then as Hitler said in 1931, about Turkey's genocide in WW1: "Who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" So the west huffs and puffs about Iraq, but when it comes to Zimbabwe, which has neither oil nor diamonds, we will do a Rwanda and look the other way.

It would be futile suggesting to Norton1 that we are entitled to expect more from civilised democracies than from a handful of criminal lunatics. After all, in our millions we failed to march in protest against 9-11, thinking it might not be a very smart response. So poor old N1 probably thinks we welcomed it with open arms.