Looks like we’re not the only ones who think Phillip Adams is a Fat Fucknuckle:-
EVEN when Phillip Adams is monumentally wrong, he claims he’s still “more right than wrong” (The Weekend Australian Magazine, 1-2/5). Where does this man’s vanity end?
It isn’t the details he got wrong on Iraq, it’s the substance. The self-serving list of his errors (mostly someone else’s fault) miss the heart of the matter which is this: post 9/11, could such a monster as Saddam be tolerated?
The idea that lives could have been saved by not invading is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis Saddam was slaughtering ? and that’s leaving aside the wars that would have come from other unrestrained dictatorial regimes if Hussein’s defiance had been ignored.
Even Adams admits other dictators are treading more carefully because of the US (and Australia’s) action in Iraq.
But his worst comment is this: “I was right, too, to back the UN rather than the US.”
Does Adams not read the newspapers? The UN’s oil-for-food program was entrenching Saddam’s power by funnelling all exports through the dictator and, while ignoring the medical needs of Iraqi kids, giving him huge sums to spend on buying influence from the French, Russians and Chinese. UN officials are deeply implicated in a scandal bigger than Enron.
By contrast, Bush, Howard and Blair did what was right. It is the UN that is covered in oil, but Adams is too blind to see.
Tom Minchin
Bayswater, Vic
FRANKLY, I feel Phillip Adams has lost it. The man who thinks he knew more about the Keating marriage than Annita Keating is applying the same powers of observation to the Iraq crisis.
We now know the UN oil-for-food program not only corrupted UN officials but also a number of high-ranking officials and politicians in UN member states. The irony of the UN program was that it strengthened Saddam’s position to act as an evil influence not only in the Middle East but around the world. Any criticism of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy needs to address the following:
Why did US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld so badly underestimate the troop requirements for the campaign.
Why did the Defence and the State departments not have a realistic post-war plan in place to deal with the aftermath of the war.
I believe if the British Foreign Office had a hand in the planning, the Foreign Office’s famous Arab lobby would come up with a very different outcome.
Val Wake
Port Macquarie, NSW
GEORGE Orwell answered Phillip Adams in 1946.
“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Bob Davis
Yamba, NSW
IN making a list of the aspects in which he was right and wrong on the Iraq war, Phillip Adams leaves out the most fundamental of his wrongs.
Adams’s basic wrong is that he is anti-American, even if he denies it.
By anti-American, I mean anti-capitalism, anti-individualism, anti-egoism and anti-glorification of existence.
Adams stands for the exact opposite of all the elements which comprise Americanism, which means: all the elements which lead to life, liberty and happiness.
Adams couldn’t do anything more wrong than preach against the very principles man needs to live freely and prosperously.
Since he advocates collectivism, selflessness and self-sacrifice, Adams, and his kind, are the real ammunition for the terrorists.
David Lee
Croydon, Vic
Given his level of popularity with readers (and by extension, the buggers who pay for the product), how much longer is Rupert going to continue to employ this enormous embarassment?
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