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THE PROPAGANDA WAR

The looming war with Iraq still dominates the headlines and news bulletins again today and one angle is the one I talked about on 3AW with correspondent Peter Arnett in Baghdad yesterday.

The fact that the anti-war rallies around Australia and around the world have been seized on by the Iraqi Government for propaganda purposes. And why wouldn't they?

As the Herald Sun headline said this morning " Iraq Gloats over Rallies".

And the Iraqi Vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, is quoted as saying: " The demonstrations and marches that are sweeping the world are a bright picture that clearly reflects the opposition by the people of the world to America's policies of arrogance and aggression".

As Mandy Rice Davies once said about another issue: Well, he would say that wouldn't he?"

And I was thinking overnight with more newspaper photos and TV footage of demonstrations at home and abroad: We saw plenty of placards insulting President Bush and Prime Minister Howard. And plenty of vulgar papier mache puppets showing Howard kissing Bush's backside or being led on a lease by the US president.

But, and I may have missed it, I didn't see any placards, effigies or caricatures of the evil, brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein who has boasted that his mentor was Josef Stalin and who -like Stalin - has ruled by terror and has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own people.

Robert Horvath, a specialist in human rights, and an Australian Research Council fellow had a chilling article in The Australian newspaper today about Saddam Hussein's decades of slaughter. Not gossip, but proof from tonnes of Iraqi government documents that were captured from police station by rebels during that short-lived and brutally revenged uprising in March 1991.

Saddam Hussein survived the Gulf War and took revenge in what was called his Final Solution against the Kurds. About 100,000 of them were killed.

And what also gets me is when some of the pious speakers at the weekend rallies talked about "doing it for the Iraqi people". Have they even considered that the wretched, oppressed Iraqi people who live in fear might want to see the dictator toppled?

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002