Tim Blair

QUOTES OF 2003 - APRIL

• "If Australia is attacked, it's no longer terrorism. We have invaded Iraq. Iraq, or its new allies, have every right to attack back." -- Margo Kingston

• "No country can hope to beat the Yanks off with conventional weapons - they've got air, sea and land completely covered. The only recourse is chemical, biological and nuclear weapons (the Yanks used them in Vietnam, and have not ruled out using them in this war)." -- Margo Kingston

• "Plastic shredders? We used to dream of 'aving plastic shredders. When I were a lad, we 'ad to get oop at three o'clock in t'morning and work 27-hour day at secret police headquarters, rending dissidents with ordinary garden rake. But tell that to yer yoong war protestors today, and they won't believe you." -- reader Paul Zrimsek reacts to news that Uday Hussein has a Yorkshire accent

• "Being against the war was yesterday's argument: today the only question is whether you are for or against victory." -- Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt

• "A too-swift and easy coalition victory may substantially increase the risk of future wars." -- Fairfax columnist Robert Manne

• "Please kill Saddam Hussein." -- Iranian-born cafe owner to US tourist Mike Gerhardt

• "I do believe this city is freakin' ours." -- Capt. Chris Carter of Watkinsville, Georgia, arrives in Baghdad

• "Rupert Murdoch's vast newspaper empire has waged a relentless pro-war propaganda war before and since the war began." -- Margo Kingston

• "Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses?" -- Robert Fisk. With Fisk that day was SMH columnist Paul McGeough, who later reported: “Robert gets a bit windy from time to time."

• "That war can brutalise those left behind is an old lesson of history and we're getting worried about The Sydney Morning Herald's Miranda Devine, who's starting to write about humans as vermin." -- Media Watch’s David Marr complains about Devine describing terrorists as “cockroaches". Media Watch had earlier used the same word to describe Sydney radio commentators

• "So much is being lost and destroyed in this war. Lives. Ideals. Dreams." -- Margo Kingston laments the end of Saddam Hussein’s dreams

• "It is an appalling military adventure mounted by appalling people with the certainty of appalling consequences for years to come, not only for the Iraqi people." -- but also for SMH columnist Alan Ramsey

• "Imagine the damage being done to the children of Iraq. For those who escape physically will, inevitably, be mentally maimed, haunted for the rest of their lives." -- Phillip Adams

• "They stand, they fight, sometimes they run when we engage them. But often they run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are." -- Brigadier-General John Kelly on non-Iraqi Muslims fighting outside Baghdad. He continued: "They appear willing to die. We are trying our best to help them out in that endeavour"

• "I have this delightful fantasy of left-wingers throughout the Western world putting their hands up and saying: ‘Well, actually we got that a little bit wrong.’" -- British columnist Janet Daley in Melbourne’s Age

• "Well, dawn has broken over Baghdad, welcoming day one of the new freedom, but if this is liberty, then it's far from perfect." -- the ABC’s John Highfield

• "The Americans ‘liberated’ Baghdad yesterday, destroyed the centre of Saddam Hussein's quarter-century of brutal dictatorial power but brought behind them an army of looters who unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy." -- Robert Fisk

• "I am happy to be wrong about the fall of Baghdad." -- John Quiggin

• "GO HOME HUMAN SHIELDS YOU U.S. WANKERS." -- banner carried through Baghdad by jubilant Iraqis

• "This is no time for gloating. Saddam has fallen. Many Iraqis are relieved. But the world is no safer." -- SMH columnist Adele Horin

• "One unpalatable consequence of victory in Iraq is that we are about to be offered a toxic brew of moral smugness and self-righteousness." -- Fairfax columnist Hugh Mackay

• "I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don't know why they were fired into Kuwait." -- one of Iraqi information minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf’s greatest hits

• "Donna Mulhearn can't reconcile the images of cheering Iraqis greeting the toppling of President Saddam Hussein with the blood on the streets of Baghdad." -- Australian Associated Press reports a human shield’s confusion

• "This must have been Saddam's love shack." -- US Army sergeant Spencer Willardson locates a townhouse featuring a mirrored bedroom, lamps shaped like women, airbrushed paintings of a topless blonde woman and a moustached hero battling a crocodile

• "It is not just the vulgar, premature bawdiness of pro-war triumphalists which I find revolting. It is that they accuse anti-war people of being uncaring about the people of Iraq, and the lack of concern that these proponents of war show for the bodies of the killed and those maimed and injured by their invasion." -- The Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

• "What we do not want is a situation of instability and the basis for terrorism off the back of this so-called victory, and it's the longer-term consequences, the humanitarian aid, how are we going to put in effect the new political system." -- Simon Crean, eloquent as ever

• "Make me dinner. Iron my shirt." -- sign carried by a representative of NO MA’AM during feminist protests at Augusta National

• "Although it would be foolish to predict what will happen in Iraq now, the apocalyptic predictions of as many as 500,000 civilian deaths (from a widely quoted leaked UN report) have so far proved exaggerated." -- The Age’s Gay Alcorn

• "Doctors at a Kuwaiti hospital on Wednesday began treating an Iraqi child who touched hearts around the world after he lost his arms." -- Reuters

• "Make no mistake, if the US can't find those chemical weapons in Iraq, it'll smuggle some in and plant them." -- Phillip Adams

• "The National Library and Archives - a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq - were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat." -- Robert Fisk. Readers were quick to point out that Fisk may have been out by as much as 2,000 degrees.

• "At the first moment, with support of other coalition forces, our people crossed the border into Iraq and made a significant dash by night to our operating area. On the way we encountered several dozen Iraqis, whom we dealt with." -- Australian General Peter Cosgrove

• "Media Watch is wrong, Media Watch knows that it is wrong, and Media Watch's viewers know that Media Watch is wrong." -- me getting it wrong, wrong, wrong

• "I hope you die you c---. I notice you daily blather of bile and shite gob right wing evil crap has disappeared. I hope it is because you are terminally ill with a painful debilitating disease which will kill you slowly and spread to all those dear to you." -- a contented reader

• "I was wrong about the war." -- Hardball host Chris Matthews

• "I was just following orders." -- Iraq air defence force commander Muzahim Sa'b Hassan al-Tikriti

• "It's not healthy." -- Ted Turner believes too few people own too many media organisations

• "He's my man; he was great." -- George W. Bush is a Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf fan

• "He was very passionate. He had learned some Spanish and he would say things like, 'I adore your body', and, 'You make me fly like a bird when I touch you'." -- Judy Lonchan Lopez, George Galloway’s Cuban love toy

• "Dyareckon he would take that view if the personal blog was filled with 'My boss is God. He is the bestest boss. Lovelove for Boss.'?" -- the Wogblogger on a Hartford Courant editor who banned a journalist from blogging

• "APRIL 28, IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY YOU LOSER!" -- a sign placed next to a donkey in Iraqi on Saddam Hussein's 66th birthday

• "If we have used the word 'liberate' in our own journalism, as in 'such and such a place had been liberated by allied forces', that's a mistake." -- the BBC’s Mark Damazar lays down the law

Posted by Tim Blair at December 24, 2003 04:37 PM