Mr Bush

Whatever your opinions on Iraq, Bush, the war on terrorism or Saddam Hussein – everyone has one.

The Guardian this week published 60 open letters to the President and they all make great reading, coming from many different and conflicting points of view triggered by his current state visit.

It’s a huge article, so I’ve quoted bits. Hope you don’t mind…

Unfortunately, the doomed strategy of making weapons of mass destruction the cause of war has discredited the war in the UK. You did better to say frankly that you wanted to remove the Saddam regime which so brutalised its people…
Michael Portillo

…you allowed a British prime minister to be morally finessed by Jacques Chirac… Dear God, that it should come to that…
Sebastian Faulks

You opposed and destroyed the world’s most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.
Frederick Forsyth

You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room
Salam Pax

The single human being I most admire in the world right now is Michael Moore. The guy’s a genius.
Bel Littlejohn

There is no way to write this but in anger…
Ronan Bennett

We are by no means an anti-American nation… this is personal. This is about you and your neo-conservative monsters who have illegitimately captured the White House…
Polly Toynbee

I don’t care why you got rid of Saddam, and neither does any Iraqi I know… [Saddam's dynasty] would have carried on mass-murdering and asphyxiating natural freedoms… Although your country will requisition all the oil, the Iraqis are now able to protest.
Aaron Barschak

Add comment November 20th, 2003

Freudian

Isn’t it strange what you thing about in the shower? Yesterday morning, I thought of this…

Insurance Freud
And speaking of strange thoughts – another weird dream last night.

I am in a large hotel. A tall hotel with fifteen floors. My workmates are there for some kind of celebration. In the lobby, I’m sitting next to a woman from marketting. She shows me her hand. The back of her hand opens up a circular flap and reveals a clear plastic cartridge filled with pipes through which her blood is flowing.

She presses the back of the cartridge and it pops out so that she can show it to me, then she pops it back in again. She explains that it was surgically implanted in order that the doctor can test for illness. She is annoyed because the part of her hand that was removed to make way for the implant has been destroyed and she can never get it back. The doctors did not explain to her that this was going to happen.

I go to the lift and go upstairs. On the next level I find my Project Manager. He is in tears, hiding his face and completely inconsolable. Despite the fact that he never speaks, I determine that he’s upset as he has made the same mistake that I have and got off on the first floor instead of the fifteenth as we should have done.

We both go to the fifteenth floor. There is a woman with white-blonde hair crying on a large seat in the middle of the hallway. Somehow I know that she is the wife of a colleague, and she is crying because he has died.

I feel bad because I don’t know how to console her. Then I wake up.

Add comment November 20th, 2003