Splinters

For anybody who missed it (and the main news media did their best to help us miss it), here's a transcript of the resignation speech of Blair's first Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. I watched it live on BBC News 24 (thus cutting out the obscuring spin the reporters put on it), and it was staggering. This from a man with access to secret documents:

"Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?"

"Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months. I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted. Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply." (Moreover, I add, did you hear about Rachel Corrie, a US citizen murdered by that same occupying army? Did Bush mention it all?)

Cook ends: "It has been a favourite theme of commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics. Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support. I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government."

The vote is tonight. Will democracy be bulldozed like Rachel Corrie? (Need I ask?)