Why should only the bad, the silly and the misled have the fun of inventing stories of grand conspiracies to explain world events?
By the way, before we begin: you don't really think that Gaddafi had weapons of mass destruction, do you? Of course he didn't. The guy lives in a tent, for goodness’ sake. So, what's going on? Well, just look at the timing: just before the invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi makes his first tremulous approaches to the West. Then he strings them along for a few months. And then suddenly, just after Saddam is finally given the cow treatment, he finally capitulates – or seems to. Why? Isn't it obvious? If a fellow-dictator you knew had secretly slipped you a large stash of WMD to hide from the Americans, what would you do? This was a dictator one doesn't say no to. Yet everyone knows that WMD can't be hidden without leaving smoking-gun evidence. Right? Gadaffi's in a dilemma. So he decides to make a virtue out of a necessity. He “admits” privately that he has a massive WMD programme but now wants to turn away from the Dark Side; then he waits until he's absolutely sure that Saddam isn't going to turn up one day to claim his weapons back; and then he brazenly goes public. So at a stroke, Gaddafi joins the select club of dictators who have achieved WMD status (thus making him a hero to the enemies of the West) and gets brownie points from the West itself. And all without ever having to find out what plutonium is made of, risk a single air attack, or spend a single petrodollar.
Damned clever. Maybe Gaddafi is secretly Jewish. After all, why else would he keep saying things like this, which so starkly confirm the fundamental justice of Israel's cause?
Anyway, here's our real conspiracy theory.
Did you really think that the unremitting torrent of defeatist, pro-Saddam propaganda that appeared in all the mainstream media before, during and after the liberation of Iraq was just a matter of reporters saying what they really thought? In defiance of the Government? Don't make us laugh! For those with eyes to see, the real purpose of what was thinly disguised as shallow, seditious stupidity is glaringly obvious.
First of all, consider this: Saddam was an avid consumer of TV news. And what were his favourite channels? CNN, BBC and al-Jazeera. The very channels that are controlled by the US Government, the British Government, and the Qatari government (itself a puppet of the Americans) respectively. So, Saddam watches them, and what does he see? Endless variations on the theme that (1) the Coalition can't and won't fight because the UN and the French will stop them; (2) if it tries to fight, the US and British governments will be brought down by mass action by their own populations, already mobilised and on the streets to keep Saddam in power; (3) if it does manage to invade, it will blunder into a Stalingrad-Vietnam-quagmire, then withdraw after seeing a few casualties, resulting in another glorious victory for Saddam.
He believed it.
Who benefited from that?
Need we say more?
Let this be a lesson to you, folks: don't believe anything you see or hear in the media. Trust only what you have personally made up.
