Baghdad Bob Redux
Source: David Attenborough Tells UN ‘Collapse of Civilisation’ Imminent
One of the more amusing characters of the first Iraq war was the official state propogandist for the Saddam Hussein regime named Muhammed Saeed El-Sahhaf, affectionately known as “Baghdad Bob” by the western media. His notoriety came from his blatantly false assertions which were humorously laid bare by observable fact. This propaganda minister’s job was to broadcast statements proving Iraq’s military superiority even as American bombers could be seen shelling the buildings right behind him on TV broadcasts. Here are some of the more famous pronouncements of El-Sahhaf, collected by the website thoughtco:
“There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!”
“My feelings, as usual, we will slaughter them all.”
“Our initial assessment is that they will all die.”
“No I am not scared and neither should you be!”
“We will welcome them with bullets and shoes.”
“They’re not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion … they are trying to sell to the others an illusion.”
and,
“Faltering forces of infidels cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege. Therefore, in reality, whatever this miserable Rumsfeld has been saying, he was talking about his own forces. Now even the American command is under siege.”
“Washington has thrown their soldiers on the fire.”
“They fled. The American louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of the Arab Socialist Baath Party yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the American soldiers. we had not anticipated this.”
Of course this was all amusing then and even more so two decades later. We can forgive El-Sahhaf for his utterances because he was convinced to do so, either by money or the point of a gun.
In his place, the modern Bagdad Bobs are the comical nutters preaching the Global warming charade. El-Sahhaf’s utterances stopped when the US soldiers finally zip tied him and sent him off to Gitmo. Unfortunately, there is no such merciful end in sight to the constant barrage of bleats from the Albert Gore and Richard Attenborough types as shown in the linked article.
No amount of cold winters, record snows, flat sea levels and exploding penguin numbers can dislodge them from their ideological and irrational pedestal. As some have noted, when Al Gore first sounded the alarm on Global Warming’s effects on the world’s polar bear population, there were 6000 of them left. Now, 20 years later, there’s only 30,000.
Attenborough, for his part, is prescient enough to predict the very end of man, of civilization and the earth itself if we don’t move some tax money around to some poor nations. He knows this because as the voice of BBC documentaries, he’s an expert on this stuff. In this same vein, we wait for Dr. McDreamy to find a cure for cancer and male pattern baldness. Such Chicken Littles as Gore and Attenborough say that the end is ‘imminent’ which is about as useful as predicting the Cleveland Brown’s Super Bowl appearance.
The spurious logic of their arguments are so blatant, they could have been uttered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While it may sound like an elegantly simple solution, ie: just throw money at it, the fact is, there is little historical record of money ever successfully solving the problems of poor nations. We recall from the ’60’s and ’70’s the plaintive pleas for money to help starving kids in Africa. Who knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars went to humanitarian aid there over the decades? Here we are, decades later, they are still starving. The only difference is that some government officials of these poor nations became awfully rich.
Now, they’ve changed the strategy. Instead of playing on people’s sense of charity, which admittedly can be unpredictable, the new gig is to play on people’s fears by invoking certain Armageddon or worse. It’s now a better idea to force the money from them. By transferring 100 billion dollars a year from western nations to poor nations, assuming it gets out of the hands of the dictators running them, this would save the earth. The leap of logic there is so great, you’d need plane tickets to cover the gap.
Even as the passage of time has uncovered more and more reputable science people backpeddling on the entire fraud of climate change, there remains a vocal contingent doing what Baghdad Bob did for Iraq during the war of 1991. Oddly, the most vocal people still peddling the snake oil of Global warming are….entertainers and lawyers. Bagdad Bob must be doing consulting these days.