Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Would you buy a used Tomahawk from such a president?

Such is the country which asks the world to trust them with nuclear weapons! Only one good has come of this totally unjustified and unprovoked aggression against a still-legitimate regime of a sovereign country recognised as such by the United Nations, of which it is a member-state.

It is that Clinton has been able to blunt the edge of the complaint of the US general accounting office (the equivalent of our auditor and comptroller general) that, notwithstanding all the hype about the technological brilliance of George Bush's 1991 war on Saddam, the performance of US missiles were 'overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available date, or unverifiable.'

By bombing Saddam once again, the US air force has apparently sought to persuade the accountants that the new, improved Cruise missiles 'were about 30 per cent more accurate.' Is this why Clinton went to war with Saddam last week? Would you buy a used Tomahawk from such a president?

There was a time --- specifically, till May 21, 1991 -- when India's would have been the first voice raised against this demented manifestation of the arrogance of power. It has, however, been demeaning for me as an Indian to find the Washington Post cite everyone from Russia's Primakov ('the US action cannot be supported by anyone at all, except those who put domestic politics -- including re-electoral situations --- above all else') to Spain's Matutues without thinking to tell what India thinks. Possibly because India does not know what it thinks.