Stardate 20021223.1547

(Captain's log): For those who might doubt that war is coming, and who don't believe anything our own government says, they might take note of the actions of the Iraqi government which is growing increasingly frantic and even hysterical. It's pretty remarkable, really; it shows that there's a growing sense of panic and desperation in the Baathist ruling elite.

Their denunciations of the US and UK are becoming increasingly shrill (and even a bit juvenile; "little Bush"?). Their claims of innocence are getting more and more strange.

They're trying to rally support from the other Arab nations in the Gulf, who don't want any part of it. They have been making a particular effort to buy off the Kuwaitis, in hopes of depriving us of Kuwait as a staging ground for the attack. They just discovered that they had possession of some paintings which had been looted from Kuwait in 1990, and just returned them to Kuwait.

Upon delivering their umpteen-thousand page declaration to the UN, they proudly claimed that it was absolutely complete. Once it became clear that it was a crock, now they're backtracking and say they'd be glad to work to try to "clarify" it.

There's also a significant chance that they'll do spite destruction in case of a war, in particular in terms of destruction of their oilfields. (The Kuwait oil fires show what they're capable of.)

And now they've announced that they're going to be placing foreign volunteers all over the place to act as human shields to try to protect "vital and strategic installations". I don't suppose that anyone cares that this is a war crime which directly violates the Geneva Convention. (After all, only the US can commit war crimes.) I'm also quite certain that our military planners will not let this affect their decisions about what we're going to bomb. If these Arabs and Europeans are stupid enough to put themselves in harm's way, they'll discover the eternal truth that stupidity has always been a capital crime. Iraq tried to do this in the first Gulf War, too. In one case they herded several hundred civilians on top of a military bunker, which we bombed anyway. It made for some horrific news coverage, but it didn't prevent us from taking that C&C facility out.

The impression you get from all the reports of words and actions out of Iraq is that they are convinced that we're going to invade.