Quote from John Simpson’s book Strange Places, Questionable People, from his time in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War:

I went back to Baghdad after a week or so and stayed on for two months … I grew to love it, and to sympathise with it, too: Iraq seemed to me like a hijacked plane, being flown to an unknown destination. A man whom scarcely anyone wanted as their president was holding a gun to the pilot’s head, and the passengers and the rest of the crew were terrified to say a word or to stop him. The fact that British industry, with the enthusiastic encouragement of the British government, had supplied the hijacker with his gun and the bullets for it made it all the worse.

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