Silver lining
"Longer term, the SARS scare will be the biggest boost to sales of life insurance and related products that I can think of." — Maurice Greenberg, chief executive of insurer AIG, quoted in the May 26 International Herald Tribune.
Deception is their business
"[British foreign secretary] Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq, the Guardian has learned." — Report in May 31 British Guardian.
Unlike the bombs dropped on Iraqis
"Mr Powell told the foreign secretary he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not 'explode in their faces'." — May 31 British Guardian report.
A richly deserved fate
"If many more months go by and our troops are still there, the Iraqis are still fighting each other and us and we still haven't found any WMD [weapons of mass destruction], there will be hell to pay." — "Of-the-record" media comment by anonymous "senior official" in the administration of Emperor George Bush II, quoted in the San Jose Mercury, May 31.
Two of a kind
"The key question is not whether some of China's rulers are thugs but whether they are thugs we can work with. And they are." — Columnist Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, June 4.
From Green Left Weekly, June 11, 2003.
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