The sage who gets the back-page interview in today's Vanguardia is a real moral guy whose name is Denis Halliday. Mr. Halliday is an Irishman who was once the Adjunct Secretary General of the UN and who is so moral that he resigned in 1998 because he thought we were being too mean to Iraq. Mr. Halliday is very proud that his father was a pacifist who worked to keep Ireland out of NATO. We've excerpted it. The questions, of course, are Q. Mr. Halliday's answers are A.

Q. The CIA says they were making chemical weapons.
A. The first UN inspection was done with some rigor, but Butler's was working for the CIA, the Mossad, and the secret services of various countries. That wasn't serious.

Q. I suppose that you don't support the mission that is beginning now.
The mission is impossible: they have to find weapons of mass destruction and, if there aren't any, the United States will attack anyway. We all know that.

Q. Why is it going to do that?
A. Iraq is the second-largest oil producer in the world. It's simply that. The United States wants absolute control of the oil market.

Q. Oil is an obsession of the Bushes.
A. And Bush is ready to do whatever it takes to get control over it. And once it has absloute control, you can be sure that Europe will pay a very high price for that oil.

Q. So why didn't they take over Iraq after they won the first Gulf War?
A. Bush Senior pulled back at the possibility of an explosion of the Kurdish powder-keg and an Iranian intervention. It's a very complex area, very much so.

Q. And what will they do after Hussein?
A: A protectorate with military bases, as in so many other countries. A puppet government and an informal occupation.

Q. That won't be easy.
A. It will be bloody...

Q. What do you think will happen?
A. The worst. We'll attack Iraq, with the shameful complicity of the UN and of its secretary general, and we will commit genocide. And, after thousands of deaths and much suffering, the Bushes will finally have their oil.

We won't comment too much, except that we wonder which star system this guy is receiving on his tooth fillings. Where did this pathological hatred for the Bush family come from? Where did he get this paranoia about the CIA and the Mossad controlling the UN? Why does he blindly believe, so simplistically, that America plans to attack Iraq in order to grab the oil after this canard has been debunked eight million times? And why is he so sure that America is acting in bad faith and its goal is to grab all the oil and then extort the Europeans? And who's the guy at the Vanguardia who keeps printing all this anti-American stuff, day in and day out? How about a little balance?