WHO Goes After Smoking in Middle East

The fellow over at the Velvet Glove, Iron Fist blog(what's that supposed to mean?) tells us the World Health Organization is going after tobacco use in Syria. It seems they also smoke something called Shisha over there, which is considered by some to be less healthy to use than tobacco. This has something to do with a proposed "plain packaging' effort:

"Despite believing that cigarettes are much, much safer than shisha, it is cigarettes the WHO are going after, presumably because they can't apply their risible plain packaging policy to waterpipes."

She urged Syrian officials to implement a "plain packaging" approach for cigarettes to reduce their "attractiveness and glamour."

You'd think the WHO would concentrate instead suggesting Syrians stop trying to kill each other but, no, that's too simple. This certainly seems similar to the U.S. and California government's war on e- cigarettes.

This doesn't come as a surprise to me. I wrote here and elsewhere long ago- back when Saddam Hussein was still alive- that once U.S. influence became dominant in Iraq, the Iraqi people would be less free than they were under Hussein. This mimicking of U.S. policy by the WHO seeems to confirm that with the WHO doing the monkey see, monkey do thing.

No way to say for sure I was right since Iraq is in such disarray right now, but the forces in play are likely the same and Iraq, by all accounts, certainly seems worse off than before we tried to save the country.