A friend suggested to me that former South African President Nelson Mandela has been smoking crack? Why? Apparently my friend saw some recent quotes from an address to the International Women's Forum.

Mandela suggested that freeing the people of Iraq from a similar oppression that blacks in an apartheid-ruled South Africa faced is tantamount to a new Holocaust.

"If (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein was not carrying out the UN instructions and resolutions... I will support them (the UN) without resignation, but what I condemn is one power with a president who can't think properly and wants to plant [sic] the world into holocaust."

Note the equivocation -- if the U.N. decides that Iraq is out of line, then a "holocaust" is acceptable. But if the U.S. goes it alone, that's unacceptable.

Interesting how the mere approval of the U.N. can turn a holocaust into an example of international unity.

Mandela, who used to have some grasp on reality, also trots out the over-used "it's all about the oil" argument.

"All Bush wants is Iraqi oil, because Iraq produces 64 percent of oil and he wants to get hold of it."

Iraq produces 64 percent of the oil? What oil? Math is obviously not his strong suit, but I can't come up with a single statistical formulation on how Iraq has "64 percent of the oil."

Mandela's brain has officially left his skull.