War and democracy

A propos of Libya, Tony Benn, John Pilger and others write to the Guardian warning against any military action. One thing they say is:

The disaster in Iraq should have taught us that military intervention cannot hasten democracy.

For one thing, this seems an overgeneralisation from one example. West Germany post-1945 springs rather quickly to mind.

But more than that, one may agree that the Iraq war caused a disastrous loss of life and was utterly wrong while still doubting that the country would have made faster progress towards democracy if there had been no war.

War does not in itself bring democracy, but can – in some circumstances – remove obstacles to it.

How to mouth off in parliament about the legality of war and get away with it

Nick Clegg’s “illegal invasion of Iraq” moment has raised questions about whether minsters speaking in the Commons are there as ministers or as random people with opinions. Lucy Mangan has some fun, as does the Daily Mash.

Hadleigh Roberts has an intriguing theory – that George Osborne fed him the line and was mouthing along as he delivered it – but I’m not convinced. I’ve watched the clip four times and I’m not sure Osborne’s lips are doing anything more than slightly, randomly wobbling.

I think the explanation is much simpler: Clegg was using the dog whistle. He knows he’s achieving less in the coalition than many of his party would like, so (to switch canine metaphors) he threw them a bone. His statement is of no consequence for government policy, but plenty of Lib Dems will have been heartened to hear it.

Just a thought, though: a senior member of the government has made a confident and unambiguous declaration on the legal status of a war without even bothering to consult his Attorney General. I’m sure that the usual suspects are rushing to the comment pages of the Guardian and the Independent to denounce his lack of respect for proper procedure…

Borrowing could destroy our way of life within 45 minutes

I was very taken with this analogy by Steve Richards:

The way the Government is attempting to manipulate voters into accepting savage spending cuts reminds me of the build-up to the war in Iraq. There was then, and is now, an attempt to create a sense of… inevitability.

And after a while I remembered that I’ve used a similar one myself, three months ago:

The quality of public services should be treated… not a sad but inevitable piece of collateral damage in the War on Debt. Intelligence reports suggesting that the ratings agencies possess weapons of mass destruction are deeply dodgy. And so is the argument that we have to inflict the mass destruction on ourselves to appease them.

Now, Richards has obviously come up with this independently, and he’s done more with it than I did. And, now I think about it a bit more, there are quite a few parallels between the anti-war narrative and the current situation:

• Something that everyone agrees is a problem but not on how urgently or how forcefully it needs dealing with.
• A government whose motives stretch more broadly than the official ones.
• A favoured approach that could end up harming us rather than making us more secure.
• Official reports showing that some progress is being made and is indeed accelerating, but provoking angry impatience from the government.
• Monstrous yet dubious warnings about the dangers of delay.
• A coalition, the smaller partner of which is clearly less happy about the way things are going.

In this narrative, someone like Fraser Nelson (via Bob and Luke and Will) plays the role of the hawkish ideologue who’s not really concerned about UN resolutions, and even fears a peaceful, diplomatic solution, because he just wants a righteous war:

Sir Alan [Budd] said yesterday that Alistair Darling was being too pessimistic: on almost every measure, the public finances look like being in better shape. Unemployment, he said, will be almost 200,000 lower than had been feared. Economic growth will not be quite as strong but the tax revenues – which are far more important – will come in much more strongly than Mr Darling gloomily forecast. Something is going badly right.
In many areas that were not included in Sir Alan's report, the British economy is doing remarkably well. Manufacturing is bouncing back – helped, of course, by the weak pound. The Bank of England is no longer buying British government debt, but demand remains strong – keeping bond yields low. Banks are lending, and money supply is increasing. Just as the economy sprang a volley of nasty surprises as we entered the crash, it's yielding pleasant surprises now.
So when Mr Osborne declared yesterday that "it's worse than we thought" he had precious little to point to. The so-called structural deficit (the amount of overspend that will not be eliminated by an economic recovery) is a little bigger than had been estimated. But crucially, Mr Osborne's election goal – to abolish "the bulk" of the structural deficit by 2014 – would have been easily achieved had Mr Darling remained in place. No more taxes need to be raised, or budgets cut, to honour this Tory manifesto pledge.
…
But Mr Osborne will have to change tactics. He cannot credibly play the worse-than-we-thought card if Sir Alan's team – on whom he has bestowed Delphic authority – disagrees. Instead, he will have to focus on something from which he shied away in opposition: the moral case for cuts; to argue, on Budget day, that even if Britain could keep on borrowing it would be reckless and wrong to do so.

No analogy is perfect, and it’d be easy to take this one too seriously. But there’s a more general reason that there’s some ring of truth in it; it’s the same as the reason I was never particularly surprised about the revelations of dodgy government manoeuvres pre-war. I think that almost any major contentious policy, with some definite downsides and the risk of others, gets justified to the public with some level of dishonesty. It’s deplorable, but hardly exceptional.

Anyway, cue George Osborne’s Mansion House speech tonight.

The really important thing about Iraq: us

Today Gordon Brown gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. This weekend, amid violent attacks on polling stations, Iraq holds an election. I wonder which will get the most coverage?

The rest of the world exists primarily as a mirror for us.

When can you make a citizen’s arrest?

George Monbiot is inviting us to attempt citizen’s arrests on Tony Blair, “for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq”. He’s offering money, so I expect Cherie will have a go.

The response to this has not been universally positive (although someone’s already had a go). But Monbiot is undeterred: “you can mock our feeble attempts to hold Tony Blair to account, but only if you propose an alternative”.

OK, here are a few alternatives: have a nice cup of tea; take up knitting; put pretend arrest warrants out on the other 411 MPs who voted for the war; go online and find out what your old school friends are up to; put a pretend arrest warrant out on Blair for his illegal war against Yugoslavia; keep writing the same Guardian column over and over again until you hit retirement; send thank-you notes to Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao and Jacques Chirac for declining to make the Iraq war was legal by giving it the nod; or eating some ice cream. These would be all be equally successful ways of holding Blair to account.

One other thing you could do would be to read section 24A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which covers the rules on citizen’s arrests [annotated with my own expert legal interpretation]:

Arrest without warrant: other persons

(1) A person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—
(a) anyone who is in the act of committing an indictable offence;
(b) anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be committing an indictable offence.
[(a) is obviously out, as the war was in the past, and for the same reason so is (b)]

(2) Where an indictable offence has been committed, a person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—
(a) anyone who is guilty of the offence;
(b) anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be guilty of it.
[No competent body has ruled that any indictable offence has been committed, so (2) is out. That basically stymies the whole idea, but let’s imagine that citizens are allowed to decide what counts as an offence, and carry on]

(3) But the power of summary arrest conferred by subsection (1) or (2) is exercisable only if—
(a) the person making the arrest has reasonable grounds for believing that for any of the reasons mentioned in subsection (4) it is necessary to arrest the person in question; and
(b) it appears to the person making the arrest that it is not reasonably practicable for a constable to make it instead.
[For (a), we’ll have to see below, and (b) is out as Blair is always accompanied by constables who could perfectly well make any necessary arrests. Actually, we could stop here, because the (3) demands that both conditions (a) and (b) be met. But while we’re so near the end…]

(4) The reasons are to prevent the person in question—
(a) causing physical injury to himself or any other person;
(b) suffering physical injury;
(c) causing loss of or damage to property; or
(d) making off before a constable can assume responsibility for him.
[No, no, no, no. Not even close]

It’s a jolly student jape, but the legal case for performing a citizen’s arrest on Tony Blair is even weaker than the political case. Sorry.

Blair denies Iraq war

Tony Blair today told the Chilcot inquiry that his detractors were wholly wrong to accuse him of having taken the UK into war with Iraq.

“Of course critics can disagree with my policy and the way I carried it out; I respect that,” the former Prime Minister said. “But I do ask people to accept that that in following the diplomatic route, I did what I thought was right.”

Rejecting the charge that he traded the independence of UK foreign policy for influence abroad, he said that he came to an anti-war view as a matter of principle, “not to cosy up to Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac and Hu Jintao”.

He added: “I am a man of peace. This notion of me taking part in some sort of war is just the usual media hype. If you don’t believe me, you can ask President Saddam about our latest round of negotiations.”

But seriously.

Were it not for the heap of Iraqi corpses in the background, I’d think the earnest and ferocious attempts to ‘prove’ Blair a liar were senseless. But not because they’re mistaken.

I pretty much take it for granted that almost any major contentious policy – from any government of any party in any country – is justified with some mix of exaggeration, selective omission, specious interpretation and outright falsehood. Introducing the minimum wage, privatising the railways, last year’s fiscal stimulus, the wars in Afghanistan and the Falklands – does anyone really imagine that these policies, whatever their true merits, were presented and advocated with such honesty that a string of inquiries and a pack of media wolves wouldn’t have something to get their teeth into?

That’s why I’m so unmoved by all the furious arguments that Blair lied (and why I’m so indifferent to the occasional counter-argument). Now, I resent being lied to as much as anyone else, especially by the people I pay to run my country. But what are the ‘Bliar’ brigade trying to achieve? He’s not going to be put on trial for war crimes in Iraq (why not war crimes in Kosovo?), so all they can do is to sully his reputation. But everyone’s opinions were set in stone long ago. Yes, there’s value in saying ‘the truth will out’, and Chilcot has been eking out a few more scraps here and there, but who at this stage is listening with an open mind?

I’m angrier about the needless and massively fatal incompetence of the whole affair than the unremarkable fact that the usual grubby political shenanigans went on behind the scenes.

The prose is purpler than the sword

Matthew Norman used to be a good diary columnist on the Guardian, inventive and cheeky yet understated. He’s also said to be (I wouldn’t know) a decent restaurant reviewer for various publications. But as a Serious Political Commentator at the Independent, he’s trying to do a very different kind of writing, and the results are perhaps not so good.

Here’s a digest of his latest column, on Tony Blair and the Chilcot inquiry:

feverishly awaited appearance … fresh revelatory nuggets … a vicious little irony … an indecently cute vignette of a warped morality … elite corps of commentators … heroic armchair warriors … cabal of staunch loyalists … Pinochet-type indignity … Olympian arrogance … soul-crushing futility … insouciant unconcern … Petit bourgeois notions such as international law … forever be eagles pecking at his liver … staggeringly defiant attitude … impossible to quantify, but it must be many millions … loyal to his own avarice … tosses and turns in the desolate small hours … the sunken eyes and haunted expression betray his fear of arrest … a demigod whose stature far transcends the insolent judgments of mankind … an outcast in his own land.

This is slightly unfair of me. You could probably create an edited torrent of bilge out of the work of many newspaper columnists, or plenty of Blair’s speeches, or maybe even some of my own writing. Actually, no, I don’t think I’m quite that bad. Not usually, anyway.

But you get the flavour of Norman’s piece. The thrust of the argument seems to be: (a) I can write all fancy; and (b) contrary to all available evidence, Tony Blair really does care that people like me hate him.

Ah well. I’d guess the man knows his readership.

David Beckham and the Iraq war: down the rabbit-hole

I have just uncovered the awful truth about the most horrifying political conspiracy imaginable.

What triggered it off was my stumbling across an apparently silly remark by Jon McClure, a popular musician of whom I’d never heard:

If David Beckham had of spoken out about Iraq it wouldn't have happened, I honestly believe that hand on heart, or Britain certainly wouldn't have got involved. Beckham's cultural gravitas was as such in that period that if he'd have gone 'I don't want this war in Iraq, it's an awful thing, we should not do it', it wouldn't have happened, the public would've gone mad against it. But because he kept his gob shut, and everybody else did, it happened, we sleepwalked our way there.

My first reaction was to laugh and to blog something appropriately piss-taking – ‘Iraq war was Beckham’s fault’. Easy fun.

But then I dug a little deeper. I wondered to myself just how well Beckham had been playing in the run-up to the war – if he’d been messing up, that wouldn’t suggest much “cultural gravitas”, would it?

Now, I’m not much of a football fan, but even I remember this incident – perhaps you do too:

Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson has refused to apologise for the dressing room bust-up in which he injured David Beckham. … Beckham was hurt after a furious Ferguson kicked a boot in the dressing room which hit the midfielder in the face.

But do you remember when it happened?

Let me put it another way: can you guess on exactly which day it happened?

Yes. It was Saturday 15 February 2003:


Alex Ferguson, of course, is a longstanding Labour/Blair supporter. He is also rather pally with none other than Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s war-propagandist-in-chief.

I need hardly spell it out, so obvious is it. Ferguson got wind that Becks was planning to address one of the marches. He alerted Campbell, who feared that the England captain could topple the government with one flick of his Alice band. Blair told Campbell that Becks had to be stopped, and so the order went out for Fergie to take him down by any means necessary. Things were smoothed over for Fergie by one of the club’s then major shareholders, pro-war Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB.

Job done. Becks was cowed into submission while the war broke out, and he was further bribed with an OBE on 13 June of that year. The very next day, the US military launched a major new campaign against Iraqi insurgents.

Three days after that, on the very day that Robin Cook and Clare Short were giving evidence to a parliamentary enquiry into the war, Manchester United sold Becks to Real Madrid for £25 million. Becks himself was out of the country at the time. The move to Spain (whose government also backed the war) would keep him safely away from the UK political scene.

It gets murkier.

The transfer deal was brokered by Beckham’s management agency, SFX Entertainments, which is owned by the Texas-based media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications.

Clear Channel’s politics is revealed by controversies such as the 2004 refusal of its outdoor advertising division to allow a billboard ad against the Iraq war. Many of its radio stations led the boycott of the Dixie Chicks’ music after their criticism of George Bush, and one of its TV stations rejected a paid-for ad by Cindy Sheehan protesting the war.

Most of Clear Channel’s talk radio stations are affiliated with Fox, and carry programmes by such ferocious right-wingers as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Lowry Mays, Founder and then Chairman/CEO of Clear Channel, was of course a Bush campaign donor.

At this point the evidence trail goes cold. I can’t yet prove that Lowry and Bush were personally involved in moving Becks out of the UK so he’d pose less of a threat to Blair’s premiership, but only a fool would doubt it.

(Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the horrific and preposterous power of the internet. The above is the result of me mucking around because there was nothing on the telly last night. Imagine what a group of truly dedicated paranoiacs could accomplish on a more serious subject.)

Iraq inquiry finds you made your mind up ages ago

11 August 2010: The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, announced by Gordon Brown last year, reported yesterday, to mixed reaction.

Its findings that A, B and C were dismissed by you as being “old news…we didn’t need this charade to tell us what we already knew”. However, the report’s judgement that P, Q and R was welcomed. “This is exactly what we’ve been saying since the start,” you argued, “and now this means that we can keep saying it, only now we get to add the word ‘official’.”

However, you also branded it a “whitewash” for its failure to conclude that X, Y and Z. “We all know the truth,” you angrily declared, adding that “this so-called ‘official’ attempt to sweep things under the carpet will not wash”.

Perhaps most controversial was this passage from chapter 6 of the report:

There is clear evidence that many members of the public had made their minds up as early as spring 2002, and that they went on to interpret all new information in light of these preconceptions. Many others formed tentative views in early 2003 but then reconsidered over the next two years; despite this apparent readiness to reconsider, though, these people now hold fast to their new opinions with the zeal of converts. Nothing we say can change that.

Your response was swift: “I knew they’d say something like this, and I’m frankly astonished that they have.” You declined to make further comment until you’d gone through the whole thing with a couple of highlighters, deciding which bits of the report were “in my name” and which were “not in my name”.

The Guardian, to save money on writers, reprinted its editorial from 16 June 2009:

What is already known about Britain's decision to invade Iraq is surely more extraordinary than anything that could possibly be uncovered by the inquiry…
The chief point of a new probe, then, cannot be to get at things that have necessarily lain under wraps until now. No, the real reason an inquiry is needed is to draw together what we already know, and in its light to try to grasp how such a monstrous blunder could have been made.

CJ to Bush’s Bartlet

Scott McClellan, George Bush’s former Press Secretary, has spilled some beans. No, not down his shirt, but in a memoir. He’s critical, but tries almost painfully to avoid attacking Bush himself.

Thus:

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

And:

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. … In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage.”

It’s easy to happen. “Boys, we need to be highly candid and honest with the public during this time of war.” “Yes, sir. We’ll immediately get going on a propaganda campaign to manipulate sources of public opinion to your advantage.” “Good stuff. Now where are my golf clubs?”

And, in a way, McClellan blames the media for Iraq:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

And, bafflingly:

McClellan... relates a phone call he overheard Bush having during the 2000 campaign, in which he said he could not remember whether he had used cocaine. “I remember thinking to myself, 'How can that be?'” he writes.

Effects of cocaine include shortened attention span, twitching, paranoia, impotence and shortened attention span.

Inquiring minds

The Tories, led in debate by William Hague, have failed in their latest bid for an inquiry into the decision to go to war in Iraq.

Thing is, that decision was made by 412 MPs, so presumably you could go round them with a clipboard and learn a lot.

The thinking back then of one W Hague, for instance, was that the intelligence, if anything, probably “underestimated and understated” Iraq’s nuclear programme, so that there was “at least a significant risk of the utter catastrophe of Iraq possessing a nuclear device without warning” and therefore “the risk of leaving the regime on its course today far outweigh[s] the risk of taking action quite soon”.

About as embarrassing as David Miliband trying to maintain the line that we can’t possibly have an inquiry now because it’d distract the troops.

Parris on Iraq: bad hopes and bad memories

Norm Geras takes Matthew Parris to task for an unedifying column, in which Parris said:

Many of the antiwar brigade, too — we who from the start have railed against the occupation of Iraq — have in our secret hearts suppressed a twinge of disappointment that the surge of US troop reinforcements in Baghdad has been accompanied by a reduction in civil atrocities. We kind of thought — did we? — that the whole place was going to go up in one enormous explosion, leaving almost everybody dead, and settling the argument finally in our favour?

Norm responds:

Perhaps Parris isn't being serious. … He's well placed, naturally, to speak for himself… But it's better for him if he's being facetious. For, though most of us are subject to the temptation of wanting to be right, there are fewer who want this want to be satisfied where the cost of its being satisfied is death and destruction to others.

I doubt that Parris really wants ever-increasing carnage just so that he can feel right; but I fully believe that he does feel this “secret… twinge of disappointment”. Poor kitten.

I’m strongly reminded of the media sniping a while ago that followed Martin Amis’s ill-judged musing that he’d felt “a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.'” His protests that “I was not 'advocating' anything. I was conversationally describing an urge - an urge that soon wore off” cut little ice.

Parris’s remarks are pretty much equivalent, I’d say.

Here’s the odd thing, though. You’d think, as Norm does, that Parris is well placed to speak for himself. Not so. In February 2003, as the Iraq war loomed, Parris wrote an apparently thoughtful piece on his opposition to it:

Would [the candid peacenik] be ready to admit that he had been wrong to oppose the war if an attack proved quick, straightforward and relatively unbloody?
Because I happen to think it might.
And after that? What if, once Saddam and his regime have been routed, the… predictions of mayhem prove wrong? When doves insist that even if the war succeeds the peace will fail, how firmly do we attach ourselves to that argument? Would we still oppose war, even if we could be persuaded that it would bring a better Iraq?
Because I happen to think it might.
…
I do not think that the war, if there is a war, will fail. …
I am afraid that it will succeed.
I am afraid that it will prove to be the first in an indefinite series of American interventions. I am afraid that it is the beginning of a new empire: an empire that I am afraid Britain may have little choice but to join.

(I think that his ultimate reason for opposing the war was less than impressive, and note that it has the virtue for the pundit – over the other, consequentialist reasons for anti-war positions – of not requiring any predictive abilities or factual knowledge.)

My point is, though: he didn’t think, as he now professes to have thought, “that the whole place was going to go up in one enormous explosion”. Furthermore, he was not, as he now claims, one of “we who from the start have railed against the occupation of Iraq”.

In July 2003, as the problems with the postwar reconstruction were becoming more apparent, he wrote:

Whatever the past, whatever mistakes may have been made, regime change must now be accepted as an honourable endeavour in whose success the whole world has a stake.
… What is to be gained by moaning? The unwilling should now join the willing in trying to make the occupation — and ultimately the handover — work.
There is no point in crowing or carping, for the alternative to a successful transition is grisly.

Grisly. Quite. If he does feel even an idle and occasional yearning for slaughter that would allow him to say ‘I told you so’, he could at least check first that he really had told us so.

How not to stop a war

Peter Wilby argues that “the British press... failed badly to expose the flimsiness of the case for going to war in Iraq”.

Norm responds: “The issue of whether or not to go to war in Iraq was debated as fiercely and extensively as just about anything in recent memory, and the voices against were many and to be read and heard at every turn.”

But they could both be right.

What if the anti-war voices, dominant in the pages of the Mirror, Guardian and Independent, and far from invisible in most of the other papers (not to mention the BBC and Channel 4), were simply incompetent? What if, rather than dissecting Hans Blix’s reports in relation to the provisions of resolution 1441, they devoted too much of their time to shouting about poodles, cowboys, oil, Islamophobia and whose name the whole business was in?

What if, like so very much of the media (left and right, TV and print, ‘quality’ and ‘popular’), the anti-war movement had focused excessively on personalities rather than policy detail?

If so, then despite having been heard at every turn, they still could have failed badly.

If you try to boil an issue down to nasty warmongers and innocent victims, and you don’t put Saddam Hussein in the former category, you’re likely to have trouble getting traction.

Just an idle hypothesis...

Bush on Iraq: “a rhetoric that’s as subtle as can be”

A transcript of a meeting between George Bush and then Spanish PM José Marìa Aznar has been published. The meeting took place on 22 February 2003, over three weeks before the start of the war. Some extracts to interpret as you will:

Bush: Saddam Hussein won't change and he'll continue playing games. The time has come to get rid of him. That's it. As for me, I'll try from now on to use a rhetoric that's as subtle as can be while we're seeking approval of the resolution. If anyone [on the Security Council] vetoes [the proposed second resolution], we'll go. Saddam Hussein isn't disarming. We have to catch him right now. … There are two weeks left. In two weeks we'll be militarily ready. I think we'll get the second resolution. … We'll be in Baghdad by the end of March.

…

Aznar: Saddam Hussein hasn't cooperated, he hasn't disarmed, we should make a summary of his breaches and send a more elaborate message. That would, for example, allow Mexico to make a move.

Bush: The resolution will be tailored to help you as best it can. I don't care much about the content.

…

Aznar: How will the resolution and the inspectors' report be combined?

Condoleezza Rice: … We don't expect much from that report. As with the previous ones, it will be six of one and half a dozen of the other. … After the inspectors have appeared before the Council we should anticipate the vote on the resolution taking place one week later. Meanwhile, the Iraqis will try to explain that they're meeting their obligations. It's neither true nor sufficient, even if they announce the destruction of some missiles.

Bush: This is like Chinese water torture. We have to put an end to it.

Aznar: I agree, but it would be good to be able to count on as many people as possible. Have a little patience.

Bush: My patience has run out. I won't go beyond mid-March.

Talking down British troops?

There was nothing wrong with Gordon Brown going to Iraq to talk about troop withdrawals. But don’t take it from me; I have it on the highest authority, as interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning:

James Naughtie: Firstly, Gordon Brown’s visit to Iraq. Is that something you welcome, and would you expect something specific to be said and to come out of it?

David Cameron: Yes. I mean, I’ve been to Baghdad and Basra myself and met with British troops, and they’ve been doing incredible, difficult work there. And if it’s now possible to hand over progressively to the Iraqi army and to bring more of our troops home, then he’ll certainly have my support.

By the afternoon, scenting an opportunity to show Brown up, the Tories had completely changed tack. Liam Fox led the charge:

You, Prime Minister, in your self-indulgent, plagiarised, 67-minute speech, how much did you dedicate to Iraq, Afghanistan and our Armed Forces? 126 words. 126 words. One word for every two servicemen or women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope you remember that when you are having your photo opportunities in Iraq today.

I have no idea whether this inane hysteria was an act or sincerely felt. I don’t care. But if I were a soldier in Iraq wanting some non-partisan prime ministerial attention, and keen to hear news of troop withdrawals, I’d rather Brown flew out to see us than devote some undefined threshold number of words to me in his party conference speech.

Was Brown’s use of troop numbers (total reductions vs those already withdrawn vs those already announced) dishonest? Here’s what he actually said:

I believe that by the end of the year the British forces, which have been 5,500, can be reduced to 4,500, and that by the end of the year, indeed by Christmas, 1,000 of our troops can be brought back to the UK and to other purposes.

There’s no implication anywhere that any of this is a new announcement (even though some of it is). Think carefully about what tense he’s using in saying that numbers “have been 5,500”. Note that his mention of the number 1,000 occurs only after he’s said that the reduction will be from 5.500 to 4,500. There’s no scope at all for confusion about the lower level of troops he means.

Hadn’t he promised to tell this to Parliament, though?

I stand ready and willing to be corrected on this, but I can’t find anywhere he’s actually said such a thing. True, many people (including me) had recently formed that impression, from his having said:

I’m going to make a statement to the House of Commons when we return in October, and I want to set out to the House of Commons how we are moving in the provinces for which we have responsibility in Iraq from what you might call the combat role to one where the Iraqis themselves take over the responsibility for their own security…

But nowhere does this suggest either that he’d mention numbers for withdrawal in this statement or that he wouldn’t mention such numbers in any non-Parliamentary statement. Any impression to that effect that I or various TV/newspaper pundits had formed seems to have been entirely our own fault.

That said, such a media expectation had formed, and so Brown’s move yesterday was predictably likely to draw him some flak. Probably the (politically) clumsiest move he’s made in the job so far.

Now, I could discuss whether these reductions would be a good thing for Iraq or for the British troops that remain, but let’s face it, the politicking is the far more important issue. Election on 1 November?

Self-serving git of the decade

Osama bin Laden (used to be big in terrorism, more recently an intermittent media pundit), as well as being vain, is also a raging hypocrite.

In his latest sermon from the diary room, he fumes about “the killing of more than 650,000 of the people of Iraq as a result of the war and its repercussions”.

Bafflingly, he omits to mention that his mates are responsible for a fair amount of that killing.

This has not escaped notice. A poll of Iraqis released yesterday finds that while general pessimism has increased even further since February, people are now more likely to blame the violence in the country on al-Qaeda and foreign jihadis than on the US/coalition forces.

Bin Laden also proudly points out that “burning living beings is forbidden in our religion”, and yet somehow doesn’t make the connection between this and what happens when you get some big metal tubes full of living beings and aviation fuel and fly them at great speed into big buildings full of even more living beings.

Still, at least his handsome new look should impress those 72 virgins – if he ever gets round to daring to practise what he preaches.

Git.

On being pleased and clear of conscience

As Matt says, the comments on Neil Clark’s noxious CiF piece (which I noted here) are overwhelmingly critical.

But most damning, by a country mile, are Clark’s own responses to these comments. Such as:

I am pleased that Britain and the US have had a major setback in Iraq, in the same way I'm pleased that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was defeated. Britain and America were in the wrong on Iraq- and I will support no aspect of the invasion.

Pleased? There’s anything pleasing about this situation? Oh, come on. Here’s how a non-reprobate anti-war writer might have put that:

Just as I’m horrified at the vast number of Iraqis killed, I’m also aghast at the pointless deaths of many British, American and other troops in this calamity, which has somehow managed to produce an Iraq even worse than it was under Saddam. The only wretched excuse for a silver lining is that further US-UK militarism has been set back – but what a terrible price to pay.

There. That’s not difficult, is it? You just need a little perspective and a small amount of universal concern for human life.

(And of all the countries Hitler attacked, why would it immediately occur to Clark to be pleased that Stalin’s USSR survived in particular? I’m just saying.)

He also says:

I have NEVER advocated the killing of innocent civilians.

But, of course, Clark doesn’t think the interpreters are innocent civilians. He thinks they’re collaborators who are complicit in an illegal war and occupation; they are “self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women”.

And, in response to a comment saying "Neil Clark wants these collaborators tortured and shot":

where do I say that? I merely said it's not a great surprise that many Iraqis feel ill-disposed towards them.
I hope the interpreters are not shot- but when it comes to their fate, my conscience is clear, I did not want to attack Iraq.

No, Clark didn’t “merely” say that it’s unsurprising the interpreters are in danger of violent death. He also said that we should “do all we can” to make sure that they stay in danger of violent death.

But I’m certainly willing to believe that his “conscience is clear”. He seems the kind of guy whose conscience usually is. Something else to be “pleased” about.

Careful talk disdains lives

Yesterday, Seamus Milne took great care to avoid saying: “I hope more British and American soldiers get killed in Iraq.” Instead, he said:

the price of staying in Iraq will have to rise still further if the US is going to be forced out and Iraq regain its independence.
Inside Iraq, that price can only be exacted by increased resistance.
…
The greatest danger to both the resistance and the wider campaign to end the occupation remains the Sunni-Shia split, fostered since the invasion in classic divide-and-rule mode.
…
The history of anti-colonial and anti-occupation resistance campaigns shows that success has almost always depended on broad-based national movements. But the embryonic resistance front has got to be a positive development if it holds together.

And today, Neil Clark takes great care to avoid saying: “I hope those Iraqi interpreters who worked for the British army get murdered.” Instead, he says:

all those who aided the occupation are complicit in what the Nuremburg judgment laid down as "the supreme international crime": the launching of an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign state.
The interpreters did not work for "us", the British people, but for themselves - they are paid around £16 a day, an excellent wage in Iraq - and for an illegal occupying force. Let's not cast them as heroes. The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country.
…
History tells us that down through history, Quislings have - surprise, surprise - not been well received, and the Iraqi people's animosity towards those who collaborated with US and British forces is only to be expected.
…let's do all we can to keep self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain.
If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war

What a veritable pair of Orwells for our age.

And now, the UN Security Council has just voted unanimously to extend and expand the UN’s mandate in Iraq. The new resolution:

will pave the way for the UN special envoy in Iraq to support and assist the Iraqi government in political, economic, electoral, and constitutional matters, and help settle disputed internal boundaries
The UN mission would also be asked to promote human rights and judicial and legal reforms and to assist the Iraqi government in planning for a national census.

This bid to legitimate the crusaders’ occupation and prop up the US puppet al-Vichy regime is surely imperialistic collaboration of the worst sort. Maybe some more resistance will be needed.

The mongering of wars

Re: Johann Hari’s review (longer version) of Nick Cohen’s book, and the critical responses from Oliver Kamm, Gene at HP, Norm Geras and others.

I don’t have much to add, but what I do follows on from Norm’s comment that Hari “simply repeats the falsehood that the Euston Manifesto is a document of 'the pro-war left'. This has been answered many times… Perhaps the best-known signatory of the manifesto was Michael Walzer, and he opposed the war.”

This is quite true; indeed the EM specifically states that its signatories hold differing views on the Iraq war. But, aside from the perhaps niche arguments about the EM, Hari makes an even more basic mistake in his opening sentence:

The pro-invasion left was always a small battallion, comprised almost entirely of journalists and intellectuals who believed toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was a good idea - even if the only President available to lead the charge was George Bush.

There were certainly people on the left who thought toppling the Taliban was a good idea; there were people who thought toppling Saddam was a good idea; and there were people who thought toppling the Taliban and Saddam were two good ideas – but not that they were one single good idea.

A phrase like “the pro-invasion left” is meaningless without reference to a specific invasion. Would someone who supported Afghanistan but not Iraq count as a member? What about someone who opposed both, but supported Kosovo and would have supported Rwanda? What is the “pro-invasion left” position on Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran, North Korea, Russia, China…?

The phrase is fatuous and facile, serving to conflate different opinions and turn a debate about policies to one about factions, so that Hari can damn Cohen and others as joined to a “neoconservative” crusade to further US oil interests under the guise of saving the world through force.

Another small point: those who were on the left and favoured invading Iraq were far more likely to be working class than members of the intelligentsia. But they tend not to write about it quite so much.

They swallowed the spider to catch the fly

So:

The US military has embarked on a new and risky strategy in Iraq by arming Sunni insurgents in the hope that they will tackle the extremist al-Qaida in Iraq.
The US high command this month gave permission to its officers on the ground to negotiate arms deals with local leaders. Arms, ammunition, body armour and other equipment, as well as cash, pick-up trucks and fuel, have already been handed over in return for promises to turn on al-Qaida and not attack US troops.

Obviously this is a gamble, and a somewhat desperate one at that. But there is a rationale to it:

One [US] commander… said that despite the risks in arming groups that have until now fought against the Americans, the potential gains against Al Qaeda were too great to be missed. He said the strategy held out the prospect of finally driving a wedge between two wings of the Sunni insurgency that had previously worked in a devastating alliance — die-hard loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s formerly dominant Baath Party, and Islamic militants belonging to a constellation of groups linked to Al Qaeda.
…
Sunni groups offering to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American and Iraqi forces met a basic condition for re-establishing stability in insurgent-hit areas: they had roots in the areas where they operated, and thus held out the prospect of building security from the ground up.

If these groups do what their leaders say they will, and don’t just sell the weapons on the black market or use them against Shiites or Americans, then some good may come of it. That’s a big if.

But even granting this, there are wider implications. As has long been obvious, the US and allies (surge or no surge) lack the ability to stabilise Iraq; the Iraqi government, itself a gaggle of factions many of which have links to assorted militias, is in no position to impose order either.

There is nobody with anything like a monopoly of force in the country, and the government’s legitimacy is shaky and contested: it’s hard to call Iraq a functioning state by Weberian standards. Strengthening the state requires more than increasing the flow of resources to the centre. Despite the constitutional referendum, the national elections and the parties’ agreement to form the government, Iraq’s still some way off a lasting political settlement.

The balance of power in the land is not what the US (nor very many Iraqis) would like. Given this, they can either accept it and work with whatever main players emerge, or try to change the balance by weakening one group, strengthening another or plonking themselves in the middle. They’ve been trying all three ways of pushing change, with the national government as presently constituted their top dog of choice.

But if this new move is meant seriously, it suggests a change in political as well as military strategy. If it works in turning non-fanatical Sunni militias against al-Qaeda, then those militias will win popular appeal among their religious constituency. The logic of this (and I know logic can be hard to come by in US Iraq policy) is that more political legitimacy will accrue to these groups rather than to the national authorities. This would mirror the support among Shia populations for groups such as those linked to Muqtada al-Sadr.

So, instead of working to build a unified national polity, this would – largely in tune with reality – favour local, sectarian power relations. It’s impossible to know whether this would be a prelude to a new settlement driven by the Sadrists and the ex-Baathists (as, in Northern Ireland, the initial agreement between moderates broke down pending the ascent of the hardliners), or a way of getting Sunni groups to coalesce and compromise in advance of their co-option into the current army and government.

Or it could just mean more powder stuffed into the keg.