War on Iraq – Page 4

Nobody likes mercenaries

Published on October 6, 2009

Mercenary bodyguards of some bigwig or other got into trouble at an Iraqi army checkpoint, get themselves arrested and beaten and then the US cavalry arrives:

Somewhere as the beatings were happening, the military showed up on the scene in the form of the useless IZ police. Rather than calling for reinforcements, or senior leadership word from those on the ground was that the IZ police said something to the effect of “You’re contractors, you’re on your own” and left. An Army convoy pulled out of FOB Prosperity located next to the incident and drove by leaving the contractors to the Iraqi mob. Two army Majors, or Lt, Colonels, did try to get involved and were promptly pushed around by the Iraqis.

Oops…

The terrorist threat facing Britain is self inflicted

Published on September 5, 2009

Brown said UK troops were in Afghanistan “as a result of a hard-headed assessment of the terrorist threat facing Britain”.

Ministers have often claimed that three-quarters of the terrorist plots facing Britain emerge from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Ministers are less willing to discuss how many of those plots facing Britain were hatched before British troops were sent into Afghanistan. Or how many of those plots are motivated by what happens in Aghanistan or Iraq, but were actually thought up in the backstreets of Leeds or Birmingham. The 7/7 bombers did state their motivations clearly, but so far the UK government has refused to face up to it.

The facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same

Published on August 30, 20091 Comment

So says Cindy Sheehan, who hasn’t been fooled enough by Obama’s moderate anti-war stance to not notice the buildup of troops in Afghanistan or the fact that withdrawal from Iraq seems more talk than action. Like she did with Bush, she therefore turned up at Obama’s holiday address to protest. As she explained:

“The reason I am here is because … even though the facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same,” Sheehan told a handful of journalists, against a backdrop of her “Camp Casey” banner.

She told US peace activists to wake up and protest Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and complained that despite the president’s anti-war stance, US troops remained in Iraq.

“We have to realize, it is not the president who is power, it is not the party that is in power it is the system that stays the same, no matter who is in charge.”

“We are here to make the wars unpopular again,” she said.

I’m not sure it’s just Obama’s election that has rocked the (US) antiwar movement to sleep. There also seems to have been a certain amount of normalisation of the war, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on and they became part of the background noise to our lives. What’s more, our own more immediate problems as the economy collapsed have seemingly left little interest in Afghanistan or Iraq with either the public or the newsmedia.

Nothing new under the sun

Published on August 10, 2009

Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley reviews Mark Thompson’s White War, about Italy’s entry into the First World War and how wrong its campaign to conquer the socalled Italian parts of the Austrian-Hungarian empire went. Quoting a bit from the start of Robert’s review, let’s see if you can spot the similarities between how Italy got roped into that war and how a more recent war was started against the will of the majority of the population of the participating countries:

The control by the war-party of the Italian intellectual class, and accordingly its control over the media, meant that it was possible for the Italian government to wage an aggressive war with the genuinely unenthusiastic support of the bulk of the country. World War I was unpopular in Italy, but control of the media was able to substantially obscure this fact.

Thompson and Farley both draw parallels with the American neocons and their lock on the serious media during the runup to the War on Iraq, but I’m more reminded of the British media, possibly because I was more aware of it myself. Sections of the media — The Independent, The Mirror — were against the war, but on the whole both the newspapers and tv newsshows were, if not pro-war, tending towards taking the arguments for war much more seriously than the millions of ordinary people opposing it. Opponents had much less access to the media than the government and other supporters of the war, were often typecast as loons or naifs, while even the most ludicrious arguments the government put forward (the 45 minutes claim e.g.) were treated with undue respect.

That Iraq inquiry: even worse than you imagined

Published on June 16, 2009

bucket of whitewash

Yesterday Gordon Brown announced an “independent inquiry into the War on Iraq, its causes and the aftermath –in secret. Which is bad, but perhaps the panel itself will be of sufficient weight to make up for this deficiency? Who’s going to be on the panel anyway?

Sir John Chilcot, 70, is a former permanent under-secretary of state at the Northern Ireland Office who sat on the Butler Inquiry into the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Also on the panel are former diplomat Sir Roderick Lyne, crossbench peer Baroness Prashar and historians Sir Lawrence Freedman and Sir Martin Gilbert.

So the chair will be somebody involved with the Butler report, not a model of transparancy itself, but hopefully the other participants will be better? Who is Lawrence Freedman for example?

The military historian Lawrence Freedman was invited, according to Kampfner, to craft, within two days, “a philosophy that Blair could call his own”, complete with benchmarks as to when countries should intervene in others’ affairs. Freedman obliged, thinking he was one of several people being consulted, and was amazed to read a speech that relied almost entirely on his proposals. Blair had announced “a new doctrine of international community” and proclaimed “we are all internationalists now”.

Oh.

But Martin Gilbert is a proper, old school historian. Surely he will be better? Wait, what’s this? Martin Gilbert: Statesmen for these times? “A leading historian argues that Bush and Blair may one day be seen as akin to Roosevelt and Churchill”. O-kaay.

that’s three out of the five named members of the panel looking somewhat dodgy. The other two look somewhat better, but are still thoroughly establishment. It’s a whitewash, but that was inevitable from the start. Whether it matters is another question. Nobody’s opinion will change because of it.