War on Iraq – Page 11 – Wis[s]e Words

Handling criticism with dignity: the Labour way

Published on September 28, 2005

At the Labour conference today, an eighty-two year old man was dragged from the conference, his conference card taken away and arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, all for heckling Jack “boots” Straw during his speech on Iraq. Another man underwent the same treatment after protesting this spectacle:

Jack Straw was heckled today as he told the Labour party conference Britain was in Iraq “for one reason only: to help the elected Iraqi government build a secure, democratic and stable nation”.

A delegate, who was 82 years old and has been a Labour party member for 60 years, was bundled out by security guards after he shouted, “That’s a lie,” during the foreign secretary’s keynote conference address.

The outburst came during one of the few mentions of Iraq in the conference hall this week.

A second delegate was expelled for complaining at the treatment of the first heckler.

Fascistic, petty and arrogant this action was, it is also an unmistakable symptom of Labour’s weakinging grasp on reality and power. A confident party does not need to be this heavy handed. As unpleasant as it was for the persons involved –the main victim actually came to the UK from nazi Germany in 1937– I can’t help but gloat over this…

Leftist political maturity

Published on September 5, 2005

For some reason, when I wanted to post a comment to this post at Reading A1 it was forbidden, so I’ll post it here. First, some context.

Michael at Reading A1 took to task Marc Cooper, yet another pseudo-Democrat who was wringing his hand on the lack of “viable alternatives” coming from the anti-war movement for the mess in Iraq. Michael correctly pointed out that it’s not the anti-war movement’s job to do this: we’re not in power,
we’re not listened to by Bush and co anyway and the only way that we can get any traction on this issue is to keep on calling loudly to get the troops out. So what is the motive for Cooper to criticise the anti-war movement for being too shrill as well as having the wrong elements in it?

Reading A1 hints at the answer in the last part of the post, which is what set me off:

Check out the update Marc Cooper thoughtfully added to his post, if you want to see a more unmediated version of his real politics:

Some of the more delusional responses [to the Juan Cole essay] predictably enough come from the
Idiot Right who accuse Cole of being a traitor. And, yes, also from those who want immediate,
unconditional, un-thought-out withdrawal on the Unrepentant Idiot Left. One of the more prolific buffoons from that corner — Louis Proyect the self-described “Unrepentant Marxist” — can offer no better response than to compare Cole with Dick Nixon and then further suggest I undergo a lobotomy for having linked to Cole and to cure what he diagnoses as my incipient Hitchens Syndrome (Ahh.. for the good old days of the Show Trials when prosecutor Vishinsky would end his feverish closing statements with a call to “Shoot these mad dogs!”). Oh well… I suppose every day that political Neanderthals like this have their mitts far, far, far from any levers of power is, at least, an OK day. For that I give thanks.

Still fighting the anti-Communist battles of the fifties, I see. And how are those “Neanderthals” (I make no endorsement of Proyect, by the way) any closer to power than you yourself are, Marc? And how close to power do you really think gloating over their lack of it is going to get you, or the people you endorse?

Of course, Proyect is right in saying that any sort of managed withdrawal of the sort Cole proposes and Cooper endorses is making the same mistake as the US did in Vietnam. Vietnam should’ve taught us that there are times when even the US cannot go against the tide of history: exactly the outcome it feared happened, only with many more lives lost than if it had not interfered.

Since Cooper is yet another beltway flack, this is of course far beyond his ken as none of these people has any sense of history or any desire to learn from it.

And it’s not even that his wishes for socalled “viable alternatives” is correct but mistimed, it’s that they’ve been wrong from the start and still wrong in their analysis of this war. Again this is from a lack of historical insight and a dependency on Beltway wisdom rather than real critical analysis.

What it all comes down to is that policy is nothing without ideology and people like Cooper have long let go of even their watered down version of liberalism for a misguided “realism”. This is the greatest disease afflicting the Democrats right now: the party’s elite no longer beliefs in anything but electability. Which is how abominations like the war on Iraq happen.

It’s official: Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction

Published on January 12, 2005

a picture of a nuclear mushroom cloud
A mushroom cloud like the ones which mysteriously failed to appear above the skyline of a major US city.

According to the Washington Post the search for those ever elusive pesky weapons of mass destruction ended last month, with a complete failure to find anything:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to
Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration
officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S.
invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and
biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons
to use against the United States.

Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official
said that possibility is very small.

And it only took them the better part of two years, uncounted (literally!) numbers of dead Iraqi civilians, well over a thousand dead US soldiers, quite a few more dead soldiers from countries stupid enough to follow the US into Iraq, billions upon billions of wasted money ~~and Halliburton bribes~~, the renewed vigour of international terrorism to reach that conclusion. Gee.

What I would like to see now is those people who before the war rubbished anybody who dared to suggest that Bush and blair were lying about this publically apologise for their support of a war that costs some 100,000 Iraqis their lives (as a conservative estimate) and turned Iraq into a second Somalia. Well done.

Two and two is five

Published on November 16, 2004

Over in the comments to this post, The Republic of Palau makes a point that deserves wider attention, about the critiques of that infamous Lancet study:

This whole situation has another aspect: the rubbishing of most respectable research that disproves the neocon worldview. It’s all of a piece with the faith-led agenda, when carefully researched, rigidly peer-reviewed science is rubbished on ideological grounds rather than its methodology or substance. The Lancet is a world-respected medical journal, and has no political agenda. The scientists approached the research as an epistemiological exercise i.e. ‘How can you safely estimate death rates and causualties in a war situation?’

The results were reviewed and reviewed, stringently and by some of the most eminently qualified scientists in the world, but that’s apparently irrelevant. Where the Republicans don’t like scientific results, they just rubbish and ignore them. They really are making their own reality.

These really are people who, as not even Orwell predicted, would happily argue that two plus two equals five if their masters ordered it. See also the ongoing saga of Michael Fumetti^wFumento, over at Deltoid. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

Colin Powell resigns

Published on November 16, 2004

The news did not come as a surprise and the tributes have been flowing thick and fast, even if it is doubtful Powell actually deserved them. One of the most succesful unchallenged lies promulgated by the Bush administration has to be that Powell was any kind of moderate. True, in comparision with moonbats like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or general incompetents like Condi Rice Powell looks moderate, but his behaviour refutes this. He had drank of the neocon kool-aid just as much as any other Bush crony. He has always had something dodgy about him, as even a perfunctionairy look at his career shows.

After all, who was Colin Powell? A career soldier who first gained notoriety for his role in whitewashing the My Lai massacre, who was involved in the Iran Contra scandals and last but not least, who lied to the UN about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction to justify an unnecessary war that may have cost more than 100,0000 civilian lives already. Every time it mattered, he was more than willing to help cover up US government crimes.

Therefore I don not think it matters much that Colin Powell has finally resigned; supposing he truly was a moderate influence within the Bush cabinet, he was remarkably ineffectual. Truly, nobody could do his job any worse, unless it would be Condi Rice.

Oh.