War on Iraq – Page 5 – Wis[s]e Words

Dutch doubts about War on Iraq covered up

Published on January 17, 2009

Back in 2003 the then Dutch government -as now led by Balkenende and his Christian-Democrats- was quite keen to support the War on Iraq, while the majority of the Dutch voters and a large part of parliament were not. So, in a typical Dutch compromise it was decided to only support the war politically, not to offer military support but to be prepared to take part in the subsequent occupation of Iraq, as we indeed did. As we now know the British Foreign service had grave doubts about the legality and legitimacy of the war, but was overridden by the political leadership. As we learned only today, it seems it was exactly the other way around in the Netherlands.

Today the NRC Handelsblad newspaper got its hands on a secret foreign affairs memo casting doubt on the legality of the Dutch government’s position, but held back from the minister responsible by the ministry’s most senior civil servants! The document, written just after the invasion started, expressed serious concerns about the legal arguments underpinning the Dutch position, claiming it “failed both materially and procedurally”. However, a hand written note on the memo’s first page says “Many thanks. Carefully store this in the archives for posterity. This discussion is now closed”. With this note, written by the then secretary-general of the ministry, Frank Majoor, the memorandum was indeed safely locked away, until NRC Handelsblad got hold of it recently and published it online (PDF). An ironic note written by the lawyers responsible for the memo adds, “apparantly “audite et alteram (sic) does not apply in this case”.

The 64,000 dollar question now is if this was the secretary general’s own decision or whether the minister, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer –who would become the NATO secretary-general in december of 2003– knew about the memo already and made the decision not to be formally brieved on it. This is after all the sort of information a minister should pass on to parliament, especially when it still has to approve sending occupation troops to Iraq. If parliament knew the government’s own lawyers are doubtful about the legality of the war, this could very well have meant it would have voted against this decision. And we couldn’t have that, could we?

All of which explains a lot about why Balkenende vigerously opposes any inquiry into the War on Iraq and the Dutch contribution to it. He knows his own role and that of his then-government is dodgy and he has no wish to be “hung” for old crimes. In fact, the current government coalition had already stipulated in its coalition agreements that it would not support any inquest. With this new revelation however, there might just be enough support in parliament for such an inquest anyway…

Legal advice on Iraq War flawed: No shit Sherlock

Published on November 22, 2008

For some reason –probably all the hoohah over John Sargent– I missed the news last Monday that Lord Bingham, onetime senior law lord of the UK, criticised the War on Iraq as “a serious violation of international law and of the rule of law”:

Summarising Lord Goldsmith’s reasoning, Lord Bingham said: “A reasonable case could be made that resolution 1441 was capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in resolution 678, but the argument could only be sustainable if there were ‘strong factual grounds’ for concluding that Iraq had failed to take the final opportunity. There would need to be ‘hard evidence’.”

Ten days later, in a Parliamentary written answer issued on March 17, 2003, Lord Goldsmith said it was “plain” that Iraq had failed to comply with its disarmament obligations and was therefore in material breach of resolution 687. Accordingly, the authority to use force under resolution 678 had revived.

The former judge then quoted the conclusion to Lord Goldsmith’s Parliamentary statement: “Resolution 1441 would, in terms, have provided that a further decision of the Security Council to sanction force was required if that had been intended. Thus, all that resolution 1441 requires is reporting to and discussion by the Security Council of Iraq’s failures, but not an express further decision to authorise force.”

Lord Bingham was not impressed. “This statement was, I think flawed in two fundamental respects,” he said.

“First, it was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had: Hans Blix and his team of weapons inspectors had found no weapons of mass destruction, were making progress and expected to complete their task in a matter of months.

“Secondly, it passes belief that a determination whether Iraq had failed to avail itself of its final opportunity was intended to be taken otherwise than collectively by the Security Council.”

Which is more or less what every anti-war activist already knew anyway. Like the dirty dossiers and the claims about Iraq being thirty minutes away from attacking Britain, Goldsmith’s legal advice was always meant as a figleaf for a decision already taken. There was never the intent on the part of Blair to really test the legality of an invasion; his former roomie knew what he wanted and so he delivered it. Had Goldsmith’s argument been made in a court of law it wouldn’t have passed the laugh test. As long as it was good enough to convince the doubters in parliament and the press it was good enough.

The runup to the War on Iraq made hollow phrases of democracy and rule of law, as the first was ignored while the second was perverted to make possible this war. It made clear what the population’s role was: to shut up, vote every few years without expecting anything important to change and to let the important decisions be made by our betters. And then Hazel “bloody” Blears has the gall to lecture us about about political disengagment and the negativity of bloggers?

The cost of War

Published on October 19, 2008

A while back former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz calculated that the total cost of the War on Iraq and Afghanistan would be a cool three trillion dollars. The video below explains what that money is spent on:

Supposedly it was only World War II that ended the Great Depression. I don’t think the War on Iraq has done the same…

Imperial Life in the Emerald City — Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Published on July 27, 2008Leave a comment

Cover of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
365 pages including index
published in 2006

The Emerald City was what its inhabitants called the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2003-2004: a pleasant bubble of transplanted America, cut off from the everyday reality of Iraq, the ultimate ivory tower where the Coalition Provisional Authority that was in power in that year made its plans for the future of Iraq, unhindered by much knowledge of the world outside their bubble. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an eyewitness account of that first year of the American occupation of Iraq, as seen from inside the bubble. It’s a story of how wide eyed innocents and well intentioned ideologues came to Iraq to remake the country into a model of Jeffersonian freemarket democracy, with little more to recommend them for the job than their personal loyalty to Bush and the Republican party and how they were cruelly disappointed by the reality of post-war Iraq and its missed opportunities.

In short, this is a whitewash, though perhaps not a conscious whitewash. It’s true the New York Times quote on the back calls this a “A visceral –sometimes sickening– picture of how the administration and the handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq” and that every other page or so has you slapping your face at yet another incredibly obvious stupidity, but in the end it’s still a whitewash. The clue is in that word bungled. As if the Bush administration and their lackeys in Iraq started the war and subsequent occupation with the best of intentions, but lacked the competence to fulfill them, or took the wrong decisions for Iraq not to further their own ends, but because they were a bit naive about the realities of the country. The book is steeped in the assumption that, while the people in charge may have made the wrong decisions, they had every right to attempt to make those decisions. It’s like reading a book on British rule in India that only tells of the problems the British had in establishing their rule and in the day to day running of their empire, without ever questioning the presence of
the British there.

Preparation for future wars

Published on March 31, 2008

I’ve talked about the failure of the antiwar movement before, in that it failed to stop the War on Iraq from happening, despite the protests held by tens of millions of people all over the world in the months before the start of the war. One common complaint heard at the time was that the protests came too late, that the troops were already in place, the preperations made and that therefore war was inevitable. I’m not sure this was entirely true; the protests did keep the Netherlands out of the war proper, though sadly not out of the occupation and I can see that if the Stop the War campaign had made different tactical and strategical choices in 2003 it might’ve kept the JUK out as well. There is however a kernel of truth in the idea that anti-war protests usually come too late, when the war is already started or preparations are so advanced stopping is impossible. It doesn’t help that for the most part anti-war movements are created largely adhoc, in response to a threatening war, that they die down in times of “peace”.

When you stop to think about it, it’s absurd that we live in a time when it’s assumed normal that even a country like the Netherlands, with no real enemies nearby is spending millions if not billions of euros each year on defence. Moreover we’re spending it not to defend our own country, but to enable our army to invade and occupy other countries. During the nineties, while our attention was elsewhere, the Dutch army transformed itself from a tank heavy Cold War style “defend the Fulda Gap” army into a lean, mean humanitarian intervention fighting machine, laying the foundations for getting involved first in Yugoslavia, then Kosovo and finally Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s the status quo, in which criticism of defence spending is seldom on a fundamental level, but mainly on issues of cost or choice of spending.

What brought this to mind is the news that the UK ministry of Defence is going ahead with a thirteen billion pound tanker investment, in which it gets over a dozen new tanker/transport planes. These planes are not needed for the defense of the United Kingdom, certainly not in that number. Instead they’ll be invaluable for the next Iraq or Afghanistan… That’s why we need an anti-war movement that doesn’t just mobilise when war is imminent, but that opposes defence spending from the start. If we have an army that’s capable of “humanitarian interventions”, interventions is what we get. We need to take away these tools that enable our armies to start wars. We need to stop the preperations for future wars, not just the current war.