War Lies

Official: Balkenende is a war criminal

Dutch politics, War Lies, War on Iraq
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He won’t appear before the International Criminal Court (conveniently located in Den Haag not too far from parliament) anytime soon, but the conclusions from the Dutch Iraq inquiry (PDF, in English) do show that the Dutch political support for the war was neither as easily decoupled from the actual war as the then government made it out to be nor justified by international law. Finally it has been officially confirmed what we all knew or at least suspected back then, that the existing UN resolutions on Iraq were never sufficient legal justification for the war. Not that anything will come from it, but at least we saw our beloved prime minister embarassed and humiliated.

I’m still reading the report as a whole, but the conclusions reached by the inquiry don’t contain any real surprises. That the war was illegal as well as immoral I knew anyway, that the decision to support the war was reached long before it was discussed in parliament, for entirely different reasons than officially stated, wasn’t news either. It was clear from the start that the CDA-led government was led by its traditional policy of “Atlantic solidarity”, a desire to engage with the US and be seen as a dependable ally of it, a lesser form of the British delusions of a special relationship. The war was never assessed on its merits, the possible outcomes were not taken into account.

Though the material support of the Netherlands for the war was small, the political effect of its support was to lend a veneer of respectability to what was essentially an unilateral US war. The distinction between “political but no military support” was completely unclear and largely elided outside the Dutch political debate, presented by the US as if it meant we had given our full support. Again, not a surprise.

Some common themes emerge from the inquiry’s conclusions, which are also coming to light in the British Chilcott inquiry. There’s the dodginess of the legal reasoning for the war, as well as the exagerration of the available evidence for WMDs — turns out the Dutch intelligence services were much more skeptical about this than the government told us at the time, shock horror. More important is the utter disdain for the democratic process shown by both governments. In the Dutch case, the inquiry concludes that the decision was rammed through parliament and went entirely against the wishes of a majority of the voters.

However I’m still convinced that the massive protests against the war in the Netherlands helped convince the government from active participation in the war, against their own instincs, as they realised they could not overcome the combination of active voter hostility and parliamentary resistance to this, including from their own MPs, at a time when the domestic political situation was far from stable. This is not directly supported by the inquiry’s conclusions, but reading between the lines the formula of “political support, but no military support” looks like a typical Dutch compromise position taken by an internally divided government unwilling to turn this disagreement into an open conflict. Interestingly during part of the runup to the war the government coalition included the LPF, the party of Pim Fortuyn, which was largely against the war, not something you’d expect considering its background…

(All of the above analysis is a bit late in the day I admit, but I’ve been busy…)

How torture was used to sell the War on Iraq

torture, War Lies, War on Iraq
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We now know (and had suspected earlier) that the bush regime used torture to “find” links between Iraq and Al-Quida. This “evidence” was to be used to justify the invasion of Iraq, with various stories about Al-Quida conencteds planted in the (usually pliant) media. Alex lays out the timetable:

But what strikes me as interesting is that it corresponds well with the PR-driven schedule for the famous dossiers and the run-up to war in general. Recall the “Downing Street Memo”, written in late July. The facts and intelligence were being fixed around the policy. This culminated in the first coordinated spin drive in the autumn. At the same time as Abu Zubeydah was being lashed to the board, the White House Iraq Group and the Iraq Communications Group were being established to coordinate transatlantic PR operations. The first dossier would be launched in September. Interestingly, I’m seeing a spike in search requests for both organisations.

A second wave of propaganda activity was then launched in the spring as the key UN and parliamentary votes approached and the military time-table counted down. And, sure enough, there was a second bout of torture; on this occasion, extra torture was approved by Donald Rumsfeld before the authorisation was taken back.

Start with the outcome you want, structure your process to get these answers, then repackage and sell the polished turds to suckers while omitting the gruesome details ; it’s amazing how much the selling of the War on Iraq resembles what was happening in American finance in the same period. The moral of both is to never assume shit is shinola just because some well respected source tells you so. On a more serious note, this is more evidence that torture does work, just not in the way 24 wants us to believe. The Bush thugs wanted links between Al-Quida and Iraq and they got them. That these links were made up by people desperate to avoid more “simulated drowning” was one of those details omitted in the breathless NYT writeups about meeting Mohammed Atta in Praque.

Legal advice on Iraq War flawed: No shit Sherlock

Law in action, War Lies, War on Iraq
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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 significance of the Haditha massacre

War Lies, War on Iraq
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Noam Chomsky has argued, in For Reasons of State as well as elsewhere, that My Lai, when put in its proper context was only a minor incident, yet it became the symbol of everything wrong with America’s war on Vietnam. The same can be said for Haditha. Worse atrocities have taken place in Iraq, worse crimes have been perpetrated by American soldiers, so one more massacre should not matter that much, should it? Why has the Haditha massacre captured the imagination of the world press and the American public when earlier outrages did not?

I think it is because Haditha, like My Lai, is so undeniably a warcrime and as significantly, it went against everything Americans like to think they stand for. Earlier misdeeds could always be excused away as “regretable errors”, “fog of war”, “a few bad apples”, etc. But here it is very clear that there were no excuses for what happened. Where even Abu Ghraib could be excused as “hijinx” and “fratboy behaviour” (conveniently ignored much more horrible things than naked human pyramids happened as well), it is nigh impossible to do so when US soldiers deliberately select innocent people and execute them, behaving like Nazis in occupied Poland.

Also, American soldiers just do not kill civilians in cold blood, that goes against everything yer average American believes in, which is why My Lai came as such a shock and why Habitha is the same. Again, Abu Ghraib was much less problematic to explain away. Torture as a last ditch attempt by the good guys to get the villain to reveal where he put the bombs that would kill hundreds of innocents is a long cherished staple of pulp tv and action movies, the idea that a bit of roughing up of obvious baddies is no big deal. Easy enough to ignore the fact that something more than roughing up was going on or that the victims were not necessarily villains. But killing people in cold blood? That’s unamerican, that’s what the bad guys do.

Even so, it has taken quite a long time for this massacre to reach the public’s awareness. It happened in November of last year, but was only starting to gain mass circulation in March (when I first posted about it) but only now has become well known enough for Bush to have to speak about. Much thanks for bringing this story to light should go to congressman John Murtha, without whose speech on the massacre this may have remained obscure. He has paid for it in attacks by wingnuts talking about how unamerican it is to mention that US soldiers engage in massacre, not noticing it is those that it is actually those that betray America’s ideals.

War lies: we were mislead into the war

War Lies
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Compare and contrast, Democratic senator John Edwards, recently acknowledging his fuckup in voting for the war on Iraq:

Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told — and what many of us believed and argued — was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.

It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn’t make a mistake — the men and women of our armed forces and their families — have performed heroically and paid a dear price.

With Democratic senator Robert Byrd, in his speech explaining why he voted against the war:

So where does Iraq enter the equation? No one in the Administration has been able to produce
any solid evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attack. Iraq had biological and chemical
weapons long before September 11. We knew it then, and we know it now. Iraq has been an enemy
of the United States for more than a decade. If Saddam Hussein is such an imminent threat to the
United States, why hasn’t he attacked us already? The fact that Osama bin Laden attacked the
United States does not, de facto, mean that Saddam Hussein is now in a lock and load position and
is readying an attack on the United States. In truth, there is nothing in the deluge of Administration
rhetoric over Iraq that is of such moment that it would preclude the Senate from setting its own timetable and taking the time for a thorough and informed discussion of this crucial issue.

As I’ve said before, it’s simply not true that, as John Edwards wants us to believe, everybody though Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. The evidence presented for it was so flimsy anybody willing to look at it clearly could see that it was untrue even if, like me, they had to rely on newspaper reports rather than intelligence briefs. It’s just pathetic to suggest that as a US senator John Edwards could not have known this intelligence to be flawed; if he was mislead it was because he wanted to be mislead. Senator Byrd in his speech before the vote, which as you know was taken just before the 2002 elections, said that “Democrats favor fast approval of a resolution so they can change the subject to domestic economic problems.”

Which explains why the war issue was never raised during the 2004 presidential elections. Most of the
Democratic Party establishment wanted the war as badly as Bush did, for a mixture of reasons: they wanted to get back to “normal” politics, didn’t want to be seen as weak on defence, perhaps thought that Bush could genuinely pull it off, or similar dumb reasons. Now that it has blown up in their faces they’re trying to reposition themselves as skeptical of the war, but without great conviction.

So now we have the sorry spectacle of an opposition party unable or unwilling to actually provide opposition on the most important issue of the day, a party hopelessly compromised by its past support for this issue. Is it any wonder the Democrats can’t gain any traction against Bush?