Articles with the Tag War on Iraq

The antiwar movement failed

Antiwar, War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq
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Over at the Socialist Unity blog Andy reviewed the latest Stop the War demo and was less than impressed. this lead to an interesting discussion in the comment thread, though unfortunately centered mostly on tactics rather than strategies, much less on the question I’ve asked there as well: has the antiwar movement failed?

Tactically, if we look at what the antiwar movement has done from September 2001 onwards, it has been impressive: larger and larger demonstrations against the War on Afghanistan and in the runup to the War on Iraq, culminating in the 15 February 2003 demonstrations, with two million in London and tens of millions worldwide marching against the war. Not just demonstrations either: a wide variety of direct action initiatives have been tried by local antiwar groups, ranging the spectrum from letterwriting campaigns to attempts to occupy military bases.

Strategically, the antiwar movement managed to set the debate in a fair few countries, despite the opposition of much of the political and media elites. Even at the height of the warfrenzy, there never was a majority in the UK in favour of war and even in the US the war was never supported by a large majority of the people, if it had a majority at all. The great victory of the antiwar movement was that it managed to put the warmongers on the defensive, by making opposition to the war the default position in the debate, with the supporters of the War on Iraq having to explain themselves. With Afghanistan it was the other way around, but with Iraq the antiwar movement framed the debate.

We must not underestimate this achievement, in a climate in which much of the US electorate at least was whipped into fear by “9/11” and The War Against Terror and despite the US/UK’s media’s tendency to portray protestors as a minority of bearded wierdies. Here in the Netherlands this was the one subject on which the overwhelming majority of people could agree, whether socialists, liberals or conservatives, Pim Fortuyn supporters or not: the war was a bad idea and Holland should stay well out of it.

And yet, Holland didn’t stay out of it, though it did avoid the actual invasion. And neither did the UK, US, Spain, Poland, etc. The antiwar movement did not stop the war, did not stop the occupation, despite two million people marching in London and tens of millions worldwide. In the end it turned out the voters could be ignored, unless you did something really stupid, like pretending an Al Quida attack is the work of ETA say. Bush got his second term, Labour had no problem winning their next election and as far as I know nobody lost their seat for their war support other than Oona King.

So I think it’s fair to say that the antiwar movement did fail, as it did not prevent the war nor raise the (political) cost of the war. Arguably it didn’t even slow down the start of the war. We won the battles, but we lost the war.

Iraq: over 600,000 excess deaths since war began

Iraqi war deaths
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This according to a new study to be published in The Lancet this week, by the same team who did the much maligned 2004 study also published there, which was the first scientific study to the effects of the War on Iraq. The news this time is much worse:

WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion, according to a new estimate that is far higher than any other to date.

The report, by a team of researchers criticized for its death estimates two years ago, says that 601,027 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths since the March 2003 invasion. It also suggests that the country has become more violent in the last year.

“This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about,” said Gilbert Burnham, the report’s lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “It shows the violence has spread across the country.”

Iraq’s violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.

The article tries its best to throw mud on the study, dragging in all kinds of irrelevancies like the Iraqi Bodycount Project, all of which is still familiar from the 2004 study and all of which fails to conceal the magnitude of this disaster. It’s so much more than expected that I don’t know what to say about it, only to note that none of this was necessary.

Handling criticism with dignity: the Labour way

Autoritarianism, Nu Labour, War on Iraq
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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:

security thugs removed an 82 year old man after he heckled Straw

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…

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

War on Iraq
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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.

The new, improved Iraqi flag

War on Iraq
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Delusion:

“This flag represents the democracy and freedom of the new Iraq, where the old one represented killing and oppression and dictatorship,” he said. “We are not imposing this flag on the people; it was chosen by the legitimate representatives of Iraq. When a new national assembly is elected, it can decide whether to keep it or change it.”

Reality:

I also heard today that the Puppets are changing the flag. It looks nothing like the old one and at first I was angry and upset, but then I realized that it wouldn’t make a difference. The Puppets are illegitimate, hence their constitution is null and void and their flag is theirs alone. It is as representative of Iraq as they are- it might as well have “Made in America” stitched along the inside seam. It can be their flag and every time we see it, we’ll see Chalabi et al. against its pale white background.

My email buddy and fellow Iraqi S.A. in America said it best in her email, “I am sure we are all terribly excited about the extreme significance of the adoption by the completely illegitimate Iraq Puppet Council of a new national piece of garishly colored cloth. Of course the design of the new national rag was approved by the always tastefully dressed self-declared counter terrorism expert viceroy of Iraq, Paul Bremer, who is well known for wearing expensive hand-stitched combat boots with thousand dollar custom tailored suits and silk designer ties. The next big piece of news will be the new pledge of allegiance to said national rag, and the empire for which it stands. The American author of said pledge has yet to be announced.”