So, in an attempt to restore the smashed trust in our political system and our politicians, to give us the ‘different type of politics, a more open and honest dialogue‘ he promised upon becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown has said the inquiry into the Iraq war will be held in private and will not report back until Summer 2010 (that is, after the general election).

In parliament today he was unable to say whether the inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses to appear before it or whether they will have to give evidence under oath. Brown did his best to blame the Tories for the way the inquiry will be conducted. ‘The opposition wanted a Franks style inquiry [the inquiry into the Falklands war] and that’s what we’re having,’ he said making it sound like a generous concession to Tory lobbying. You’re all in this one together, lads.

One of the members of the inquiry’s committee is Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. Writing in the Independent in 2003 at the outbreak of the war, he had this to say…

Even if it takes time to dislodge Saddam’s regime, the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East.

Let’s hope Sir Lawrence is better at recording history than he is at predicting it.

Update: Jamie: ‘Let the assistant gravedigger bury the dead‘. There aren’t any words, really. Not longer than one syllable at any rate.

Update updated: A good point from Bob:

But at the end of the day I suspect few will change their opinions because of the inquiry, in public or private. And I’m one of those. To me, Blair either lied on WMD or was conned by the US. Fool or Knave, it makes no difference, both were things for which he should have been made to resign, and if he had some evidence which would persuade me otherwise I’m damn sure he would have put it in the public domain by now.

Updated update updated: Here’s inquiry committee member Martin Gilbert comparing Bush and Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill.

Here’s a fun little story from the government’s News Distribution Service…

Plot to keep Iran’s ‘Top Gun’ jets flying … …with parts from eBay!

I like the exclamation mark. Hahaha Iran hahaha with its hahaha crappy airforce hahaha needing part from hahaha eBay!

Three men were jailed for a total of ten years for their part in a plot to supply military equipment to keep Iranian F-14 ‘Tomcat’ fighter jets airborne and combat ready in contravention of an embargo on military exports to Iran.

The thing is, I’m not sure if the British government should be crowing about this, to be honest. Not with our soldiers being killed because we’re too incompetent (or, in the case of former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, too evil) to make sure they got body army. Not with our Snatch Land Rovers which in Iraq and Afghanistan are called ‘mobile coffins‘. Not when US troops in Iraq called our lot the ‘borrowers’. Not with our welcoming of a greater deployment of US troops into Helmand in Afghanistan because it finally means our troops might get some decent helicopter support.

No, instead of jailing Mohsen Akhavan Nik and his son, along with Nithish Jaitha, for breaching the embargo, we should be making them heads of equipment procurement for the Ministry of Defence.

Iraq’s Marsh Arabs suffered long under Saddam Hussein. In punishment for the failed Shia uprising incited and then betrayed by the Western powers after the first Gulf War, Saddam diverted water away from the marshes. This destroyed food sources and the Marsh Arabs, the Ma’dan, were forced to flee.

After the second Gulf War in 2003, the marshes were re-irrigated. The Ma’dan could return. On February 21 2007, Tony Blair proudly told the House of Commons…

In an extraordinary development, the Marsh Arabs, driven from one of the world’s foremost ecological sites by Saddam, have been able to resettle there.

So, two years later, how are the Ma’dan faring, now that their homelands have been liberated from drought and despotism?

Experts say the rivers that flood the marshes today are too brackish and polluted to support life.

[A resident of the marshes, Ali Jassim al-] Battat sees the “undrinkable” water as a symptom of the official failure to rehabilitate the Marsh Arabs. As a father to 13 children, he says he wants better road and electricity links and improved access to education, healthcare and clean water.

“Water is the source of all our suffering,” he shouted angrily. “The water tankers do not get to us, we have no electricity. Our young men are crushed by destitution and our children grow up like savages, without schooling.”

[...]

Satellite images taken in 2006, three years after the overthrow of Saddam, showed the marshes had been restored to 70 per cent of their size in the early 1970s, before the major drainage projects began.

In 2009, environmental officials said the marshes were shrinking again, and now covered only 30 per cent of their spread in the 1970s. Dams built upstream in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey are blamed for reducing the volume of water feeding the wetlands. A prolonged drought in Iraq has only made matters worse.

According to Alaa al-Badran, head of the union of agricultural engineers in Basra, the marshlands will continue to shrink, reversing recent gains. “Salinity rates will keep rising,” he added. “Once absorbed by the soil, salts are very hard to eradicate.”

There’s currently no message of support for the Marsh Arabs on Tony Blair’s official website, a state of affairs that will no doubt be rectified as soon as he’s back from collecting his $1 million prize for leadership.

Iraq war: Gordon Brown aims to delay inquiry report until after election
‘Gordon Brown will announce by the autumn a “long” inquiry into the Iraq war, indicating that the potentially embarrassing report will be delayed until well after the general election expected next year’

Kneejerk policies a strain on prison system, says charity
‘The government is failing to rehabilitate offenders, leaving charities to pick up the pieces and running the risk of further strain on the overstretched prison system, according to damning research published today.’

Mass arrests over power station protest raise civil liberties concerns
‘Police have carried out what is thought to be the biggest pre-emptive raid on environmental campaigners in British history, arresting 114 people believed to be planning direct action at a coal-fired power station.’

This is my Hillsborough
‘Twenty years after Britain’s worst football stadium disaster, in which 96 people died, Mike Bracken shares his painful memories for the first time – and describes the ongoing fight for recognition of what really happened’

Afghanistan:

Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan’s presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands’ permission.

Iraq:

Urgent action is needed to halt the execution of 128 prisoners on death row in Iraq. Many of those awaiting execution were convicted for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality, according to IRAQI-LGBT, a UK based organisation of Iraqis supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iraq.

As Nick Barlow says: ‘could someone remind me why all those people had to die to bring this about?’ Anybody? Tony?

So, this week the British Army handed over its last command post in Basra to Iraqi forces, signalling the beginning of our glorious formal withdrawal from Iraq. In an exchange of gifts, Major General Andy Salmon was given a ‘magnificent golden fish‘.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere but I’m blowed if I can pin it down. Something about the handing over of Iraq’s precious resources, perhaps? An obscure reference to New Labour and a fish always rotting from the head down, do you think?

Is the fish, perhaps, a reminder of those brave keyboard warriors who helped make the case for war – the Alastair Campbells with their faithful megaphones the Nick Cohens, the David Aaronovitchs, the Harry’s Places, the Oliver Kamms and the Norman Gerases of this world? They once swam free in deep waters of certitude attacking enemies with quicksilver ferocity. Now? Frozen and silent. Yellow.

Maybe it’s a reference to what’s happening to the people elsewhere in Iraq. A fish painted gold as an indictment against the damage we do to the environment and ourselves? How the civilised US weapons used in the humanitarian intervention in Fallujah has now left the women there bearing children with two heads, missing limbs and other birth defects?

Still, it’s for the Iraqis to start shouldering the burden, isn’t it? Thanks for the present.

Shock and awe began in Iraq six years ago today. Were you shocked? Were you awed?

Reuters: Kudeir, a 30-year-old Iraqi worker, carries his badly burned nine-month-old son Amir Yas to safety in the Zaafaraniya neighbourhood in the outskirts of Baghdad April 26, 2003. Up to 40 Iraqi civilians were killed and many badly hurt in a series of explosions near Baghdad on Saturday, an Iraqi medic said after an arms dump blew up on the outskirts of the capital.

‘It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.’

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You have to admit, when we exported western values to Iraq, the new Iraqi government listened and learned and followed our lessons to the letter…

Since they brought [the death penalty] back in August 2004, the Iraqi authorities have executed over 150 people and sentenced hundreds more to death (the real figures could be a lot higher as the government doesn’t even bother publishing statistics).

Wasn’t it US General Tommy Franks, the leader of the glorious liberation, who said, ‘we don’t do body counts‘?

Surely it’s long past time that the murderous Talabani regime was toppled?

Amnesty International has learnt that the Iraqi judicial authorities have confirmed death sentences against 128 prisoners putting them at imminent risk of execution.

The Iraqi authorities apparently plan to start executing the unnamed prisoners in batches of 20, beginning next week, and Amnesty has called Iraq’s Justice Minister to intervene to prevent the executions.

We must impose universal values on this corrupt and savage government. Where is our Foreign Secretary? Where is the dodgy dossier? Where are our battalions of keyboard warriors calling for invasion? Cohen? Aaronovitch? Kamm? Geras? The Queen’s First Harry’s Place?

While writing the previous post, I turned to the authority on such matters to check whether the term ‘asylum seeker’ is Unspeak*.

In doing so I rediscovered this delightful anecdote from the two-fisted tales of Jack Straw MP.

Jack Straw refused an Iraqi man’s asylum application in January 2001 on the grounds that he could be assured of a “fair trial” under Saddam’s regime…

As Mark Thomas reminds us, it took Straw two more years to belatedly arrive at his conclusion that Saddam’s regime was too murderous and corrupt to be allowed to continue in power.

These things are worth remembering.

* It is.

Hey everybody, the US State Department’s 2008 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices is out. Shall we take a look at how things are going in our favourite shining beacon of Middle Eastern democracy?

During the year, there were numerous reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings in connection with the ongoing conflict. [...] these forces caused civilian deaths during these operations [...] battles against Shia militia failed to distinguish sufficiently between combatants and civilians, and often used disproportionate force [...] mass arrests, denial of due process, and credible reports of torture, some resulting in death [...] There was virtual impunity for officials tried for killings [...] Insurgent and terrorist bombings, executions, and killings were a regular occurrence throughout all regions [...] 6,787 civilians were killed by terrorist attacks during the year, and 20,178 were wounded…

Tony Blair earned twelve million pounds last year.

You have to admit it’s elegant. The Foreign Secretary who was instrumental in making the fraudulent case for an illegal war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed is now the Justice Secretary suppressing documents detailing the making of the fraudulent case for an illegal war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. That’s not a conflict of interest, that’s an apocalypse of interest.

Even better, Straw says he’s vetoing the release of 2003 cabinet minutes where the legality of the war was ‘discussed’ because they would do ’serious damage’ to cabinet government. What we know however, thanks to the Butler Inquiry is that, at the time, cabinet government was in the toilet.

Those cabinet ministers who weren’t complicit or compliant were silent and supine, while Tony Blair and an entourage of unelected placemen plotted a war crime. The ‘Justice’ version of Straw is merely protecting the right of cabinet ministers to be doormats for Prime Ministers to wipe their shitty shoes on.

Straw says if the minutes were released ministers would be inhibited from speaking out in cabinet meetings with their concerns if they knew they might be put into the public domain. What was the excuse in 2003?

I think we can all agree by now that the war in Iraq was defined by incompetence, hubris, stupidity, and corruption. Remember this?

The US has lost track of about 190,000 weapons issued to Iraqi security forces since the 2003 invasion, some of which will have ended up in the hands of insurgents, according to an official report published in Washington. Among the missing items are AK-47 rifles, pistols, body armour and helmets.

Still, life’s a learning curve, isn’t it? Once we re-trained our sights on Afghanistan, our leaders and tacticians could obviously be expected to have learned from their experiences and mistakes made in Iraq, couldn’t they?

Oh. No, no they couldn’t…

The US military has failed to keep track of thousands of weapons shipped to Afghanistan, leaving them vulnerable to being lost or stolen, a report says.

[...]

It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s only superpower.

Far be it from me to lecture the Iraqi government on its sense of priority but who knew that saving Saddam Hussein’s yacht for the nation was anywhere near the top of the to do list?

That said, it sounds a very desirable piece of kit…

The former dictator’s 269-foot (82-meter) yacht is fitted with swimming pools, salons, a secret escape passage and a rocket-launching system.

Clearly a fan out the mid-period Bond films was our Saddam. No doubt he also had a big red button opening a trap door to drop adversaries into shark-infested water. But a secret escape passage? On a boat? To where, exactly? Getting wet, presumably.

Update: I take it back – ‘There is also, apparently, a secret passage leading to a mini-submarine escape pod’. Did Saddam not see Diamonds are Forever? Those mini-submarine escape pods have a terrible safety record.

Too much coffee:

Tony Blair believes that he may have triggered his heart scare by drinking too much strong continental coffee…

Too much coffee:

People who drank more than seven cups of instant coffee a day were three times more likely to hallucinate than those who took just one, a study found.

Too much coffee:

The dossier that we publish gives the answer. The reason is that his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programme is not an historic left-over from 1998. The inspectors are not needed to clean up the old remains. His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.

Gordon Brown was in the House of Commons yesterday polishing the turd of New Labour’s Iraq campaign. It has to be said, what with his visit to the place this week, that he’s managing to buff that stool with some success. Judging by the reaction to his smudging of history this week from the media and his cunning idea of a placeholder garrison in Basra so a public inquiry can never be held, New Labour may yet escape a full examination of its crimes.

Still, some haven’t forgotten and never will. How about this exchange from the debate yesterday:

John Barrett (Edinburgh, West) (LD): The Prime Minister has never detailed what the Government believe to be the number of civilian deaths in Iraq. Much work has been done on that, and the lower estimates are around 100,000. If the Prime Minister cannot give details today of his estimate, will he confirm that the Government will do some work on it, so that we can know the answer to the question?

The Prime Minister: It is not a matter for the British Government: it is for the Iraqi Government to examine what has happened in their country. Only they will be in the position to obtain the full information. I cannot see how from here or from just Basra the British Government could conduct such a survey.

I think we can take from that the Prime Minister really doesn’t want to know. And why would he? Even if he’s a fifth as human as his ‘friends’ and ’sources’ tell us, the true enormity of what he wrote the cheques for would surely help to crush even the most hardened sociopath.

But Gordon’s answer is just insulting though isn’t it? Were you expecting anything else? You have to admire his management of the low expectations many have of him. ‘It is for the Iraqi Government to examine what has happened in their country.’ How very fucking generous of you, Gordon. You’ll be telling us next that Iraq is a sovereign nation.

In other words, it was New Labour’s job just to deliver the cluster bombs, depleted uranium, missiles and bombs. What happens after that? Well, you know. Like a postman, I suppose. You can’t expect to be able hold the postman to account if he delivers a parcel containing a toy that chokes your kid, can you?

And how about ‘I cannot see how from here or from just Basra the British Government could conduct such a survey’? He’s just spent a week telling us how fantastic things are in Iraq, hasn’t he? The surveys published by the Lancet were conducted under far more dangerous conditions. The government and its courtiers rubbished those surveys (despite what the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser said).

So why not take the opportunity of ‘improved’ conditions in Iraq to rub the Lancet’s nose in it? Gordon would be able to stand up and crow, ‘look everybody, we only killed x thousand men, women and children!’ Or, if he wanted to spin it more sympathetically, he could use a government-sponsored survey to demonstrate his fabled humanity and courage we’ve been told so much about.

Like I said, he really doesn’t want to know.

So, George Bush takes having shoes thrown at him in his stride and says its ‘a sign of a free society‘.

If that’s the case, that Iraq is now ‘a free society’, let’s hope this isn’t true:

The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush has been beaten in custody, his brother said today.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi suffered a broken hand, broken ribs, internal bleeding and an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC. He has since been handed over to the Iraqi judiciary, a step that normally heralds a criminal case.

Or would George like to tell us that that’s fair game in a free society as well?

And to think we always said George was a bit slow…

He’s certainly quick enough when he wants to be.

‘So what if the guy threw a shoe at me?’, said the President. You get the feeling he’s entirely ignorant of the cultural significance of having footwear thrown at you in that part of the world.

You know, I can understand why soldiers weren’t fully and properly equipped in the early days of the Iraq war. A political decision was made not to order kit and equipment too far in advance in case it tipped people off that the decision to go to war had already been made while the charade of consulting Parliament and the United Nations was still ongoing. Those soldiers died to save political careers and pensions and we honour them for that. That is, after all, what sacrifice in wartime is all about.

The thing is, we’ve been in Afghanistan for seven years and our soldiers still aren’t properly equipped.

[SAS commander] Major Sebastian Morley claims that Whitehall officials and military commanders repeatedly ignored his warnings that people would be killed if they continued to allow troops to be transported in the vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers.

What’s the reason for the delay in equipping troops in Afghanistan properly? Did the invoice fall behind a filing cabinet or get left on a train by a feckless official? I mean it’s one thing to send men to their needless deaths when you’re trying to give political cover to a war crime but this is inexcusable, surely?

It suggests that political attitudes towards soldiers haven’t changed much since the Battle of the Somme. Do you think they still have those big maps on tables at the Ministry of Defence where they push toy divisions around with big sticks? It’s the best way to avoid seeing soldiers as human, I suppose.

Literally:

[T]he devastation that is now Iraq is not of a kind that can always be easily explained in a short report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on artillery and air power during the worst days of fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure. Political and economic changes imposed by the American occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very tools they would now need to launch a major reconstruction effort in their own country.

What is there to say?

(Via Mike P.)

I see the inquest into the deaths of ten servicemen on a Hercules transport plane shot down in Iraq has reached its conclusions.

To be honest, I’ve always wondered why the inquest was really needed. Former Defence Secretary John Reid told us more than two years ago how and why these men were killed.

It was because the UK was stupid enough not to fight in Vietnam. Who can argue with a mind capable of such cast-iron bastardy?

No, no, no. This won’t do at all…

Buried in the new Quarterly Report from the Pentagon is this statistic: 74% of Iraqis feel safe in their own neighborhoods, but only 37% feel safe outside their neighborhoods. Iraq has become a nation of ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, separated by 12 foot concrete barrier walls.

They’re not 12 foot concrete barrier walls, they’re Freedom Hedgerows. It’s not ethnic cleansing, it’s distributed community cohesion.

(Via Mike P)

Here’s a breathless, erotic press release from the Ministry of Defence. I bet the guy who wrote this had a sock handy:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles scanned the horizon for enemy action. Jackal vehicles with their awesome firepower raced ahead using the latest surveillance and targeting systems. Infantry stood ready to strike with deadly sniper rifles, mortars and grenade machine guns – this wasn’t a major operation in Afghanistan but the UK’s largest demonstration of military equipment purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh my God, I think… I’m going to… ohhh… deploy.

Can I just ask one thing though. If all these throbbing, thrusting engines of hot death have been ‘purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan’ then WHY THE BLOODY HELL are they being flaunted on Salisbury Plain for drooling death fetishists? Shouldn’t they be on transports heading to where they’re needed?

(Those are rhetorical questions by the way. There’s no brownie points in just sending this stuff to the army, is there? Where’s the PR value in that? If New Labour hadn’t made such a cock-up of supplying troops up until now, there wouldn’t be any need for this dick-waving. ‘Look at us! Look at us! We’re finally getting it right! And it only took 14 years and four wars to do it!‘)

Hey, it’s not all doom and gloom coming out of the Middle East. Take a look at this:

Iraq is fast becoming one of the United States’ top customers for military sales. Since January 2007, Iraq has spent $3.1 billion on U.S. weapons. That number looks likely to grow exponentially as Iraq uses its vast unspent reserves of petrodollars to develop its army into a force capable of defending its borders against hostile neighbors.

In the past two months alone, the Pentagon has alerted Congress of a possible $8.7 billion worth of additional military sales to Iraq, for everything from lightweight attack helicopters to armored ambulances to binoculars.

There’s a friendly pimp who can guarantee you the best whores. A slick hustler always working the angles. He’s got the best girls. You don’t need to look anywhere else, man. Those other girls? They’re not clean. It’s his you want. Think of Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver telling you where you can put your missile.

Still, a good news story or what? Iraq might have some of the worst living and health standards in the world right now but, boy, are they going to be tooled up. I wonder what the mark-up is on a pair of US military-issue binoculars. Don’t shop for it, Pentagon it!

You know what I’d get me with all that cash if I was Prime Minister of Iraq? A WMD programme. I’d get me some mobile laboratories, maybe some VX gas rockets. Then I’d let slip some ambiguous remark dissing Israel. You know, just for a laugh.

When George Bush/Tony Blair/A.N. Other War Criminal visit Baghdad/Kabuk/A.N. Other Bombed-out Shithole, it is always a ’surprise’ visit. It is always ‘unannounced’. The media agree to a blackout until they are on the ground with said bastard.

There is a very good reason for this. If it was announced that George Bush/Tony Blair/A.N. Other War Criminal was visiting Baghdad/Kabuk/A.N. Other Bombed-out Shithole, every yahoo with a shoulder mounted anti-air missile would be gathered around Baghdad/Kabuk/A.N. Other Bombed-out Shithole airport in order to try and bag themselves a prize amongst prizes as said bastard’s plane (or any other plane for that matter, just to be sure) came corkscrewing in to land.

Or maybe the same yahoos would make every effort to get a suicide bomber or sniper within striking distance of George Bush/Tony Blair/A.N. Other War Criminal.

That being the case, why are the media saying that Barack Obama will ‘probably’ be visiting Iraq and Afghanistan during his tour of Europe and the Middle East?

Update: As if by magic, A.N. Other War Criminal turns up unexpectedly in Baghdad on a ’surprise visit’. Why weren’t we told he was ‘probably’ going?