• home • about • twitter • archives • subscribe • email •

No. 10 deny PM ‘hit’ Iraq. Allegations Gordon Brown pulled the country from its chair and ’shoved’ it are ‘lies’ said a spokesman.

Largely trampled beneath the deeply unedifying flurry of handbags that we must now call Bullygate was the announcement that the Prime Minister is to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War on March 5. However, lost in the distant mists of time B.B. (Before Bullygate), was Gordon Brown’s launch of a pre-emptive strike on the Inquiry.

On February 19, 2010 at approximately 15:27 GMT explosions were heard in the Chilcot Inquiry. Special operations commandos from Number 10’s News Management Division, infiltrated throughout Westminster, called in the early air strike.

Getting his retailiation in first, Brown announced ‘the threat of weapons of mass destruction was not the reason he backed the invasion of Iraq’. ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,’ said Winston Churchill. Brown hopes to ape him.

Mr Brown said weapons were not his prime motivation, and instead it was Iraq’s persistent disregard for United Nations’ resolutions which “put at risk” global security.

Ah, yes. Respect for international law and the will of the international community (or at least the five permament members of the UN security council) are important considerations. Although, how a disregard for United Nations’ resolutions in this instance puts global security at risk if we discount WMDs is for much more morally flexible minds than mine.

And isn’t it fortunate that Gordon now reveals he didn’t regard Saddam an imminent threat, just as that argument is shown (once again) to be a stinking pile of mendacious horseshit. If only Brown had had a quiet word in Alastair Campbell’s ear back in 2002, all of this unpleasantness might have been avoided. Brown seems to have had no consideration of Iraqi human rights (as Blair later tried to twist it) and admits Saddam could have stayed in power if only he’d come clean about the weapons he didn’t have.

If anything, Brown’s case for cluster-bombing children is even weaker than Blair’s. At least Blair tried to convince us of some threat that needed countering. Brown makes the deaths of – at the very least – 100,000 people, the destruction of a country, and the debasement of UK foreign policy sound like an early bed time for disobedience. I have children who have a ‘persistent disregard’ for what they’re told. God help them if I take up the Brown Doctrine.

Mission Accomplished.

Still, should Brown win the election I for one look forward to him taking to new theatres his intolerance of countries whose flouting United Resolutions ‘put at risk’ global security. What are the chances, do you think?

Very late with this but then there are somethings that should never be allowed to go stale. Armando Iannucci, while researching his movie, In The Loop, hears some grim tales in Whitehall about how the liberation of Iraq proceeded…

Donald Rumsfeld weeded out from those going to help the reconstruction of Iraq anyone who could speak Arabic, on the grounds they would be pro-Arab. As a result, it took the Americans 18 months to realise that when marines held up the flat of their hand to oncoming cars to signal them to stop, they were actually using the Iraqi hand-signal for “come forward”. That’s why so many families in cars were shot.

Weren’t we told that we were invading because we are pro-Arab? You know, human rights, Saddam is a monster and have a look at this shredder? Still, no regrets.

Geoff Hoon, the Hammer of Iraq, is stepping down as an MP – not in 45 minutes unfortunately but at the general election. In announcing his flouncing he took the opportunity to have a whine about the media…

…newspapers do not always report fairly or accurately and [...] I always tried to take decisions in the best interests of the country…

Poor Geoff, suffering so at the hands of nasty newspapers. It’s good that he’s finally come to the conclusion that newspapers aren’t always the benign collaters of the public record, however late in the day it might be. He clearly thought ‘45 MINUTES FROM DOOM‘ headlines and the hounding of Dr David Kelly showed newspapers acting ‘fairly or accurately’. He’s certainly never felt compelled to make a public statement to the contrary. But then he did have a filthy hand in both squalid affairs.

Still, there is more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents etc.

So anyway. While Alastair Campbell gets the collywobbles over being asked to give a straight answer to a straight question and Tony Blair is whinging about the ‘conspiracy theorists‘ that won’t leave him alone (it’s great to know it really bothers him), how are things in long-forgotten Iraq?

(You remember Iraq, don’t you? That place out east that this is all about in the first place. It’s easy to forget that what with all these politicians’ fragile egos, reputations and book sales to worry about).

It seems that, seven years after the war, achieving democracy in Iraq remains very much an ‘aspiration’ (New Labour, after all, loves a good ‘aspiration‘; they’re so pleasingly lacking in concrete and promise). When giving evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, Blair said: ‘It is too early to say right now whether the Iraqi democracy will take root and will function effectively, although… there are really hopeful signs.’

Really hopeful signs?

Last month, an unelected commission held over from the early days of the US occupation of Iraq, the Justice and Accountability Commission, issued a shocking ruling banning more than 500 candidates from taking part in the election, including a number of members of the current parliament running for reelection… Secular politicians, nationalists, former Baathists with low-level positions, dissident Baathists who left the party in the 1970s (such as Allawi and Mutlaq), and many others are painted as blood-stained criminals and “Saddamists.” The fact that Maliki has descended to such bitter and petty name calling signals that the prime minister has abandoned any pretense of trying to rise about sectarianism to become a national leader. For the election, at least, Maliki has thrown his lot in with the pro-Iranian clique. *

The Justice and Accountability Commission is run by Ahmed Chalabi. He, for those who don’t remember, was the Iraqi exile and ‘convicted fraudster‘ who helped supply the piss poor intelligence on Iraq’s WMD that made the ‘case’ for war. Funny how all the comedians with a hand in doing that are still around and doing well.

So much for the ‘really hopeful signs’ for Iraqi ‘democracy’ (does that jackass even read the newspapers, do you think?) How are things for ordinary Iraqis? Let’s have a look…

More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels or radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found. Areas in and near Iraq’s largest towns and cities, including Najaf, Basra and ­Falluja, account for around 25% of the contaminated sites, which appear to coincide with communities that have seen increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years…

Just super. Anyone see ‘really hopeful signs’ there? And to think Tony’s worried about his toxic legacy.

* Thanks to Mr P for the link.

Hello you. How are things? What have I missed?

I didn’t see much news in the last couple of weeks but the headlines from the Chilcot Inquiry managed to waft their way to my holiday bolthole. Claire Short and former Foreign Office lawyer Elizabeth Wilmhurst may have got the applause but for me the stars of the inquiry so far have been two other faces from the squalid past, namely Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.

(more…)

Fans of barely restrained fury and sneering condescension should make a note in their diaries for next week. That’s when Alastair Campbell makes his appearance before the Iraq Inquiry. I just hope for his and the inquiry members’ sakes that he remembers to visit the stationery cupboard beforehand…

One of the most vivid details to emerge from the [David] Kelly affair was that Alastair Campbell had used a pin held in the palm of his hand to control his temper while testifying to the foreign affairs committee. Each time he felt the explosive urge, the story went, he would squeeze on the pin and the pain would distract him from the immediate provocation. Like many stories about Campbell, this one wasn’t entirely accurate – it was actually a paper clip – but the gist was true.

It’s good to know this man spent so long at the heart of government.

Welcome to the United Kingdom, 2009…

Reading the high court judgment, you have to pinch yourself and remember that this isn’t Kenya under Daniel arap Moi, but good old Blighty, where the police are impartial, the civil service disinterested and a minister’s word is his bond. In a civilised country, at least half a dozen senior officials would now be charged with perjury, the secretary of state for defence would be facing impeachment hearings and a number of soldiers would be on trial for torture and murder. But in the United Kingdom, where we see only what we choose, the judgment sinks without a ripple. We carry on believing what we have always been told: that unlike other countries, we do things properly here.

But anyway. What’s Jordan been up to lately?

…The Sun was one of the principal cheerleaders and propagandists for it.

See also, courtesy of Alex Ross.

Let us read between the lines of the way the Iraq inquiry is to be conducted…

[Iraq Inquiry chairman, Sir John] Chilcot repeated his insistence that evidence would be heard in public, and perhaps live on television, “wherever possible”.

But he said some sessions would remain behind closed doors, “consistent with the need to protect national security, sometimes to ensure complete candour and openness from witnesses”.

‘To ensure complete candour and openness from witnesses’. To be fair, it doesn’t take a genius to translate this. What Chilcot is saying, in other words, is some prominent members of the British Establishment cannot be trusted or expected to tell the truth in public. How marvellous.

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.