The Iraq War, the build-up, according Lord Drayson, Minister for Defence Procurement:

The military was considering and advising on elements of the equipment list. To order substantial numbers of further body armour pieces beyond the number held in stock—approximately 13,000 at the time, if I recall correctly—would have sent a clear signal about the particular type of operation being contemplated. With the political process as it was, it was judged that that was not the right thing to do.

The Iraq War, the fallout:

An inquiry into the death of Sergeant Steven Roberts, of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, who died of a bullet wound in the chest on the fifth day of the war, said that he would have lived had he been protected by the special body armour.

Sergeant Roberts was the first British soldier to die in action in the 2003 Iraq war, on a stop-and-search operation at Az Zubayr in southern Iraq. He had handed his enhanced body armour (ECBA) to a colleague because the equipment was in short supply.

And what’s that ‘clear signal’ that Lord Drayson speaks of? He doesn’t say to who the government were worried about sending it. Was it Saddam or antagonists closer to home - MPs whose votes were needed but shouldn’t be told that war was already a done deal?

Still, that was back in 2003. Having gone tooled up to Serbia (1999), Sierra Leone (2000), and Afghanistan (2001), New Labour were still a little rusty about how to run a war, bless ‘em.

Fast forward to 2006 and the deployment to Helmand Province in Afghanistan which then Defence Secretary, John Reid hoped would go off ‘without a single shot being fired’. How had things changed since the politically-dictated sacrifices of 2003? Not by much.

Helmand, the build up, according to an army board of inquiry:

“Critically,” it said, “the secretary of state, [then John Reid] had delayed announcing the Helmand deployment because he wanted to ensure that the campaign could be won, that the 3,150 manning cap was not exceeded, and that Britain’s Nato allies were also contributing.” The board’s report continues: “The immediate consequence was that the two-month delay effectively froze the [urgent operational requirement] process and resulted in the [Helmand Task Force] deploying without much of the mission essential equipment that it had requested.”

Helmand, the fallout:

An Oxford coroner criticised the Ministry of Defence yesterday, accusing it of betraying soldiers’ trust by sending troops to Afghanistan without basic equipment.

Andrew Walker castigated the MoD at the end of an inquest into the death of Captain James Philippson, 29, who was killed in June 2006 during a gunbattle with the Taliban in which British troops were described as “totally outgunned”.

John Reid was then promoted to Home Secretary.

You can’t deny that New Labour have rewritten the political truisms, aphorisms and other assorted cliches. Under this government, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as tragedy.

(Via Alex.)

The website for the Iraqi Council of Representatives is a bloody shambles.

On the fifth anniversary of the march against war, Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, sends an upbeat, if brief, update on the progress of legislation in Iraq:

‘The Council of representatives has this week taken three important and positive steps for the future of Iraq. Confirmation of the 2008 budget releases record resources for services and reconstruction. The Amnesty Law lays the foundation for greater Sunni reintegration in Iraqi politics. The Provincial Powers Law moves Iraq closer to a new round of provincial elections. There is now a clear desire on the part of Iraq’s political leaders to reach out to each other in a spirit of compromise, and use the space created by the improved security environment to make real progress on reconciliation. I hope this positive atmosphere continues. Political reconciliation is key to Iraq’s development as a secure and stable country’.

And that’s it.

It sounds like good news but not wishing to be fooled again, I’d be keen on seeing the breakdown of the parliamentary votes passing the legislation. How did it split across sectarian lines. Were there any abstentions and how many? What about a transcript of the debate to get a flavour of any horsetrading that may or may not have taken place? It’s not on the parliament’s website, in any language

I know it sounds cynical, and I’m sure David is a very nice man and trying very hard. It’s just that he wouldn’t recognise a clear and honest view of events in Iraq if you got Leonardo Da Vinci to paint it for him.

We’ve got five years, what a surprise, since the big march.

Two articles today about it stand out. The one by John Harris in the Guardian takes an optimistic tack:

In Birmingham, the march’s organisers reserved well over 100 coaches - enough to carry at least 5,000 people - and then tried to get hold of even more, only to find that every coach company for miles had been booked up. In Liverpool, the local STWC had organised its previous outings using a colour-coded system - blue coach, green coach, red coach - but this time found that they had run out of colours, and were reduced to a byzantine system of patterns, so that some people made their way to London on the “leopardskin coach”. At service stations on the M4, protesters marvelled at the great fleet of vehicles making its way from Wales and the West Country; on the morning trains into Paddington there was standing room only. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that London was not the only location for an unprecedentedly huge event. Quite apart from the events that took place overseas, 10,000 marched in Belfast, and as many as 100,000 turned out in Dublin. In Glasgow, 50,000 people pitched up outside the aforementioned Labour conference.

But I think Flying Rodent nails it better, in an excellent piece, full of the futility, the contempt the public are held in, and the need for fresh ideas…

The point I’m trying to make is that protest is going to have to change to be useful in future. Our political and economic systems are massive, impersonal behemoths that give not one shit for our opinions on their behaviour, and will press on unabashed with any deranged schemes they have in mind.

Harris wants us to ‘think of Saturday February 15 2003 as the day that politics stopped working.’ I couldn’t get to the London march - I hadn’t long since lost my job and we could barely afford to get off the sofa let alone get on a bus to the capital. But I went on quite a few marches in Brighton.

There were other things that stopped working that February as well as politics. Trust in the police must have been jammed up as well. It certainly was for me. I saw with my own eye what some policemen will do if they think nobody’s watching. It was ugly.

Watching what combat-booted policemen will do to a peaceful march having the temerity to deviate from its route put me off taking my children to protests until they’re of an age to run unassisted and fast.

Still, pepper spray in the eyes and a hard clout around the head or boot in the thigh from a cocksure copper turned out to be the least of everybody’s worries.

Via RickB we have the March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm:

This blogswarm will promote blog postings opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a full withdrawal of foreign occupying forces in Iraq. Five years of an illegal and catastrophic war is five years too many. On the March 19 anniversary of the conquest of Iraq by the Bush Administration, there needs to be a loud volume of voices countering the pro-war propaganda from far too many politicians and corporate media outlets.

I urge you to sign up and take part.

I plan to participate with one major proviso: I can’t swear with hand on heart that I’d like to see the occupation’s troops out of Iraq. I was against the war but I’m for the occupation, at least in an abstract sense. I think I’m off the ‘you broke it you bought it’ school.

I wonder about and fear what will happen if and when the troops leave. Who will fill the void that’s left? Daniel Davies says of ‘liberating’ Afghanistan, ‘if something can’t be done, then it can’t be done, no matter how bad the consequences of not doing it’. It has a certain appealing logic when also applied to whether to stay in or quit Iraq, but I can’t shake the feeling of: Is this it? Is this what it comes down to?

We’re going to leave Iraq to the theocrats and the bombers and the monsters? All those lives, all that money, all those hopes, for this? Isn’t there something else we can do? I told you it was abstract.

Knowing that those of us who marched against the war got it right at every point should be no comfort at all - I won’t be gloating on March 19. I wish we’d been very, very wrong at every stage. I wish we had been greeted as liberators with flowers.

I could live with the sneers and I-told-you-sos of the pro-war crowd, the Cohens, the Aaronovitchs, the Harry’s Places, the Kamms, Gerases and attendant cheerleaders, if those million Iraqis were still alive today. This isn’t a rhetorical parlour game for me, as it seems to be for some if not most of them. I’d have been more graceful in defeat than they would have been in victory. Sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say ‘you were right’.

But I will say this: Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein. There were other options than killing so many and then giving the country, inch by inch, to murderers and fundamentalists. If you disagree, then I only have one thing to say to you: I don’t believe you.

More observations from the Ministry of Defence’s Iraq: Cultural Appreciation Booklet.

Hospitality
Iraqis place great emphasis on the values of hospitality and generosity.

Let’s hope that the Iraqi ethos of hospitality and generosity rubs off on some of our soldiers and they bring some home to show the rest of us. I’d be very keen to see what they look like. And it’s now clear to see why paparazzi agencies never caught on in Iraq.

Photography
It is considered extremely rude to photograph someone without first asking permission.

I wondered why we’ve never seen any long-lens shots on the Iraqi Prime Minister’s wife in her bikini or of her flashing her generative organ while getting out of sports car and now I know. On the matters of hospitality and respect for personal privacy, at least, it seems to me that it should have been the Iraqis invading us.

But when it comes to the art of conversation, it seems us lads are at one with our Iraqi brothers:

Conversation
Men should avoid questioning other men about women in their family.

There is not much that separates us there, it seems. Britain is also a country where one must tread carefully when considering bringing women into the conversation. After all, over attentiveness to a man’s sister or an unwise remark about his mother can see you on the wrong end of a glass, bottle or fist. As such, this passage can be regarded as redundant.

Cultural Comparison Scoreboard
Combating binge drinking: UK 0 Iraq 1.
More tea, vicar?: UK 0 Iraq 1.
See if you can get a shot of her knickers: UK 0 Iraq 1
Are you looking at my bird?: UK 0 Iraq 0

The MoD’s Iraq: Cultural Appreciation Booklet is a mine of useful information. On alcohol, for example:

Whilst alcohol was previously available in large Baghdadi hotels and from a small number of shops, most alcohol sellers have been forced to cease trading since 2003 under pressure from militant Islamic groups.

For reasons of space (I’m guessing) the booklet doesn’t say under what mandate militant Islamic groups have acted or how they gained a foothold in Iraq in the first place.

Cultural Comparison Scoreboard
Combating binge drinking: UK 0 Iraq 1.

British soldiers have been issued with “cultural appreciation” manuals explaining how the war on terror and Western imperialism have alienated the Arab world and how they can avoid making matters worse. In a candid assessment of the grievances motivating the forces facing British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Ministry of Defence highlights Guantanamo Bay and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Where the hell have these ‘manuals’ been for the last seven years? Did the printers let the MoD down or something? Maybe they got lost in the post along with the instructions for telling the difference between right and wrong.

You can’t help but think that this comes a bit late in the day. Surely when you’re planning to liberate a country, a little cultural awareness would be handy before you actually begin the liberation. It seems a little strange now to have to go about the place explaining to Arabs that if only we’d known that they didn’t like being beaten for no apparent reason or imprisoned without trial, we could have all saved ourselves a lot of bother. Still, cultural misunderstandings, eh? What can you do?

Still, I doubt whoever wrote the manuals had to do a lot of work. This passage sounds like it was cannabalised from the Abu Ghraib Big Book of Rotten Apples, turning a threat into an opportunity, as it were:

They also emphasise how Arabs value the notion of shame. “The socio-psychological need to avoid a loss of face… and a consequent diminution in social status in the eyes of society, to a large extent underpins social behaviour and interaction between Arabs, at least in public.”

To tell the truth, it’s as much the Arabs’ fault as ours. They should have told us they don’t like being threatened with dogs and sexually humiliated. Come on, guys, throw us a bone.

(Via Philip.)

Update: You can read the MoD’s manuals for yourself here. Thanks to Richard in the comments.

Press Conference, Room C, 1 Parliament St.
(just off Parliament Sq.)
Tuesday 15th January 2008 3pm

John McDonnell MP and members of the Campaign to Make War History will brief MPs and the media on allegations of war crimes committed against the people of Iraq by Britain’s former Prime Minister and former Attorney General.

read the rest

(Thanks to Hannah.)

A good one this one:

Russia’s foreign ministry said Wednesday it would temporarily close regional offices of the British Council cultural organization, marking a further deterioration in bilateral relations.

…

“I think it’s a very sad fact that there are two countries in which the council is not allowed to operate. That is Burma and Iran,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said, using the former name for Myanmar.

“I just hope the announcement today from Russia does not signal they are taking steps down that road. That is unwholesome company in which to be.”

Except the British Council has got offices in Rangoon and Tehran.

Young Miliband really must try harder with his propaganda. It’s not as if the material isn’t out there.

(Via Private Eye)

The chief of police in the southern Iraqi city of Basra has warned of a campaign of violence against women carried out by religious extremists.

It has, Maj-Gen Abdul Jalil Khalaf said, included threats, intimidation and even murder.

Some victims were dressed in indecent clothes by their killers or had notices attached to them, he said.

And as they breathed their last, no doubt those women we relieved. Could have been worse - it could have been Uday or Qusay Hussein pulling the trigger.

Mission accomplished.

It’d be easy direct hateful laughter at General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British Army, and his assertion that ‘asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal’. After all, it’s a twist on the revolting trick used by all leaders having spiritual pretensions to reconcile their faith with their ordering of others to kill on their behalf.

It’s how they sleep at night. Their certainty that we go to a better place after we die is the lagging they use to insulate their consciences against the chilly screams of the dying and maimed. Without it, they’d be even more insane than they already are.

But then I thought, Dannatt’s got a point here when it comes to our armed forces. Picture yourself as a British soldier on the dusty streets of Basra. You’re fighting a war built on lies, deceit and the betrayal of the very values you’re supposed to be defending. You face a motivated, merciless enemy who will use the hidden sniper and the hidden bomb to try and kill or injure you. You may very well not have the correct kit or, if you do, it’s crap.

Patriots and veterans of conflicts past queue up to declare that covenant between government and soldier is broken. If you’re killed, all you can expect is a few meally-mouthed words from the cosseted politicians who sent you to die. If you’re injured you can expect to be flown home to a filthy hospital and the risk of further illness. If you find yourself suffering from combat-related stress you’ll be largely on your own. You’ll be forgotten.

It’s a situation that would make a fervent, desperate believer out of even the most hardened atheist. With comfort not forthcoming from where it should, why not look to the skies? Is any wonder Dannatt’s drafting God?

Still not fully fit and will hopefully blog on this in more detail soon (in the interim, see Dan, Davide, Robert, Sunny, Daniel, We Owe it To Them and all the other s) but need to point to this:

1. David Miliband’s written statement outlining the Government’s woefully inadequate scheme to assist its Iraqi employees past and present is here.
2. Dan Hardie has a list of talking points for another round of letters to MPs here. Ask your MP to sign Early Day Motion 2057.
3. David Miliband has written about his statement on his blog and is taking comments here. I urge you to get across there and have your say. Please be polite. I enjoy saying horrible things about government ministers as much as the next blogger but insulting them on government forums will only be harmful to this campaign.

We’ve got a foot in the door on this, we just need to keep pushing.

Mark Brockway will be appearing on Channel 4 News tonight to speak about the Iraqi Employees campaign.

Mark is a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who ran the British Army’s Quick Impact Reconstruction Projects in 2003, when he hired a great many Iraqi staff in 2003. Mark has been in close contact with them since and knows of at least one who has been recently murdered.

To say that many of us campaigning are less than impressed with the Prime Minister’s paltry offer is an understatement. Dan Hardie spells it out: this announcement abandons people to the threat of torture and death.

Gordon pipes up at last:

Mr Speaker, I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances exposing themselves and their families to danger.

And I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in uniquely difficult circumstances.

Existing staff who have been employed by us for more than twelve months and have completed their work will be able to apply for a package of financial payments to aid resettlement in Iraq or elsewhere in the region, or - in agreed circumstances - for admission to the UK. And professional staff — including interpreters and translators — with a similar length of service who have left our employ since the beginning of 2005 will also be able to apply for assistance.

We will make a further written statement on the detail of this scheme this week.

I’ll wait for the details until commenting further as I’m sure will most people. I have to say though that I really, really, really don’t like the look of that ’staff who have been employed by us for more than twelve months and have completed their work‘ proviso. Don’t put that champagne on ice yet.

See you tomorrow?

UPDATE: And this shouts out as well:

And professional staff — including interpreters and translators — with a similar length of service who have left our employ since the beginning of 2005 will also be able to apply for assistance.

I might be wrong but I’m guessing that excludes teenage laundry workers.

Urgent news for anyone coming to the meeting at Parliament tomorrow night (Tuesday October 9). Hope to see you there:

Over to Dan Hardie:

And another announcement: the meeting on Iraqi Employees will take place on the same day (Tuesday 9th October) at the same time (7-9pm) with the same speakers in a changed venue very close to the original one: the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House (MPs’ own office block, opposite Parliament). The long-suffering and highly efficient Mette Kahlin will be standing outside the door of the old venue (Committee Room 14 in Parliament) pointing the way to the new venue, which is the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House. How do you get there? Walk to Parliament and it’s the very ugly building at the corner of Bridge Street and Victoria Embankment, facing Big Ben (or St. Stephen’s Tower, if you really must). If you get lost, which you won’t, ask one of the police officers, who are actually very helpful, or just look round for the biggest eyesore. It is unmissably hideous.

Poor Mette had the job, a couple of hours ago, of telling me that - despite the fact that she booked the room back in the first week of September, despite the fact that not double-booking rooms is a task open to the simplest person capable of using something like Outlook, despite the fact that a struggling provincial hotel could manage to avoid doing something like this- a Cabinet Minister claimed that she had previously booked the room and so we were bounced out. Oh, imagine my joy. It quite took the pleasure out of learning that I was a qualified physician.

Salt in the wound: the Cabinet Minister in question is Hazel Blears. Silver lining: we can get TV crews in to film in the Attlee Suite, which we couldn’t in Committee Room 14. That’s Committee Room 14, our old venue. And of course our new venue is the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House.

If you saw The Times yesterday, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the campaign has been a success and we could all go home:

Hundreds of interpreters and their families are to be given assistance to leave Iraq, where they live under fear of death squads because they collaborated with British forces. Those wishing to remain in Iraq or relocate to neighbouring countries will be helped to resettle.

However, there has yet to be a formal announcement and the word is that the Foreign Office doesn’t know about this change in policy. As we’ve seen this week, stories spun to the media shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value.

The speaker meeting at Parliament on October 9 (this coming Tuesday) is still going ahead. It’s still not too late to invite your MP along. The tireless Dan Hardie has all the details of what you need to do.

UPDATE: Dan Hardie: Wait and see

I have always said, when writing to Jacqui Smith and other Ministers, that to pre-announce asylum for Iraqi employees before they’d actually been taken to safety would increase the risks to them and to the British soldiers who would have to evacuate them. I hope desperately that this won’t happen. I also hope that we will see a genuine promise of resettlement for all who are identified as being seriously at risk for having worked for the British in Iraq.

Blackwater security contractors in Iraq have been involved in at least 195 “escalation of force” incidents since early 2005, including several previously unreported killings of Iraqi civilians, according to a new congressional account of State Department and company documents.

In one of the killings, according to a State Department document, Blackwater personnel tried to cover up what had occurred and provided a false report. In another case, involving a Blackwater convoy’s collision with 18 civilian vehicles, the firm accused its own personnel of lying about the event.

read the rest

It’s still not too late to get involved in the Iraqi Employees campaign. Dan Hardie, who has worked incredibly hard on all this, has some tips and a form letter for inviting MPs to the speakers meeting at Parliament on October 9 next week:

…

There will be a meeting at Parliament on Tuesday October 9th, to call for the British Government to recognise its responsibilities and give shelter to the Iraqis endangered by their work for this country’s troops and diplomats. You can invite your MP. And if you care about these people, you should.

The more MPs we get in the meeting, the better. They are not going to listen to Mark Brockway, who is getting desperate emails from the Iraqis he hired, and walk away indifferent; they are not going to listen to Richard Beeston of the Times and decide that they can ignore this. We are going to make it impossible for the Home Office to carry on with its delaying tactics.

This is how to invite your MP:

1) Find your MP: type your postcode into They work for you.

2) Copy-and-paste or better still, adapt this form invitation below (and make any changes you want, but we have to keep these letters courteous). Also; make sure that your address and postcode are on the letters

3) You can then either email it to your MP (email addresses for MPs take the form surnameinitial@parliament.uk- thus Gordon Brown is BROWNG@parliament.uk ) or you can post it to ‘MP’s name, The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA.’ If you have the time, printed letters are better than emails: and it’s not that hard to write a letter, is it? If you get a bounceback from an MP’s email address, get in touch with me (danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) as I have a bunch of alternative contact details now, or -better still- write the print letter and post it. Please make sure that your address and postcode are clearly written on either emails or print letters, so that the MP realises they are dealing with one of their own constituents.

4) If you are in London on the evening of Tuesday 9th October, please come along to the meeting in person. Go to St Stephen’s entrance, facing College Green (the police tend to be helpful here) and ask for admission. There will be at least one campaigning blogger at the entrance, ready to point you in the right direction: remember the meeting starts at 7pm.

Thank you- and, hopefully, see you there.

FORM INVITATION:

Iraqi Employees of British Forces – Parliamentary Speaker Meeting, Tuesday October 9th

Dear NAME

As your constituent, I am writing on behalf of ‘We can’t turn them away’, an online campaign for resettlement for those Iraqis threatened by death squads for their work with British forces. We would like to invite you to a meeting in Committee Room 14 of the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday October 9th from 7 to 9pm .

As you may well have seen in The Times, Iraqi citizens who have worked as interpreters for British forces are being tortured and murdered by death squads for having worked with the occupying forces.

Speakers will include:

Mark Brockway (a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who ran the British Army’s Quick Impact Reconstruction Projects in 2003, when he hired a great many Iraqi staff in 2003. Mark has been in close contact with them since and knows of at least one who has been recently murdered;

Richard Beeston, senior Foreign Correspondent for ‘The Times’ newspaper.

Ed Vaizey MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Lynne Featherstone MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for International Development.

A senior Labour MP.

A number of reporters from television, the national press and BBC Radio will attend the meeting.

This is a cross-party, moral issue, on which both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war can agree. Whilst the Government has said that it is reviewing the policy, no change has yet been made, and further delay is likely to leave Iraqi employees at the mercy of the local death squads. Attendance at this event certainly does not imply any agreement with the aims of our campaign: you are welcome to come and ask searching questions, or to send a Researcher to represent you.

If you cannot come to the meeting, I would also ask that you write to the Home Secretary, and to the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, asking for an explanation of why policy has not changed despite the announcement of an ‘urgent review’ of the matter on August 8th this year.

Thank you very much for your time.

…

I’ll just add two things: A personalised letter goes a lot further than a cut and pasted letter (which often just go in the bin). By all means use the excellent points from Dan but do try to tailor your letter. Secondly, you can also email your MP using WriteToThem,com.

Also a new precedent has been set. The British government have been given a lead in saving these people’s lives:

Late last night, to the amazement of refugee advocates, the Senate approved by unanimous consent an amendment by Senator Kennedy to a defense bill that will make it easier for America’s Iraqi friends to be admitted as refugees to the United States. The Administration lobbied against it this week—the talking points included complaints about infringement on executive-branch authority—but Kennedy’s office agreed to a number of compromises, and won the support of holdout Republican senators.

Hope to see you on October 9.

UPDATE: The Facebook event.

October 9 2007.

Back in the early days of the Iraq war, British soldiers were killed for lack of kit like body armour. New Labour ministers, in the run up to hostilities and not wishing to be seen preparing for a war that was already a done deal despite their protestations to the contrary, ordered equipment at the last possible moment. As such, some troops arrived in theatre ahead of vital equipment.

So, it’s good to see that ministers aren’t going to be caught out a second time. According to Nick Robinson:

The BBC has learnt that over the past 24 hours the Labour Party has begun recruiting key staff to work on an election campaign. The BBC has spoken to a number of individuals who have been asked if they can begin work on Monday.

This time, when the phoney war ends and the shooting starts, you can guarantee that everybody will have what they need.

Remember when those Blackwater mercenaries shot up those Iraqi civilians and were ordered out of the country? Well slap my thigh if they aren’t already back on the street of Baghdad.

Blackwater operate with enviable an impunity. Imagine the larks you could get up to with their mandate for mayhem. This is from the latest Private Eye (still not online, dammit):

[Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] Al-Maliki has already tried (and failed) to impose his will on Blackwater. When he said last week that he was revoking its licence because of the shootings, it turned out Blackwater didn’t even have a current licence. When its old one ran out in 2005 and the Iraqi government had ‘impeded’ its application for a new one, Blackwater simply continued sending armed men on to the streets of Iraq and the US government continued to pay for them.

Further humiliation for the Iraqis came last Christmas when an off-duty Blackwater man got drunk and shot dead the personal bodyguard of Iraq’s vice president, Dr Adil Abdul Mahdi. The Blackwater guard was then spirited out of Iraq without charge.

In fairness, who hasn’t done something stupid after a few brewskis? In my callow, fresh-off-the-leash youth as a fresher at polytechnic, drunk on life and copious amount of cheap alcohol, my (short-lived) party piece du twat was shaking cans of lager and letting them off on the student union dancefloor. The difference between my antics and those of Blackwater is that mine never failed to get me ejected from the premises.

Excellent piece by Sunny on Comment is Free about the Iraqi Employees campaign, the spot of bother with Mr Usmanov, and what it all means for blogging and activism.

If you’d like to get involved with the Iraqi Employees campaign, here’s a few things you can do:

Nearly two million Iraqis have become refugees in their own land in the past year, redrawing the ethnic and sectarian map of Baghdad and other cities, a report by the Iraqi Red Crescent said yesterday.

In Baghdad alone, nearly a million people have fled their homes.

Last month saw the sharpest rise so far in the numbers of Iraqis forced to abandon their homes - 71.1%.

read the rest

Dan Hardie was on Five Live’s Pods and Blogs slot on Monday night along with Mark Brockway, a former solider who had hired Iraqi staff while stationed out there. It was an excellent piece and Unity is hosting an MP3 of the full exchange - get over there and give it a listen.

Disturbingly, Mark Brockway tells of Iraqi employees who have managed to escape to other Middle East countries being tracked down and murdered by militias. It seems refugee status is offering no protection.

If you’d like to help, here’s what you can do.

Let’s get one thing straight. They’re not private security contractors, they’re mercenaries. The media seem determined to finesse the fact that these people swarming all over Iraq are hired guns and, as we saw on Sunday, hired killers. There’s between 20,000 (BBC) and 127,000 (Washington Post) of them apparently. That kind of accuracy with figures is symptomatic of the unmitigated incompetence we’ve seen since the invasion.

Blackwater, the perpetrators of Sunday’s little snafu, are buying light combat aircraft, for God’s sake:

The aircraft can carry up to 1.5 tons of weapons, including 12.7mm machine-guns, bombs and missiles.

…

Blackwater already has a force of armed helicopters in Iraq, and apparently wants something a little faster, and more heavily armed, to fulfill its security contracts overseas.

That’s some heavy machinery for private security contractors. Particularly when their legal status (ie, can you get redress if they shoot up your family?) is ambiguous at best.