‘I have expressed a degree of regret than can be equated to an apology‘

For God’s sake. Is there any other walk of life where that kind of talk wouldn’t get you punched in the face? The sooner these dickheads are gone the better.

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

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Well, it’s half time in the Iraq vs the Rest Of The World football match. For those just joining us you’ve missed some amazing action in the last four years, and although the score remains unclear at this stage both sides still have all to play for.

Eyebrows were raised early in the game over the sacking of Iraqi manager Saddam Hussein while play was ongoing. In amazing scenes, the team saw a succession of managers come and go as the match failed to go in Iraq’s favour. Garner, Bremer and Allawi were all found wanting and dismissed. Current manager Nouri al-Maliki reluctantly took up the reigns and has expressed his intention to leave the job after the game.

Our experts in the studio expressed surprise at the Rest Of The World team only fielding eight players, the thinking clearly being that an understrength side would easily beat an apparently demoralised Iraqi eleven. A big mistake which saw several own goals scored early doors. The mix of the away team is also strange. European talent is clearly lacking and the underperforming British players look certain to be substituted in the second half. Some players have also complained that their kit isn’t up to scratch with cheap boots, missing shin pads and no team physio for those players taking knocks.

Questions have also been asked about the refereeing of the match with both sides ignoring reffing decisions. Match referee Annan was controversially replaced just before half time by Ban Ki-Moon who has so far failed to stamp his authority on the game.

The Iraqi’s substitutions during the first half have seen an influx of foreign talent using some dubious tactics. The strategy by some of the Iraqi players of involving the crowd was unorthodox but worked in turning the fans against the Rest Of The World team. Offers from the Rest Of The World coaching squad to train some of the Iraqi players has been met with some scepticism. It’s widely doubted that the money is available for the grooming of new talent and whether inexperienced players will be able to make an impact.

Late in the half, Rest Of The World brought on several more attacking players in an attempt to put the game beyond the Iraqis’ reach. The home team’s attacking players responded by largely melting away but their defence is still looking pretty solid.

News just coming in says the chairman of the Rest Of The World, dissatisfied with his team’s performance, might declare them the winner at some point in the second half and take his ball home.

And with the whistle being blown for the second half, it’s back to our commentators to tell us how the game’s going - Tony and
George.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

…shock and awe started this time four years ago?

Tim Ireland wants to know what bloggers were saying for themselves on March 20 2003.

I was blogging at ‘Bar Room Philosophy’ at the time, a blog I kicked off in January 2002. The blog is now long gone but thanks to the wonders of the interweb, the post I wrote on March 19 2003 was preserved by the Wayback Machine.

The post I made on March 28 was better, after having been on Brighton beach watching the West Pier burn down.

I was a proper Stopper back then. My marching days didn’t last very long though. Trying to get away from combat-booted policemen, breaking up a march for having the temerity to deviate from its route, while pushing a two year-old in a buggy made a coward of me, I’m sorry to say. And then seeing George Galloway speak in the flesh put me off the Stop The War Coalition altogether.

I was very fond of BRP and I’m sorry I closed it. Through it I became friendly with a few people who I still know now, including Tim. Some of them are still blogging and I’ll tag a few of them (Jim, Nick and Rochenko) to carry on this meme, if they don’t mind. I think this is rather a good one.

So, what did you post on 20 March, 2003? (Or on as near to the day as possible.)

• Jim Bliss
• Rochenko
• Nick Barlow
• Daniel Davies
• Backword Dave

Doesn’t have to be a blog entry; it could easily be in usenet or in a forum.

Update: Rochenko reminisces.

Again, on the big issues it is necessary to quote Bill Hicks and for that we make no apology. Speaking about the first Gulf War in 1992, Hicks said, ‘I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops’.

Yes, Iraq needed to be freed from Saddam. It’s just that expecting Tony and George to make a decent fist of it was like asking Jonathan King to run a youth outreach programme. They’re all the wrong men for the job.

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Conspiracy theorists, fire up your Google News Alerts for Ali Resa Asgari.

Asgari, a general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and former Deputy Defence Minister, is missing. ‘Western sources’, according to the Times, insist he’s defected with ‘a treasure trove of his country’s most closely guarded secrets’. The Iranians say he’s been kidnapped.

Students of ancient history may remember Iraqi ‘defectors’ with information on WMD helping to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein. One ‘defector’, codename ‘Curveball‘, allegedly the brother of a senior aide to convicted fraudster and Iraqi president wannabe, Ahmed Chalabi, whose information was relied upon, later turned out to be peddling what is known in the intelligence community as a load of old cobblers.

It might be worth watching if Asgari starts singing for his supper and what, if any, parts of his testimony makes it into the public domain. Especially into any dossiers that might be drawn up. As Tony Blair would tell you, beware allegations coming from a single uncorroborated source. Tin foil hats on.

Here:

Media watchdogs rebuked ITV News yesterday for inaccurate reporting when it asserted last year that the prime minister’s faith had played a part in his decision to go to war in Iraq.

Scandalous. As inaccuracies go though, it’s hardly ‘45 Minutes From Doom’, is it? You should have seen the brouhaha that one caused.

But will the time ever come, one wonders idly, when our revisionist historians reconsider the ravings of Comical Ali? The idiocy of most of his statements will, admittedly, endure. Footwear-based supremacy has not been achieved, despite the much-vaunted boast that the Iraqis would be waiting for the coalition forces “with shoes”. But the smile fades when recalling other pronouncements. “Do not be hasty because your disappointment will be huge,” the old crazy warned. “You will reap nothing from this aggressive war, which you launched on Iraq, except for disgrace and defeat.” “We will embroil them, confuse them, and keep them in the quagmire,” he said later, adding that “they cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege.”

There are, of course, rather fewer than 26 million people in Iraq these days, but even those who dispute the precise extent of the population depletion might agree that it comes to something when, in hindsight, several statements by this preposterous character seem more prophetic than anything spouted by the British government at the time.

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And the follow-up - ‘Why are the British really scaling back in Basra?’ - here.

You have to smile grimly at the incompetence of the American administration in Iraq that has managed to ‘lose’ $12 billion in $100 bills. The cash was flown into Iraq on military transport planes in shrink-wrapped bricks during 2003. After that, nobody’s quite sure where most of it went.

Some was given to contractors (what we used to call ‘mercenaries’). A bunch of modern day ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ lifted $740,000 from an army division’s vault. Enterprising Iraqi ministries created thousands of ‘ghost’ employees, put them on the payroll and watched the good times roll in.

Oh, and some of it might have reached the insurgency. American dollars may very well have bought the guns and ammunition that were later fired at American troops. And they say you can’t please all the people all the time. Saddam Hussein isn’t the only dead president in Iraq - the country’s awash with them.

As Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the US Congress’ committee on oversight and government reform, which is trying to get to the bottom of the spendthriftery, said this week: ‘The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they’re true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?’

Who indeed? Right minds have been in short supply in Iraq in recent years. They say if the cap fits, wear it. But if you were a milliner making caps for right minds in the American administration right now, you’d be out of business in less than a week. Has Waxman asked them if they’ve checked down the back of the sofa?

In an attempt to grasp the enormity of it, here are some quick sums.

$12,000,000,000 is 120,000,000 $100 bills. An American $100 bill is 6.1 inches by 2.6 inches. So 120,000,000 bills gives us an area of 1,923,048,000 square inches. Or 30,351 square miles.

That’s enough to paper the whole of Scotland with a single layer of $100 bills.

All the bills laid end to end would stretch for 11,630 miles. That’s almost all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole. Or twice around John Prescott. Also, by pleasing coincidence, 11,630 is the number of years it’s going to take Tony Blair to live down his role in this fiasco. Or apologise.

Clearly, once The War Against Terror is won, stupidity has got to be the next abstract noun on our list. One day we’ll all look back on all this and have a good laugh.

In about 11,630 years.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)

Left-wing intellectual Norman Geras on Nick Cohen’s new book:

…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the decents’…

As opposed to…

…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the stoppers’…

…I suppose.

But wait, there’s more from Norman:

…give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas.

Jesus Christ, man, let it go. You got your invasion, you got your liberation, and you got your victory. And you’re still whining. You and Cohen and ‘the Decents’ were listened to and the anti-war crowd were ignored - that’s why the world looks like it does today. And you’re still not happy?

That Nick Cohen should then feel compelled to write a book rubbing us anti-war types’ noses in it, despite getting everything he wanted, smacks of gloating. Nobody likes a sore winner.

Update: If I was as articulate as John Harris I’d have put my argument something like this.

Remember this, from January 2003…?

Tony Blair today derided as “conspiracy theories” accusations that a war on Iraq would be in pursuit of oil, as he faced down growing discontent in parliament at a meeting of Labour backbenchers and at PMQs.

Well, four years later, we have this:

Now, unnoticed by most amid the furore over civil war in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as “production-sharing agreements”, or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq’s oil.

Hence this:

In the light of Tony Blair’s statement to parliament on 18/3/03 that ‘the oil revenues, which people falsely claim that we want to seize, should be put in a trust fund for the Iraqi people administered through the UN’, the statement from the Iraqi trade unions that ‘We strongly reject the privatization of our oil wealth, [] and there is no room for discussing this matter. This is the demand of the Iraqi street, and the privatization of oil is a red line that may not be crossed.’, and reports in the Independent (Future of Iraq: The spoils of war 7/1/07) that Iraq’s oil is ‘about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days,’ we petition Tony Blair to keep his word, support the Iraqi people and ensure that Western corporations are not allowed to pressure the fragile Iraqi government to sign contracts to privatise Iraq’s oil.

Sign the petition here.

Imagine you went to a party and the most sparkling, witty and popular guest in the room was burly sex-killer Fred West. That should give you a flavour of what an unbelievably monumental, visible-from-space clusterfuck Saddam Hussein’s public execution turned out to be.

Saddam’s capture, trial and execution shows in microcosm how bright a beacon of democracy Iraq has become under our tender attentions. Of all the shifting reasons we were casually tossed in the run up for war, torture, farcical show trials and quasi-judicial executions were some of the most compelling. We all know people don’t like change and resist it wherever possible but it makes you wonder how many Iraqis are comforted by the continuing of these practices after Saddam’s downfall.

Then, after the invasion, we find the people we’re fighting against like nothing more than publishing shaky videos of their grisly executions on the internet. And then after the invasion we find the people we’re fighting *with* like nothing more than publishing shaky videos of their grisly executions on the internet. Tactical mastermind Donald Rumsfeld said ‘freedom is a messy business’ but the intractable reality is worse than even the abattoir of pants-shitting terror that we’re sure constitutes Rummy’s dreams could come up with.

Saddam looked like a pale half-starved elderly badger in the moments before his death but the blood-soaked old butcher showed considerably more dignity than the ski-masked executioners in their Sweeney-era leather jackets braying the name of theocratic thug Moqtadr Al-Sadr. It’s really some achievement making Saddam look good. Those blokes don’t deserve arrest, they deserve their own TV series where they conduct gob-smacking feats hitherto considered impossible. No doubt Tony Blair has taken note and hired a bunch of thickset and terrifying men to publicly harangue him should he every be charged for selling honours.

Considering many of us, the state of the NHS being what it is, will leave this world shrieking for morphine on some cancer ward, Saddam’s exit suddenly becomes rather enviable. Who would you rather be, Saddam who got shouted at a bit by a bunch of knobheads and then offed in seconds or 91 year-old Olive Nockels who, the inquest into her death heard this week, expired slowly and begging pathetically for beetroot sandwiches after doctors decided to withhold treatment and food from her? Any Middle Eastern dictatorships currently with a vacancy should write to the usual address.

(First published in this week’s 5th birthday edition of The Friday Thing. Or would have been if Pond hadn’t forgotten it, the berk. Consider this like a DVD extra. TFT was on its Winterval hiatus when Saddam took the drop hence this piece being slightly past its sell-by date)

Mr. Bush did not mention that while our people are trying to do that, the factions in the civil war will no longer have to focus on killing each other, but rather they can focus anew on killing our people.

Because last night the president foolishly all but announced that we will be sending these 21,500 poor souls, but no more after that, and if the whole thing fizzles out, we’re going home.

Or the shorter version…

This senseless, endless war.

But — it has not been senseless in two ways.

It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It has gotten many of us used to the idea — the virtual “white noise” — of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague “sacrifice” for some fluid cause, too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase “the war on terror.”

And the war’s second accomplishment — your second accomplishment, sir — is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.

Because if you sell the Army a thousand Humvees, you can’t sell them any more until the first thousand have been destroyed.

The service men and women are ancillary to the equation.

This is about the planned obsolescence of ordnance, isn’t, Mr. Bush? And the building of detention centers? And the design of a $125 million courtroom complex at Gitmo, complete with restaurants.

Simon Hoggart: Dead fish day

Our prime minister looked pretty rough. But he was James Bond at the poker tables compared with the president. At the best of times - and these are not the best of times - Bush finds it hard to find the right words, so he thrashes about in the hope that some will pop into his head, like wasps into a jam jar. (At one point he called the sectarian attacks in Iraq “unsettling”. It’s a word, I suppose.)

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Matthew Norman: Together they rode off into the sunset…

As they walked out together to face the press, smiling with a sort of studied sombre courage, the closing scene that came to mind was the one in which Butch turns to Sundance and says, with the sort of inspired gallows humour we can only hope they reprised in the Oval Office yesterday: “For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

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“The standard for recording attacks acts a filter to keep events out of reports and databases,” the report said. “A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count.”

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Some Iraqis are running even further, others not fast enough.

(Video via Pond.)

When Saddam was stringing people up and torturing dissidents, Tony launched a war in order to stop him (at least we *think* that was the reason). Now the new Iraqi regime wants to hang Saddam and government-sponsored death squads roam the streets of Baghdad using drills on their victims, poor Tony doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.

See here for full hissy fit. And here for more.

So I turn my back for five minutes and suddenly we’re executing Saddam?

I’m almost afraid to go on holiday, there would be nothing worse than getting home to discover everyone had spent the whole time I was away holding Kim Jong Il’s head down the toilet and pulling the flush.

Still, I see that the news has gone over well with those whose fierce commitment to universal human rights flops like a stiffy in a scissor factory the moment we, the Americans or the Israelis rev up our war machines to unleash some kick-ass whizz-bang upon lunatics and civilians alike.

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Who knew that the morale of our troops in Iraq was in such a parlous state? Despite our boys being, as Tony Blair said last month, ‘the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for’, the Government, it seems, is extremely concerned that the lads are close to breaking point.

The reason the Government has dug its heels in and refused this week to hold a public inquiry into the Iraq war is because it would ‘undermine’ our troops, the poor, fragile things.

Here we have ranks of men, trained to fight, to kill and, sometimes, be killed. Hard men, in other words. And yet we’re expected to believe that an inquiry into the events that sent them there will destroy their morale. Clearly the British army is collectively on the point of mental collapse, needing only one more setback to reduce it to a parade of blubbing nancy boys.

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The British parliament is God’s gift to dictatorship. If I were an absolute ruler I would get one immediately. Last night Britons were offered the spectacle of their MPs pleading with the government to be allowed an inquiry into the Iraq war. For all the vigour of the debate, they were still humiliated by the government’s supporters. While British soldiers ram democracy down others’ throats at the point of a gun, their representatives seem incapable of performing democracy’s simplest ritual, challenging the executive.

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Christopher Hitchens’s response to the Lancet study is ingenious. First he smears it as fantasy – because the Lancet apparently has “a reputation for conjuring bloodbaths”. But then, “for the sake of argument”, he assumes that the figures are correct. What then?

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Daniel Davies is excellent on the latest Johns Hopkins research into Iraqi deaths as published in the Lancet.

This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent. It really could not have happened by chance. If a Mori poll puts the Labour party on 40% support, then we know that there is some inaccuracy in the poll, but we also know that there is basically zero chance that the true level of support is 2% or 96%, and for the Lancet survey to have delivered the results it did if the true body count is 60,000 would be about as improbable as this. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.

Grand old Guardian writer Michael White attempts to monster the findings, unconvincingly:

I am not competent to judge the methodology of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore…

…but does so anyway.

Daniel then steps in and tears White a new one in the comments…