The Blair LegacyUKWatch.net - 20 Mar 2008Hundreds of thousands dead, Britain less safe Is there a causal link between British military intervention in the Muslim world and terrorism by Muslims in Britain? That is a vital question. After all, the Government is never done telling us that it is the first duty of government to keep us safe. Yet, the Prime Minister cannot bring himself to admit the existence of such a link, even though the British intelligence services say: ?We judge that the conflict in Iraq has exacerbated the threat from international terrorism and will continue to have an impact in the long term. It has reinforced the determination of terrorists who were already committed to attacking the West and motivated others who were not.? Blair cannot bring himself to admit that there is a causal link. For him to do so is to admit that his military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he justified to counter alleged threats to Britain?s security, have in reality made Britain less safe. As for the threats to Britain?s security, there were none, neither from al-Qaida in October 2001, nor from Saddam Hussein?s Iraq in March 2003. That is Blair?s legacy. He has made Britain less safe by his military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and, in the process, he has caused the deaths of nearly 200 British soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis. That should be engraved on his tombstone. This pamphlet traces Blair?s deceit about the threats facing Britain in order to take us to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also shows that Bush and Blair misrepresent the objective of al-Qaida, which is not about overthrowing ?democracy and freedom? in the West, but about ending Western, especially British and American, interference in the Muslim world. It can be guaranteed that al-Qaida will not attack Sweden. As Michael Scheuer, who was the first head of the CIA?s al-Qaida desk, wrote in his bookImperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terror: ?...the greatest danger for Americans confronting the radical Islamist threat is to believe ? at the urging of US leaders ? that Muslims attack us for what we are and what we think rather than for what we do. ?Rhetorical political blustering ?informs? the public that Islamists are offended by the Western world?s democratic freedoms, civil liberties, intermingling of genders, and separation of church and state. However, although aspects of the modern world may offend conservative Muslims, no Islamist leader has, for example, fomented jihad in order to destroy participatory democracy, the national association of credit unions, or coed universities… ? Al-Qaida?s public statements condemn America?s protection of corrupt Muslim regimes, unqualified support for Israel, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a further litany of real-world grievances. Bin Laden?s supporters thus identify their problem and believe its solution lies in war.? If the West stops interfering in the Muslim world, then the al-Qaida threat to the West will disappear. It?s as simple as that. This is a summary of David Morrison’s pamphlet “THE BLAIR LEGACY”. Read the full pamplet (pdf).
A War of Utter FollyUKWatch.net - 20 Mar 2008The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a tragedy – for Iraq, for the US, for the UN, for truth and human dignity. I can only see one gain: the end of Saddam Hussein, a murderous tyrant. Had the war not finished him he would, in all likelihood, have become another Gadafy or Castro; an oppressor of his own people but no longer a threat to the world. Iraq was on its knees after a decade of sanctions. The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war. It is improbable that the governments of the alliance could have sold the war to their parliaments on any other grounds. That they believed in the weapons’ existence in the autumn of 2002 is understandable. Why had the Iraqis stopped UN inspectors during the 90s if they had nothing to hide? Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003. By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks. They could not succeed in eliminating WMDs because they did not exist. Nor could they succeed in the declared aim to eliminate al-Qaida operators, because they were not in Iraq. They came later, attracted by the occupants. A third declared aim was to bring democracy to Iraq, hopefully becoming an example for the region. Let us hope for the future; but five years of occupation has clearly brought more anarchy than democracy. Increased safety for Israel might have been an undeclared US aim. If so, it is hard to see that anything was gained by a war which has strengthened Iran. There are other troubling legacies of the Iraq war. It is a setback in the world’s efforts to develop legal restraints on the use of armed force between states. In 1945 the US helped to write into the UN charter a prohibition of the use of armed force against states. Exceptions were made only for self-defence against armed attacks and for armed force authorised by the security council. In 2003, Iraq was not a real or imminent threat to anybody. Instead, the invasion reflects a claim made in the 2002 US national security strategy that the charter was too restrictive, and that the US was ready to use armed force to meet threats that were uncertain as to time and place – a doctrine of preventive war. In the 2004 presidential election campaign, Bush ridiculed any idea that the US would need to ask for a “permission slip” before taking military action against a “growing threat”. True, the 2003 Iraq invasion is not the only case in which armed force has been used in disregard of the charter. However, from the most powerful member of the UN it is a dangerous signal. If preventive war is accepted for one, it is accepted for all. One fear is that the UN rules ignored in the attack on Iraq will prove similarly insignificant in the case of Iran. But it may be that the spectacular failure of ensuring disarmament by force, and of introducing democracy by occupation, will work in favour of a greater use of diplomacy and “soft power”. Justified concerns about North Korea and Iran have led the US, as well as China, Russia and European states, to examine what economic and other non-military inducements they may use to ensure that these two states do not procure nuclear weapons. Washington and Moscow must begin nuclear disarmament. So long as these nuclear states maintain that these weapons are indispensable to their security, it is not surprising that others may think they are useful. What, really, is the alternative: invasion and occupation, as in Iraq? Hans Blix was head of UN inspections in Iraq in 2003
secretariat@wmdcommission.org
The Only Lesson We Ever Learn…UKWatch.net - 20 Mar 2008...is that we never learn Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”. But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry ? but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin. Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people ? the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world ? not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam’s links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn’t plan for the aftermath of war? Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning ? of which more later ? but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale. As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I’d brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror ? I recommend the Battle of Borodino ? along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: “With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war. “They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.” How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill’s brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year. On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia ? “Mission Accomplished” ? and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians ? ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents ? annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus’s head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading. To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair ? as we should always have called this small town lawyer ? should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war ? and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper ? daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it? But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith’s proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us ? be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or “terrorism” ? are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences. Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam’s capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?. But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had “penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks”. Why didn’t Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere “dead-enders”. On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: “The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune.” Why didn’t Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved ? even just a few tears for a minute or so ? for the Iraqis? For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders “the Allies” ? they did, by the way ? and painting Saddam’s regime as the Third Reich. Of course, when I was at school, our leaders ? Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States ? had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA. Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen ? Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz ? have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like “Shock and Awe” appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown. Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won’t even account for Iraq until the war is over. It is a grotesque truism that today ? after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago ? we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200). They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq ? 176 ? is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq ? 29,395 ? is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284). Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead ? they range from 350,000 up to a million ? these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom ? 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded ? from 1940 to 1945. Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or ? more terrible still ? two Hiroshimas. Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan’s warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died. America’s massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam? We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa’ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto ? in Afghanistan ? unheard of suicide bomber. And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror ? yes, our terror ? of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. It’s not too complicated an equation. And we don’t need a public inquiry to get it right.
Iraqi American Reflects on Five Years of WarDemocracy Now - 20 Mar 2008As the US occupation of Iraq enters its sixth year, we turn to an Iraqi American voice to get a rarely heard perspective on the war. Ayad Al-Qazzaz is a professor of sociology at California State University, Sacramento. He was born in Iraq and immigrated to the United States in the 1960s. [includes rush transcript]
Fed Bailout of Bear Stearns First of its Kind Since Great DepressionDemocracy Now - 20 Mar 2008The nation’s fifth largest investment bank Bear Stearns nearly collapsed last week. It was saved only after the Federal Reserve took extraordinary measures to help JPMorgan purchase the eighty-five-year-old firm. The Fed has become the lender of last resort for other investment banks in a move that marks one of the broadest expansions of the Fed?s lending authority since the 1930s. We speak with Nomi Prins, an author and former investment banker at Bear Stearns, and Max Fraad Wolff, an economist and writer. [includes rush transcript]
China Continues Crack Down on Tibet ProtestsDemocracy Now - 20 Mar 2008China has acknowledged for the first time that anti-government protests in Tibet over the past few days have spread to other provinces. The protests erupted last week when Buddhist monks took to the streets of Lhasa to mark the anniversary of the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. Human rights groups say dozens of people have been killed and hundreds arrested. We speak with Lhakpa Kyizom, a Tibetan activist in Dharamsala, India, and Robert Thurman, president of Tibet House US. [includes rush transcript]
Headlines for March 20, 2008Democracy Now - 20 Mar 2008Over 200 Arrested in Nationwide Protests on 5-Year Mark of Iraq War, Bush, Cheney Dismiss Iraq War Opposition, Obama, Clinton Tout Iraq Stances, China Admits Tibetan Protests Spreading to Provinces, Witnesses Speak Out on Deadly U.S. Raid in Afghanistan, Ex-Soldiers Reveal New Details of Abuses at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo Prisoner: U.S. Interrogators Threatened Rape, Israel Kills Palestinian Farmer in Gaza, McCain Shuns Palestinians on Israel Trip, Mass Held for Victims of Colombia Attacks in Ecuador, Citing Racial Bias, Supreme Court Orders Retrial for Death Row Prisoner
