iraq

Blair tried to spin his announcement of a reduction of British troop levels in Iraq as some kind of victory by telling us that the situation was now safe enough for a handover to Iraqi control. Obviously this is contrary to the evidence coming out of Basra where troops seem to be largely confined to base and liable to be attacked as soon as they venture out.

Now we are hearing of another reason for the proposed troop reduction. Yep, they're going straight to Afghanistan. 1,600 soldiers leave Basra and more than 1,000 are off to Helmand for the Taliban Spring offensive. So how much of a victory does Basra look like now? Tony, of course, is still in denial about military overstretch despite what his generals tell him. Presumably it's just a coincidence that these two announcements came within 48 hours of each other.

Afghanistan is turning into a meat grinder for British troops with 48 killed since their deployment. And let's not forget that just under a year ago John Reid as Defence Secretary told us that:

There is an interesting video piece with Keith Olbermann talking to MSNBC Political Analyst Richard Wolffe about the British troop reductions in Basra, amusingly entitled The Blair Ditch project (via Chicken Yoghurt). The neo-cons are being characteristically ridiculous over the news of a partial pullout of Iraq by Britain. Condoleezza Rice is insisting that the coalition of the willing is still intact, stressing that some British troops will remain and neglecting to mention that Denmark is also abandoning the sinking ship and Lithuania too is looking for the life jackets. Australia is still loyal to the cause and Dick Cheney went over to remind them that:

This is, of course, one day after the news broke of British troop reductions when he said:

The spin never stops.

Jack 'Man of' Straw has apparently announced that there'll be an inquiry into the Iraq War 'at the appropriate time'. Blair is on board with this, although he wasn't last week and the wrong time to have an inquiry is 'while the troops are out there' as it will 'send the wrong message'. Judging by ARRSE, the message the troops have got - 'we expect you to fight for a lie without adequate equipment' - hasn't exactly done wonders for their view of Mr. Blair. I'm sure big, tough, cynical British squaddies aren't squeamish about Parliament having an inquiry into what they know is a crock of shit. Mr. Straw must have rather a low opinion of them, which is just one reason I have rather a low opinion of Mr. Straw.

Of course, the right time for an inquiry, from Tony Blair's point of view, is about a nano-second after his private jet leaves UK airspace, heading west.

BBC

For those of you that missed it this morning, here is Tony Blair's 30 minute Iraq interview on Radio4.

No time right now, but it Fisks itself...

Make sure you have a big stick ready, to beat yourself over the head whilst you listen, it helps!

So, we're going to withdraw our troops and the US is increasing their troop levels. The obvious question is,if we are allies, why are we leaving and not reinforcing the US surge?

If anyone can find an 'official' answer we'd love to hear it. Unofficially though, is it because the UK military is horrified at the US tactics towards civilians which they believe has increased the insurgency?

Or is it because the Palace doesn't want photos of Prince Harry blasting away at Iraqi civilians all over the papers?

Or are we leaving in the hope of preventing a wipe out in the May elections and spoiling Gordon's ascension? Or all three?

via Stop the War Coalition

From the Downing Street website:

So we get a chance to ask  to ask our Foreign Secretary a question. Judging by previous performances it should be entertaining. Anyone got any suggestions?

For more background on Dahr's reporting, see his main site at dahrjamailiraq.com or check out our interview with Dahr from last year.
Please repost this as widely as possible, thanks.

We've finally finished analysing the full text of the speech and it can be summarised as:

"All we are saying, is give war a chance"

Joe Lieberman is an odd fish, indeed - ostensibly, even proudly a Democrat, yet signed up to the increasingly beleagured and unpopular neocon agenda. Rejected by his party, yet elected by his public, and now recommended by Iain Dale. Iain's support for the Iraq war is well known, and he's entitled to his position (I believe that people are entitled to their position if they can spell, punctuate and construct coherent sentences, incidentally - criteria that exclude the President of the United States, who's entitled to nothing more than my boot up his harris should I ever catch him bending over. I digress). Having read the article and from what I've seen I totally disagree with Iain, and I suspect that more people are moving towards my position than his (70% of the US population for a start). Considering he's likely to be standing for Parliament and I'm extremely unlikely ever to ('Vote Tom for sensible public transport, a moral foreign policy and the nailing up of David Blunkett by the thumbs') is a bit strange - you'd have thought he might want a few votes, for which a mainstream rather than an extreme position could be an advantage. He'll certainly find it hard using Lieberman's arguments to a cynical British audience, as they're identical to Tony Blair's, and we know Britain is fed up with him.

On the other side of the fence, it's quite a shock to find who our fellow travellers are these days - sold-out, sold-up Blairite Peter Hain, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel - not the sort you'd expect to see joining us great unwashed out on the streets in the 'Bush #1 Terrorist' shirts. However, when you survey the wreckage of the neo-con agenda - still an array of familiar faces from the American 'Enterprise' Institute, Dick Cheney, Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens and of course the Hornswoggler-In-Chief, Tony Blair, still gurning and spewing over the TV and papers, it becomes clearer. Many of these are of course 7/10ths frothingly insane, so why is a decentish, affable Tory like Iain still urging us to back them? It's hard to draw much connection between any of them and traditional British conservatism, which is a carefully crafted ploy to play chess by keeping all the pieces exactly where they are, not a revolutionary movement that intends to throw all the pieces in the air and work out what to do after they land.

To have any chance at understanding, we need to don our long rubber gloves and waders and see what Joe's been writing. Oh dear. From the first line it appears that we're deep in the ideological territory where an undefined 'win' in Iraq is linked closely, and with no evidence, to the security of the USA. He goes on to portray Iraq in the same glib, unreal language as Tony Blair - moderates versus extremists, without specifying precisely whom he considers to be on each side. The hallmarks of extreme neocon rational detachment are still strongly visible - Iraq and 9/11 are linked, mysterious 'thems' are conjured out of thin air, but never expounded upon. Rhetorical flourish replaces analysis (sound familiar?) and the lack of evidence is overwhelming.

More pertinently, he talks about 'surrendering' Iraq, which will come as a surprise to anyone who might have thought that handing over Iraqi sovereignty in a carefully stage-managed ceremony 2.5 years ago actually meant anything. Clearly, in Lieberman's mind, the US is holding Iraq as a bulwark against extremism, which isn't quite what we were originally supposed to be doing there (disarming Saddam, if you believed Tony Blair). You can't hold a sovereign nation except by force of arms and military occupation, which is so clearly the neo-con strategy that they aren't even hiding it these days.

We then move on to illogicalities - Saddam was a 'danger' (not to the US, he wasn't), a 'barrier' to a democratic Middle East - so was the Shah, so are President Mubarrak, General Musharraf, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia/any other strong man with a secret police concerned about the voice on the street. If a democratic Middle East is the goal, let's judge them on results. Can we hear the Voice of the People? Nope, a deathly silence, punctuated only by the glad cries of the arms companies as we give them the green light to supply our friendly dictators. What would be the result of democracy spreading across the Middle East at this point - moderation or extremism (as defined, or rather as not defined, by Lieberman)? Joe doesn't say, perhaps for obvious reasons - the result of the Iraqi invasion on the 2005 Iranian elections is clear and unequivocal.

Perhaps it's Joe's views on politicians that caught Iain's eye? I hope not:

There was I thinking they were elected to represent. Many are clearly capable of neither, so what the hell were they elected for?

We then turn to a telling part which indicates quite clearly that Lieberman has a good grasp of the stick. At the wrong end.

Whisper it - al Qaeda isn't going to be a popular mass movement unless we help it. No one likes a fundamentalist, particularly if you're a powerful, proud tribe used to getting your own way and doing things your way. The arrival of bearded foreign fanatics with wild-eyed talk of jihad and martyrdom and the profound importance of murdering as many Shias as possible is at odds with this. It's the least surprising thing in the world if Sunni tribes decide that the al-Qaeda boys are better off out of their fight. It would, of course, take a powerful common enemy to bring such people together, a powerful enemy like, oo, a foreign military occupation. That would do it, so what Joe's unwittingly advocating here is pulling out and letting the Iraqis dictate their own future, which will be without al Qaeda.

[My goodness, this is like reading raw tripe. The things I do to prove that neocons are irrational, insane and dangerously deluded fools]

The tough questions posed by this highly partisan interviewer have the same tangible existence as those elusive WMDs.

We then come to predictions of dire catastrophe if we pull out. Well, there will be a dire catastrophe whatever we do, for the simple reason that there's a dire catastrophe now, which we started; the people who started it are still running it and there'll be a dire catastrophe as long as they're running it. It's a damn good idea to change horses in midstream if the horse you're on is galloping towards the waterfall and not listening to you shouting 'WHOAAH'. Lieberman's predictions are of course rubbish - al Qaeda will not take over in Anbar for the reasons outlined above - without a common enemy the locals will boot them out. Iran will not take over in the south unless we make it easy for them - President Ahmedinejad is in a poor political position at the moment, although we can easily improve that by attacking him. As for the prospect that the people who attacked the US on 9/11 'achieve a victory' if we leave? They're dead, or in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and in a sense have been winning on points since 2002 without actually having to do much work. Mind you, if the mooted Taliban offensive in the spring proves hard to contain, then fingers should be pointed at people like Joe Lieberman who actively supported pulling US troops out of Afghanistan into the Baghdad meatgrinder...

Quite, Joe. Anything else on your mind?

Except for the Taliban, apparently. Logical stuff, Joe. Clearly the first thing people do on getting the ruins of their country back is to jump into imaginary aircraft or ships and head for the USA. This sets up the interesting position that while there's one 'terrorist' left in Iraq (which there will be as long as the US is there) you can't pull out. Catch 22, unless of course you actually want to stay there permanently.

What's noticeable is the degree to which Joe's rhetoric closely resembles Tony Blair - this isn't so surprising, since they've both made the same journey from Clinton-acolyte to fully paid-up swivel eyed neocon Bush fancier. Check this out:

Remind you of anyone?

Uncanny. And both wrong, if you trust our Armed Forces (which surely any good Tory would?). It's difficult to see why Iran would help the Mahdi Army with IEDs (since the Mahdi Army specialise in death squads, defence of Shia areas and internal Iraqi politics) and impossible to see them helping the Sunni insurgency, which contains elements (Baathists and Sunni fundamentalists) who are profoundly opposed to Iranian influence. That leaves the Shia militia in the south, who are sporadically attacking not the Americans, but the British, or precisely the people who are emphatically saying that no proof has come to light that the Iranians are supplying the weapons. Game, set and match, I think - the same people are giving us the same spiel we got four years ago, and it doesn't add up any more now than it did then. This is a propaganda piece from the US far-right, brought to you steaming and hot from the rear end of the real anti-Americans. The words 'Wall Street Journal' at the bottom of the article rather give the game away.

Ladies and gentlemen - I give you Joe Lieberman - incoherent, illogical, ill-educated and not someone worthy of any British bloggers recommendation. Time for the adults to take over, I think.

Tony Blair - 12 January

Sunday Times - 21 January

Fancy that!

A message for you Peter, from an anonymous commenter on the previous post.

For a more detailed review of Peter Hain's position on the war - see

And his attack on dinner party critics:

The argument never closed Peter...

One of the public signs of Blair's decline is his lack of authority over his ministers. Gordon can now do whatever he wants and beat Blair to pronouncements on subjects far, far outside his brief.

The other ministers know which way the wind blows and are steadily distancing themselves from their past decisions and responsibilities. The Blairites are going into detox. They also need to deal with Tony's most poisonous legacy, Iraq. So they're coming over all contrite saying Labour has to admit it's errors. Note that it's 'Labour' and not I who was wrong, for all their mealy mouthed, weasel words they don't take any personal responsibility. But it is the first sign of the rats leaving the sinking ship; tough on sinking, tough on the causes of sinking. Expect these voices to get bolder and grow louder over the coming months.

Hilary Benn let us be clear about that truth. Look, the intelligence was wrong, the de-Ba'athification went too far, the disbanding of the army was wrong
Peter Hain The problem for us as a government ... was actually to maintain a working relationship with what was the most rightwing American administration, if not ever, then in living memory.
James Purnell I think the biggest mistake is that you always need to learn the importance of moral legitimacy and international support.
Yvette Cooper I think if different decisions had been taken early on, we might have seen a different course of events

And there's more. Writing an interesting piece on Europe Peter Mandelson says How, post Iraq, can we establish a more equal relationship with the US except by putting more effort into building common European positions, as we have done on Iran?

Interesting, even Mandy's saying Blair got too close to the US.

We discussed Blair's speech to military commanders and academics earlier, in detail but we noticed that soldiers have taken exception to his words, especially "On the part of the military, they need to accept that in a volunteer armed force, conflict and casualty may be part of what they are called upon to face."

Listening to Tony Blair's recent speech aboard HMS Albion in Plymouth in which he stated his desire for Britain to be involved in even more wars, you'd get the impression that he'd jump at the chance to send more British troops to Iraq, especially if asked to do so by his lord and master in Washington. However, it seems now that our war addicted Prime Minister was given such a request and, strangely, balked at the idea.

In his speech Blair said that:

How does that square with his refusal to send the requested troops? Is this a tacit admission that our armed forces are in no state for an escalation of an already disastrous conflict, or has Blair decided that in the light of the huge opposition to this failed war, and in consideration of his all-important legacy that it's all too difficult and that doing the easy thing is also doing the right thing? Perhaps in an all too rare moment of lucidity Blair has realised that Bush's escalation plan goes beyond batshit crazy and is doomed to fail. Either way this is the best indication so far of a possible split between London and Washington. No doubt this welcome decision will be used as evidence of Britain's independence from the USA after the recent stinging criticisms of Blair's subservience to Bush. I'd be more inclined to believe that if I heard an unequivocal statement that Britain will not in any way be part of an attack on Iran. I can't help suspecting that Blair's bellicose speech was partly an attempt to smooth some ruffled feathers in Washington.

Interestingly, the same article in Scotland on Sunday had this little gem:

There was another strategy proposed for ending the violence in Iraq. It was called the Iraq Study Group report and Bush ignored it.

From today's Independent

I hadn't read much of Blair's speech before this (my main reading yesterday was the Guardian in a pub - recuperation is such a nuisance sometimes), but it seems to be a humdinger deserving of much fisking for its vivid portrayal of a man let down by everyone - the army, the media, the British public. We've let ourselves down, we've let the school down and worst of all we've let Tony down and we should all stand in the corner wearing a big hat with a 'D' on it until the State Dunce Police come to pick us up. Strangely, the only people who haven't let him down are 'The Enemy', who have given him his life purpose back. That they're largely an imaginary friend of his own devising does nothing for anyone trying to argue that Blair is still sane.

In reality, of course, this is classic projection and another indication that the Prime Minister isn't mentally fit to lead the country any more.

With this in mind, I set out to search for a full transcript of the speech, rather than some journalist's juicy bits (an unpleasant image, I think). Oddly enough, the Number 10 website has it. Here goes:

First thing to note is that this is one of a series of lectures the Lord Protector is giving on the subject of 'Our Nation's Future'. Since about the only thing we know is that Tony Blair isn't going to be part of our nation's future if us or 78% of the electorate have anything to do with it, it's unclear what the utility of this is beyond Tony's pathetic attempts to go out leaving us 'wanting more'.

What stands out:

It's always new and different. I'd expect Tony to react to a change in the decoration of the Kellogg's Corn Flakes packet by annoucing solemnly that this momentous event requires a qualitatively new approach to breakfast. It's dangerous baloney when applied to real-world conflict as it absolves those in charge from any necessity to look to the past for any lessons, including those that they should have learnt from their own mistakes. To learn from one's mistakes first requires that you admit them, which as we've seen before is always a little difficult for Tony.

A dig at the French, I think, who after all are doing peacekeeping in south Lebanon these days but unaccountably declined to participate in the Iraq jaunt. Presumably Tony would have preferred them to join him and Dubya in backing the Israeli attacks on the Lebanese population. Blair is fond of dividing the world into easy-to-understand lumps, and conjuring up a defeatist/pacifist Francosphere is quite in character. The fact that the French were right on Iraq and have pointed this out repeatedly has made no impact on Blair whatsoever. So much for the alliance with Europe he talks about elsewhere (ranked after the alliance with the US, naturally).

Two things here - he neatly forgets the considerable involvement of Israel in the Suez crisis. The implied message (which runs throughout) is that the UK fails when it undertakes military action away from the US umbrella (and with those perfidious Frogs to boot), but should be actively involved when the US turns up. We're lost without America in other words - the presence of the USA sanctifies us. Still, pre-1997 history in a Blair speech is a novelty, thought typically he gets it arse-about-face and gets in another dig at the French.

While the demands on it have gone up dramatically, including running several wars in parallel. Has no one else spotted that he's effectively admitting having a failed defence policy?

Why's he buying the massively-expensive Astute class hunter-killer submarine then, that's 4 years late and a billion quid over budget, almost entirely on his watch. The only contribution each of these three (yes, we're only getting three of them at something over a billion quid each, although BAE SYSTEMS shareholders will be delighted to hear that Tony and the boys are ordering another one) can provide to the kind of operations Tony has in mind is to fire cruise missiles, the counter-insurgency weapon of choice for military morons. Dare I suggest that there are better delivery mechanisms than a 7800-ton nuclear submarine and better uses for the money?

Beyond irony. There's no qualification to say what distortions so exercise the PM, but it's possible he's referring to later on in his own speech, such as this bit:

Yes, he believes the Taliban were defeated by air power, rather than us teaming up with some really quite unpleasant warlords (with more than a passing resemblance to the Sierra Leonian 'gangsters' he refers to at another point) to help them win a pre-existing civil war. It often occurs to me that if you did an identity parade with the leaders of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban in it, the average Sun reader wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Beards, AK-47s, Korans, antique attitudes to women's rights - like any civil war (apart from ours, where we helpfully put on fancy dress) it's extremely hard to get a handle on it from outside.

Why the juxtaposition of Iraq and bin Laden? Why was it 'unclear' 18 months after 9/11 when we'd supposedly been concentrating on it (actually, we weren't, we were concentrating on invading Iraq, weren't we? Another Blair failure of priorities)? Why does he say three months instead of three weeks (17 March - 9th April 2003)?

Here he's started veering off the path of sanity big style. It's 'ludicrous', apparently, to suggest that the vast upsurge in terrorism in Iraq, the terrorism here by people quite openly pointing to Iraq as a factor indicates that there's somehow more terrorism around. He's also setting up a classic straw man by trying to suggest that the argument is that it was just the removal of Saddam that increased the threat of terrorism. It's not, of course, it's the military occupation and promotion of sectarian politics that came after Saddam. As for Afghanistan, unlike Saddam, the Taliban didn't go away, so by conflating the two he commits yet another sin against common sense.

Accelerating over the sanity horizon, he's now suggesting that when people question why UK soldiers are 'there', there are two reactions, an understandable one and by implication a non-understandable one. That the understandable one is an emotional reaction and the non-understandable one is a rational question is incredibly revealing. Blair likes his public emotional and passive (think Diana). Rational and pro-active citizens really don't float his boat. We like to think we're in the second category, so this is a pleasant conclusion to draw.

There follows a long segment arguing that the problem with war reporting is that there's too much of it, it's not controlled tightly enough and there's a bit too much 'reality' in it for his liking. In Tony's world we'd have less reality and more propaganda, which smartly contradicts what he said earlier about distorted or embellished truth. Frankly, if I watch a video of an IED attack on a US patrol, I think the exultant whoops of 'Allahu akbar' as the bomb goes off would give me a clue that the originators were of an Islamic jihadi persuasion, just as the Fox News logo in the corner of the screen would give me a clue that I was being fed the neocon line. Oops, I'm using that cool, rational component of my brain again, in direct contravention of Tony's desires.

Two more assertions without any backing. Failed states can't threaten us, they're failed states, for crying out loud. Terrorism doesn't destroy progress, it destroys lives, property and creates distress and hatred, but it's not going to stop Apple launching the iPhone or someone setting up a flower selling business. It can't threaten the integrity of the state.

Whenever Blair describes something as 'reality', assume the opposite is true. In this case the opposite is that Britain should keep its Armed Forces but use them rationally. Sounds pretty sensible to me. Blair is effectively admitting that in his 'reality' we shouldn't make rational decisions about the deployment of the Armed Forces. He's saying, before an audience of servicemen and women, 'Trust Me With Your Lives, I'm Mad'.

Blair wields supreme power on a minority vote and uses this power to suppress democratic protest and ancient freedoms. He then redefines 'security' to mean 'pre-emptive attacks to impose his way of thinking' and attempts to remove the word 'defence' from the military lexicon. He has no need of defence, only attack. Breathtaking.

Because people join up thinking it's a gadget filled opportunity for exciting foreign travel? This insults everyone in the Army, Royal Navy and RAF who know bloody well what a volunteer armed force is.

I'd settle for protecting our security, given the results of Blair trying to advance what he thinks are our interests and values. I'll use the old-fashioned definition of security, not Tony's redefinition, thanks. And I'll continue to call our alliance with the US neocons in Iraq a bloody mistake of epic proportions, too.

Oh, an attack on the UN now.

'You're wrong, I'm right'.

Only in your reality, Tony. The rest of us haven't the faintest idea what you're on about.

No you don't, you look forward to stating your beliefs and ignoring anyone with a professionally grounded opinion, as you usually do. I look forward to reading ARRSE and PPRUNE for some actual debate from the bits of the Armed Forces that matter.