For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened (OP)
Salaam
A statement of the obvious,
For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened
Far from paying any price, the British system has rewarded ministers for their fateful decision on Iraq
March 20th marks the 15th anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq which plunged the country into a brutal occupation leading to sectarian civil war, terrorism and a death toll of hundreds of thousands.
Yet in Britain the anniversary marks another year of impunity for the ministers who authorised the invasion. This lack of accountability for crimes committed abroad is a British disease with a very long history.
A disastrous decision
No British minister was forced to resign over Iraq or has been held properly accountable for it, despite the disastrous decision to go to war made collectively by the Cabinet on 17 March 2003.
Where are they now, those Cabinet ministers who gave their assent? No less than six of them have since been elevated to the House of Lords: John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, was given a life peerage as Baron Prescott.
He is joined by former fellow Cabinet members David Blunkett, Tessa Jowell, Alastair Darling, John Reid and Paul Boateng. Other Cabinet members were promoted following the invasion: Margaret Beckett later became foreign secretary, Darling became Chancellor and Reid became defence secretary.
What about the main actors? Tony Blair, then Chancellor Gordon Brown and the International Development Secretary Clare Short were subsequently allowed to perform top international jobs: Blair became official special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East until 2015, Brown became UN special envoy on global education and Short became chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
It is perhaps tragi-ironic that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary in March 2003, was later allowed to become justice secretary.
Far from paying any price, the British system has rewarded ministers for their fateful decision on Iraq. But not just ministers. Matthew Rycroft, Blair's private secretary at the time who drafted the "Downing Street memo" that was central to the build-up to the war, subsequently served as UK ambassador to the UN.
Earlier this year, he was promoted further to become permanent secretary at the Department for International Development.
A crime of aggression
The basic issue remains: the evidence is overwhelming that the war was illegal and constituted a "crime of aggression" – one of the worst crimes in international affairs. John Prescott himself later said he thought the war was illegal.
He is joined in this view by a long list of others including then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, later deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, not to mention most international lawyers.
When the Chilcot report on the Iraq war appeared in 2016, the media widely commented that it failed to explicitly say the war was illegal. But it did say: "Mr Blair asked Parliament to endorse a decision to invade and occupy a sovereign nation, without the support of a Security Council resolution explicitly authorising the use of force. Parliament endorsed that choice."
The invasion could only have been legal if it had secured such explicit UN authorisation. All Cabinet members were surely aware of this since it is basic international law - even though, as the Chilcot report showed, Blair withheld some key legal advice from them.
Sir Michael Wood, the most senior legal adviser at the Foreign Office at the time of the invasion, was unequivocal, advising the government that military action without UN approval was "contrary to international law" and would constitute a "crime of aggression".
He told ministers they risked offences under the International Criminal Court Act and for "misfeasance in public office". Wood's deputy Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who resigned in protest on the eve of the invasion, told the Chilcot inquiry that "all the lawyers dealing with the matter in the Foreign Office were entirely of one view."
Escaping accountability
British ministers have been involved in war crimes abroad throughout the post-1945 period, as can be seen in declassified government files.
In the forgotten war in Oman in 1957-9, when Britain leapt to the defence of an extremely repressive regime against a rebellion, the files show that then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, personally approved British "attacks by rocket on water supplies" and on agricultural gardens – civilian targets that constitute war crimes.
In the mid-1960s, British governments covertly supplied arms to the regime in Iraq to be used to attack Kurds in the north of the country. In 1963, British officials described this as a "terror campaign" involving "the clearing out and destruction of Kurdish villages".
Yet British rockets, to be fired by British supplied warplanes, were provided to Baghdad "intended for use against the Kurds", a Cabinet file noted.
No-one, as far as I know, ever questioned ministers about this at the time or when the declassified files were released. What is happening now in Yemen is simply a repeat: ministers are also escaping accountability for their involvement in consistent Saudi attacks on civilian targets such as schools and hospitals – using similar rockets to those supplied to Iraq in the 1960s.
Bribery undertaken by British companies overseas can now be prosecuted in UK courts. But involvement in human rights violations and war crimes can be conducted with impunity.
Ministers are thrown out of the Cabinet for trivial driving offences (Chris Huhne) or viewing porn at work (Damian Green) but not for instituting foreign wars involving mass killing.
The invasion of Iraq was tragic for the people of that country but for the British political elite it is as though it never happened. Jeremy Corbyn, if he attains power, should make good on his signal to call for an investigation into Tony Blair for alleged war crimes during the Iraq war, and it should cover other Cabinet members too.
Yes, and guess what lessons the pathetic Blair has learnt? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, NOTHING.
Tony Blair warns of 'flabby liberalism'
Tony Blair has warned against "flabby liberalism" and says there needs to be a tougher centre ground approach to issues such as tackling extremism and responding to the refugee crisis.
The former UK prime minister is planning a global project to prevent extremism through education.
But he warns that too often the West can "be made to feel guilty about itself" and fails to make its case.
"We're in a situation where we have to fight back," said Mr Blair.
"The centre has become flabby and unwilling to take people on. We concede far too much. There's this idea that you're part of an elite if you think in terms of respectful tolerance towards other people. It's ridiculous," Mr Blair told the BBC.
After leaving office, Mr Blair set up a foundation which works to promote greater understanding between the world's religions and to challenge extremism and prejudice.
But he warned that moderate voices were too defensive about arguing their case and this was fuelling a culture of extremism in religion and politics.
"One of the problems with the West is that it constantly can be made to feel guilty about itself - and I'm not saying there aren't things we should feel guilty about.
"But you know, we shouldn't let people intimidate us into thinking there are certain values we shouldn't be standing up for," said Mr Blair, who was attending the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai last week.
"I'm a supporter of multiculturalism. But there's been a long period of time when we've allowed the concept of multiculturalism to be abused."
As an example, he said that if people were asserting the equality and fair treatment of women that they should not be made to feel "somehow we're being culturally insensitive".
"We have to be clear no one has the right to abrogate those basic human rights."
But he warned that moderate voices were too defensive about arguing their case and this was fuelling a culture of extremism in religion and politics.
"One of the problems with the West is that it constantly can be made to feel guilty about itself - and I'm not saying there aren't things we should feel guilty about.
"But you know, we shouldn't let people intimidate us into thinking there are certain values we shouldn't be standing up for," said Mr Blair, who was attending the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai last week.
"I'm a supporter of multiculturalism. But there's been a long period of time when we've allowed the concept of multiculturalism to be abused."
As an example, he said that if people were asserting the equality and fair treatment of women that they should not be made to feel "somehow we're being culturally insensitive".
"We have to be clear no one has the right to abrogate those basic human rights."
On the challenge of migration and refugees, he says that in an "era of anxiety", a lack of a coherent mainstream response has opened the door to more extreme arguments.
"You have to give a real solution and not one which is populist but false. If you don't give a solution, and you leave people with a choice between what I would call a bit of flabby liberalism and the hardline, they'll take the hardline I'm afraid."
He called for a more assertive policy of "muscular centrism".
The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is promoting the idea that all countries should include a commitment to tackle extremism and promote tolerance between different religions and beliefs.
He says there is clear evidence that education can reverse the spread of intolerance and he blames extremists for cultivating bigotry and conflict between religions.
"The truth is this extremism is being incubated in school systems, formal and informal, which are teaching children a narrow minded and often hateful view of those who are different," says Mr Blair.
"What people need to understand is that this culture of hate is taught.
"They are taught a culture of hate and they can be untaught it."
"This extremist thinking is what you have to attack, if you don't attack the ideology you'll never defeat the violence."
Mr Blair says that when people are taught to hate people in other religions "it's not surprising that a proportion of them go into violent extremism".
He says that he is talking to international leaders about this proposed Global Commitment on educating against extremism - and expects countries in the Middle East to be supportive.
"What is happening in all the turmoil, particularly since the Arab Spring, is that there is a much clearer understanding in this region of the need to fight back, and a realisation that you can't fight back unless you're putting a better idea in place than the extremists."
He argues that education against extremism and intolerance will come to be seen as an international obligation - in the way that environmental policy, such as tackling pollution, is addressed by international agreement.
But Mr Blair rejected the idea that promoting values of tolerance would be seen as a form of Western interference.
"The West has just got to get over this," he said.
"There are many other people in the region who do not regard the notion of peaceful co-existence as a Western value, they see it as a sensible human value, a global value."
The former prime minister also warned that both the far right and far left were promoting arguments in favour of "isolationism and protectionism".
"People are very anxious and uncertain and they are turning to the demagogic populism of left and right."
Re: For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened
Salaam
During a conflict Rreports like this are routinely denied unless the evidence is overwhelming. After the intial phase of the conflict its over the truth starts the emerge.
Re: For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened
Believe or not, british people still think their kingdom was a light upon the lesser savages (non-white people) upon the Earth. Recently on one of my FB groups, a turkish member uploaded a series of old photos of british soldiers' masscre of native people, with one soldier with two heads on his hand, and the entire thread became a world war lol.
Basically the british response was:
"It wasn't us guv' I swear. We are all bad, we ALL did those things. Let's just forget this and move on, right?"
And ofcourse there was the mandatory Armenian genocide rantings as well. That's why I just equate british people with evil.
UK military turns to universities to research psychological warfare
Cambridge among partners shortlisted for £70m MoD funding, documents show
The British military is recruiting philosophers, psychologists and theologians to research new methods of psychological warfare and behavioural manipulation, leaked documents show.
Cambridge University was among the institutions shortlisted by officials in the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), as it sought a partner to spend almost £70m in funding for a project known as the human and social sciences research capability (HSSRC), looking at how the arts, humanities and social sciences can shape military and security strategies, including “psychological operations”.
A spokesperson for the university said it had since pulled out. Others in the running were Lancaster University – which also subsequently dropped out – and the arms companies BAE Systems and QinetiQ.
In a slideshow to prospective contractors published online, DSTL listed “understanding and influencing human behaviour” among its list of research priorities, including through the “targeted manipulation of information” and “coordinated use of the full spectrum of national capabilities … including military, non-military, overt and covert”.
According to leaked Cambridge University documents detailing the research areas included under the programme and first reported by student newspaper Varsity, the military wants to develop “information activities and outreach, defence engagement and strategic communications” alongside military campaigns, as well as “communications and messaging [to] UK domestic and defence internal audiences that promote the attraction, health, welfare and resilience of our people (military and civilian)”.
This research would include “the testing, refinement and validation of workable concepts, tools, techniques and methods to enable analysis of audiences to inform planning of appropriate activities, synchronised delivery of these activities [and] measurement of their effectiveness”, the document said.
A spokesperson for DSTL said its research into “targeted manipulation of information” was focused on “communicating with overseas audiences and deterring adversaries who threaten the UK’s interests”. The research was intended to tailor military communications to key audiences in the most appropriate way, the spokesperson said, adding: “All DSTL research complies with ethical and legal requirements.”
For their HSSRC bid, Cambridge dons proposed a partnership with the national security consultancy Frazer-Nash to set up a research centre, initially within the university’s centre for research in the arts, social sciences and humanities (CRASSH). Within 12 months, it was to be spun out into an independent research facility within the university, called the Centre for Strategic Futures, “with the longer-term aim to explore the potential for this to be spun out as [a] profit-generating programme management consultancy”.
Funded with an initial £6.9m over four years, the centre would help the MoD decide where to spend its money, “including administering open competitive calls for research funding”. University administrators expected that not only would the core funding “provide a significant surplus” but a further £20m would pay for research by its own academics.
Forming the partnership with Frazer-Nash, “which has the highest levels of security clearance”, would give Cambridge access to the defence industry, as well as the framework to handle “projects up to the security level of ‘secret’.” The documents suggested the university has existing relationships with the MoD, DSTL and Frazer-Nash, but the natures of these were not made clear.
Dozens of academics at Cambridge were listed as engaged with the bid, including specialists in disciplines such as architecture, psychiatry, neuroscience and sociology. The project would have been led by Prof Steven Connor, the director of CRASSH.
Cambridge’s general board of the faculties approved the bid for the funding in June 2018, after a presentation by the university’s pro-vice chancellor for research, on a pitch written by Dr Peter Hedges, the head of the university’s research office. Board members were told Cambridge had been criticised for not seizing similar opportunities in the past. Taking this opportunity would, they heard, given them a chance to influence defence research and policymakers.
Heads of the schools potentially involved in the project were supportive, the documents suggested, particularly since many represented areas that typically struggle to obtain research funding. Arts and humanities in particular do not often benefit from big pots of research investment.
A spokesperson for Cambridge said the university was no longer bidding for the HSSRC contract, but was not able to give details as to why it had decided to pull out at such a late stage. Simon Schaffer, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, said he welcomed the withdrawal but was concerned it had not been more widely discussed at the university.
Schaffer was particularly concerned by the suggestion in the documents that “reputational risks” posed by the university’s collaboration with the MoD would have been mitigated by a communications campaign paid for by the HSSRC funding.
“Now I don’t want to be too academic about this, but it’s very striking that a programme designed to change people’s views and opinions for military purposes would spend some of its money changing people’s views and opinions, so that they wouldn’t object to changing people’s views and opinions. See what they did there? Propaganda squared, and that seems wrong,” he said.
DSTL said no PR budget was included in the funding available for HSSRC.
Re: For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened
Salaam
Another update.
Remember this in the lead up to the war?
Blurb
An interview with Professor Hans Blix, Swedish diplomat and politician, who tells how US intelligence about WMDs rarely led to anything, and how the pride of the Iraqis explains the reluctance to grant the inspectors full access.
And now
Blurb
Former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix gained notoriety 20 years ago when he contradicted President George W. Bush’s claims about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. He asked for more time to find those weapons, Bush instead invaded Iraq. Two decades later, Blix joins Mehdi to discuss lessons learned from the war, and why he’s worried history could repeat itself.
We had the honour to welcome our guest Moazzam Begg, outreach director of CAGE, a human rights group.
We discussed CAGE's efforts in freeing Muslim prisoners, the Arab League normalising ties with the Assad regime and lastly, some advice for the Muslim youth.
Re: For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened
Salaam
Another update, something thats not talked about enough. Iranian expansionism in the aftermath.
HOW IRAN WON THE U.S. WAR IN IRAQ
A trove of secret intelligence cables obtained by The Intercept reveals Tehran’s political gains in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
IN JANUARY 2015, as Islamic State militants were waging an offensive across Iraq and Syria, an Iranian intelligence officer known among his colleagues by the code name Boroujerdi sat down for a meeting with an important official: then-Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
The meeting, held at Abadi’s office in Iraq’s presidential palace in Baghdad, took place “without the presence of a secretary or a third person,” according to a report about the discussion contained in a leaked archive of cables from Iran’s shadowy Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
Abadi was a member of Iraq’s exiled political class, mostly Shia, who had returned to take power following the U.S. invasion. The two men discussed a range of topics, including the threat of ISIS to the Iraqi state, the role of foreign powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the region, and, finally, the position of the West. On at least one point, they agreed: Despite the threat of ISIS and other regional powers, the political conditions wrought by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein had created an opportunity for the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allied Iraqi elites to “take advantage of this situation,” according to the Ministry of Intelligence and Security report.
Twenty years after U.S. troops first invaded Iraq, the classified Iranian intelligence documents, which were leaked to The Intercept and first reported in a series of stories that were published beginning in 2019, shed light on the important question of who actually won the war. One victor emerges clearly from the hundreds of pages of classified documents: Iran.
Today, Iran enjoys privileged access to Iraq’s political system and economy, while the United States has been reduced to a minor player. Iraqis themselves remain fractiously divided; many of their own political elites are close allies of Iran. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security cables, which were written between 2013 and 2015, the peak of the international campaign against ISIS, provide no shortage of examples of the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq. While helping train and organize Iraqi security forces who are ideologically tied to the Islamic Republic, activities documented at length in the cables, Iranian officials had also been routinely involved in promoting favored Iraqi politicians to important roles in the Iraqi government to protect Iran’s economic and political interests. One classified 2014 report contained in the trove of Iranian cables described then-future Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi as having a “special relationship” with Iran and named a laundry list of other Iraqi cabinet members who were close with the Islamic Republic — often people who had spent years exiled in Iran. The cables discuss how these close relationships have benefitted Iran, including by having sympathetic Iraqi officials give Iran access to Iraqi airspace and vital transportation connections with their allies in Syria.
The privileged conversation between Boroujerdi and Abadi was being replicated at that time at many levels of Iraqi government and society. In the cables, Iranian officials documented their work to solidify business and security interests in Iraq while obtaining oil and development contracts in the northern Kurdish regions and water purification projects in the south, the latter won with the help of a $16 million bribe paid to an Iraqi member of Parliament, according to one of the documents. The cables also show how former Iraqi military officials, including individuals trained or supported by the U.S. during the occupation, had been pressed into the service of Iranian intelligence, with one typical operative described as being forced to “collaborate to save himself.”
The war’s benefits to Iran were not solely political or security based either. Iraq is home to many sacred sites of Shia Islam, which, as the cables note, have opened up to Iranian tourism and influence. The documents in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive mostly provide individual reports of conversations and intelligence activities carried out by Iranian operatives inside Iraq. Yet overall, they depict Iran’s far-reaching political, security, and even cultural influence over Iraqi society in the vacuum left by the U.S. invasion.
THIS PICTURE OF Iranian ascendance is not only reflected in that country’s own intelligence documents. A massive two-volume study published in 2019 by the U.S. Army War College came to a similar conclusion, stating that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the conflict. The study is the most comprehensive look yet at the costs and consequences of the war from a U.S. military perspective. Some of those costs are obvious and well known: Thousands of Americans were killed in combat after an ill-defined mission to find weapons of mass destruction devolved into a counterinsurgency campaign and civil war. But although most of the burden of the war was borne by the relatively small number of Americans who directly took part, the war had broader impacts on American society that continue to be felt today.
“The Iraq War has the potential to be one of the most consequential conflicts in American history. It shattered a long-standing political tradition against pre-emptive wars,” the War College authors wrote. “In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”
Iraqis themselves have suffered greatly from the war; millions have been killed, wounded, or displaced as a result of the invasion and the subsequent civil conflict. The emergence of the Sunni Islamist extremist group ISIS, which Iran’s intelligence documents discuss at length, was itself the product of the chaos of post-invasion Iraq, including abuses by rogue Iranian-backed militias. In the same 2015 conversation between Boroujerdi and former Prime Minister Abadi, the Iranian intelligence officer opined that “today, the Sunnis find themselves in the worst possible circumstances and have lost their self-confidence,” adding that they “are vagrants, their cities are destroyed, and an unclear future awaits them.”
The miserable condition of Iraqi Sunnis had worried others within Iran’s intelligence establishment, who warned that many Sunnis, reeling from massacres by Iraqi government security forces and militias, had been driven not merely to welcome ISIS, but also other Iranian enemies as well.
“The policies of Iran inside Iraq have given legitimacy for the Americans to return to Iraq,” one Iranian intelligence officer lamented. “People and parties who were fighting against America from the Sunni side now are wishing that not only America, but even Israel could come and rescue them from Iran.”
IN THE END, ISIS was destroyed as the result of a tacit coalition between the Iraqi government, the United States, Iran, and the Kurdish Peshmerga, which combined to fight the group and regain control of its territories. Today, Iran remains the most powerful outside player inside Iraq. Although it has achieved a goal longed for since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s — to wield power in Iraq and incorporate its Shia-majority areas into Iran’s sphere of influence — Iran’s victory has proven, in many ways, an unhappy one.
During protests against government corruption in Iraq in 2019, Iraqis often blamed Iran and its allies, along with the United States, for the parlous state of the country. In 2020, Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a major architect of Iran’s policy in Iraq whose role is documented at length in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive, was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad’s airport, following tit-for-tat attacks between Iranian-backed militias and U.S. troops in the country.
Despite relative peace following the defeat of ISIS, Iraq today remains a powder keg with widespread unemployment, environmental degradation, and poverty that its ruling elites, widely denounced by Iraqis as kleptocrats and puppets of foreign countries, have been unable or unwilling to address. Two decades after the first U.S. troops invaded Iraq, Iran is facing its own challenges with internal instability and the economic impact of a U.S.-led international sanctions campaign that has destroyed its economy.
Yet when it comes to the shadow war between Iran and the United States in Iraq, Iranian elites likely view themselves as having prevailed — at a steep price to themselves, Americans, and Iraqis alike.
Re: For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened
Salaam
Hah, wasnt expecting this.
Neoclowns in Retreat
The Ukraine War hasn’t even been officially lost yet and the neoclowns responsible for it are already in retreat again from their own imperialist ideology.
Shortly after September 11, 2001, I became known as a “neoconservative.” The term was a bit puzzling, because I wasn’t new to conservatism; I had been on the right ever since I could remember. But the “neocon” label came to be used after 9/11 to denote a particular strain of conservatism that placed human rights and democracy promotion at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. This was a very different mindset from the realpolitik approach of such Republicans as President Dwight Eisenhower, President Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and it had a natural appeal to someone like me whose family had come to the United States in search of freedom. (We arrived from the Soviet Union in 1976, when I was six years old.) Having lived in a communist dictatorship, I supported the United States spreading freedom abroad. That, in turn, led me to become a strong supporter of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, Paper American thinks he should be setting US foreign policy because he lived in an imperialist dictatorship created by his own people for five years. Strangely enough, he supports the same imperialist foreign policy of the place from which he came.
Although I remain a supporter of democracy and human rights, after seeing how democracy promotion has worked out in practice, I no longer believe it belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy. In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11.
So we’ve seen the neoclowns retreat from the inevitable “End of History” to the need to “Garden the Jungle”, and now we’re seeing them retreat again to “Garden the Garden”.
I still favor U.S. international leadership and support of allies, including a strong U.S. military presence in the three centers of global power—Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia—where their deployment is essential to maintain order and deter aggression.
But you know what? The Garden is going to fail too. The neoclowns are going to lose control because they are not only at war with reality, but with God, history, and human nature. And they know it, which is why they are rapidly attempting to change their tune in order to try to escape being held accountable for their monstrous failures for which so many lives, including Americans, were sacrificed.
Understand where the garden and jungle rhetoric comes from.
Blurb
Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, holds a speech in Bruges to inaugurate the European Diplomatic Academy. "Europe is a garden," he says, praising the "combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion". He urges European leaders, whom he compares to "gardeners", to help prevent the invasion of the "jungle".
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