The Golden Strawberry

For the BBC, 'Spooks', the series about MI5 operatives counter-acting terrorism through increasingly spectacular and tense missions, is little more than fiction. Its recent storyline regarding America and Iran trading nuclear weapons secrets was only ever trivial fiction, a believable, but unrealistic vision of the immediate future in which the 'good guys' (by definition the British) strive to stop the world blowing itself apart. For the British, maintenance of world order has been top of their international agenda for the last couple of centuries.
From the French revolution, and the climatic battle at Waterloo, right through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, all Britain strived to do on an international level was maintain the peace. Obviously this was in her own interests, as maintaining the peace would keep Britain at the top of the international pile as the front runner in industry and democracy. Maintaining the peace was undoubtedly important, some argue it is why we went to war in 1914, why we declared war on Germany twice in the twentieth century, why we entered the Falklands in the 1980's, and why we followed America into Iraq in 2003. I fall into this camp. I do believe, as naive as it seems, that Britain entered these conflicts in a vain attempt to secure a lasting peace right around the world. They entered these events so as when they eventually won (something which was inevitable, after all, the British never lose- right?) they could dictate the peace, after every worldwide event. It is this which makes the British absence from Vietnam all the more surprising. Britain, and her leaders, regardless of party, wanted a world in which Britain, allied with America from the 1920s, could lead the way forward, providing a light to those countries who had been troubled. 'Out of the darkness comes light' a beer slogan once ran, and it is fitting that this seems to be the British motto to a tee. Yes there will be bad times, but we the British will be there to lead everyone through it, onto something better.
Except things are rarely that smooth. Obviously the world is a darker place than that naive view wishes to imply. Britain were and are still just as culpable as any other country in the continuing troubles around the world. This story, based on events from the 1970s serves to indicate that Britain is not the clean, honest country the ardent nationalists wish to imply. Britain, as much as any other country has a murky past and an even murkier present. That we supplied another country with military equipment is to be expected. What was not expected was what Iraq proceeded to do with this equipment, which, by the end of the 1980s was enough for America to be concerned enough about Iraq to invade for the first time. Quite how supplying military information to another country was meant to deter conflict I'm not sure, but the nett result is an ongoing conflict, which despite pledges to the contrary, looks destined to continue throughout 2008 and into 2009. For Britain to be able to dictate the peace, they first have to win the war, something which appears unlikely.
It seems sad that Britain, in a poorly conceived attempt to introduce democracy to a dictatorially ravaged country has to use military might to bring this about. Such a strategy seems sadder given the events of the past couple of days in Pakistan, whereby one of the lights of world democracy has been extinguished. I do not pretend to know enough about Bhutto, but I can understand that she very much stood for democracy.
Democracy via war seems an odd concept to justify, something neither America nor Britain has really adequately done yet. As we enter the fifth year since the invasion of Iraq, it is probably worth thinking about how such situations came about in the first place, the root causes for events and Britain's continuing role in world affairs. Creating a peace has never been so important, but nor has it seemed more unlikely either.

Luke

Oliver Kamm is getting desperate. He is a good blogger. He has a tendency to sound like the most pompous bloke in the room, but his posts are always elegantly written and packed full of interesting facts. But he really needs to give up on the neo-conservatism. His latest post, which is an attempt to call into question Johann Hari's spot on reading of neo-conservatism here, is the work of a man who is trying to cover up his horrendous misjudgement by nit-picking and needless pedantry. The elephant in Kamm's room is a huge number of dead Iraqis and a failed state swamped with terrorist nutters.

Kamm was wrong, about the whole thing. I think he needs to get of his high horse and admit that, before he digs himself any deeper into a hole. Maybe its harder to do that when you are as obviously amazingly intelligent (he speaks German! and French!) as Kamm is, I wouldn't know. But what I do know is that the invasion he (and I, at the time) backed has killed 500,000+ people.

He can quote as many books about the debates in US foreign policy as he likes, but it doesn't change the facts about Iraq, and about the stupid, stupid bunch of callous psychopaths who launched it. Their incompetence really is breathtaking - I should know, for some reason I've decided to write my dissertation on the whole bloody mess.

-posted by Adam

 

 I'm up for work in less than seven hours, so don't expect anything original from me. Instead, here's this reprinted from Harry's Place as part of a blog campaign:

Since British troops occupied Southern Iraq in the spring of 2003, thousands of Iraqi citizens have worked for the British Army, the Coalition Provisional Authority (South) and for contractors serving UK forces. There is now considerable evidence that their lives, and the lives of their families, are at risk: some former workers for the British have been murdered, and many others have fled to neighbouring countries or gone into hiding in Basra. The British Government, for whom they were ultimately working, has not offered them the right of asylum in the UK. This is morally unacceptable. It is also unnecessary, since we are well able to accommodate several thousand Iraqi refugees, most of whom already speak English and all of whom have already worked for our country.

The most detailed recent report, by Jonathan Miller of Channel Four news, notes the murder of 17 translators in one single incident in Basra. It cites the cases of hundreds of others who have fled to a refugee existence in nearby Middle Eastern countries or are in hiding in Iraq. The British Government response has come from the Home Office, which has suggested that Iraqis put at risk by their work for British troops 'register with the UN refugee agency'. Other reports provide supporting detail: Iraqis are being targeted for murder because they have worked for British forces.

Marie Colvin's report for the Times of April 8 speaks of desperate former workers for the British Army being turned away from the British embassy in Syria by staff who had orders not to admit any Iraqis. These brave men and women have testimonials written by British officers stating that they are at risk from jihadi violence: and yet we are still refusing to admit them to the United Kingdom.

If you feel that this is unacceptable and that Britain should prevent Iraqis from being murdered for the 'crime' of working for British troops, could you please write to your MP and ask him or her to press the Government for action. You can use the excellent website 'Write to Them' or post a letter yourself.

Please be courteous when writing to your MP. It would be a good idea to read the reports above, and cite relevant facts. We would suggest that your letter could contain the following points:

- It is morally unacceptable that Britain should abandon people who are at risk because they worked for British soldiers and diplomats.
- This country will be shamed if any more Iraqis are murdered for the 'crime' of having supported UK forces.
- Iraqis who worked for British forces should not be told to leave Iraq and throw themselves on the mercy of United Nations relief agencies in Arab countries: these agencies are already being overwhelmed by the outflow of Iraqi refugees, and Iraqi refugees who have worked for British diplomats or troops may well be targeted by local jihadists.
- There is plentiful evidence that armed groups in Iraq kill the families of those they consider 'enemies': for this reason we must extend the right of asylum to the families of those who worked for us.
- It is entirely practical for this country's troops in Iraq, and its embassies in neighbouring countries, to take in Iraqis who have worked for us and fly them to the UK. Indeed, there is already considerable anger among British servicemen that Iraqis are being abandoned in this way.
- This country is large enough and rich enough to accommodate several thousand Iraqi refugees. Denmark has already given asylum to all 200 Iraqis who worked for its smaller occupying force.
- It does not matter what your MP's views (or what your views) are on the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. People who risked their lives for this country's soldiers are now being abandoned by the British Government. Their lives can and must be saved by their being granted the right of asylum in this country.
- This policy should be implemented regardless of whether British soldiers stay in Iraq or are soon withdrawn. But it must be introduced soon: applications for asylum cannot be processed in a lengthy fashion, as the security situation in Basra is deteriorating rapidly, and delay is likely to lead to further killings of Iraqis who worked for British troops.

Please consider putting this appeal on your blog.

Cory

Here's Neil Clark on those with "blood on their hands":

The role played by pro-war journalists, in manipulating public opinion in favour of the illegal conflict should never be forgotten. The journalists who faithfully parroted the propaganda of the US/UK governments have blood on their hands. Lots of it. Yet, despite the human catastrophe that their propaganda has caused, the self-same hacks continue to pump out their pro-war, imperialist poison as if nothing has happened. Nick Cohen holds court at the Hay Book Festival, flogging copies of his latest pamphlet. Melanie Phillips writes articles on how Iraqi WMD have been moved to Syria. Stephen Pollard and Daniel Finkelstein try all they can to get public support for a pre-emptive strike on Iran.

etc etc. Do they really have blood on their hands though? It's not as if Bush was wavering on whether he should invade Iraq, then read a Nick Cohen article and thought, "Shit, maybe invading Iraq's a good idea after all." Is it?

Then who pops up in support but John McDonnell, our failed wannabe next PM:

Thanks for this considred [sic] piece Neil.
...

A key issue is how Members of Parliament and Ministers on this and so many other issues cut themselves off from and remain unaccountable to our society.

Er...wasn't there a GENERAL ELECTION in 2005, AFTER the Iraq war? And the Great British public did not vote out those imperialist Zionist neo-cons. One would have thought that that was a sort of democratic accountability. And wasn't the decision to allow PARLIAMENT to vote on declaring war unprecedented? Sigh.

Roll on John4leader 2009, I say...

Cory

George Orwell, something of a literary hero of mine, wrote in his 1946 essay 'Why I Write':

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

This 'power of facing' was arguably his greatest asset as a writer. It must have come in handy whilst he fought his battles against his three great foes. Imperialism; which his rejection of cut any ties he might have had to his family's old cash cow. Communism; against which he fought his longest and most bitter struggle, remember, nothing is as hate-filled as a Comrade scorned; and Fascism - a disgusting ideology against which he saw fit to grab a rifle and hurl himself against.Central to this 'power of facing' is to admit when you have got things wrong. It is difficult, it is humiliating, and it is harder to do the longer you ignore it; But like an elephant in the room, it bears down on you, demanding attention and acting as a dam to your intellect, preventing you from addressing any other issue until the omnipresent pachyderm is dealt with.

We got it wrong. We all got it terribly wrong. All the columnists, pseudo-intellectuals and 'experts' who backed the war in Iraq (I almost said Bushes war, but it was Our war as well) should feel cowed and intimidated by the magnitude of their mistake. It was never going to work, and the true experts said so. All the hubris and self-righteous squawking about the 'flowering of democracy' ignored history, ignored evidence and ignored reason.

I am talking here not of the upper echelons of the Bush administration. Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. are old school nationalist Conservatives who never gave a damn about the Iraqi people and had no interest in seeing Iraq become a country for and of its people rather than a state lording it over them. Rumsfeld just wanted to go in and bomb the crap out of a few Arabs. Blow some shit up. Show 'em who is boss. American Iron, American Steel, American hegemony. Might makes right. Never having been a fan of Bush and Rumsfeld and the rest of the junta and not believing for a minute their bullshit about Weapons of Mass Destruction, I looked elsewhere for justification. My search led me to the writings of Christopher Hitchens, the famous journalist and polemicist. Well spoken, incredibly intelligent and possessed with an acid wit and sharp turn of phrase, Hitchens seemed the ideal advocate for this noble enterprise I was supporting. It helped that the most vocal opponents of the war were the repulsive neo-fascists of RESPECT and their demagogue-in-chief, the slobbering and spitting and drooling George 'Slug' Galloway. I had no wish to associate myself with such people. No, instead I would read the work of this gentleman man-of-letters and take my position alongside him accordingly. (Incidentally, for those who think Hitchens is as boorish and rude as Galloway, remember this phrase: 'a gentleman is never rude except on purpose'.) Hitchens' polemics in favour of regime change were convincing and his essays about the plight of the Kurds and the brutality of Saddam had me enthusiastically signing up for his removal. So on it went for several years afterwards. As things rapidly deteriorated in Iraq I read more and more pro-war literature in a desperate effort to shore up my rapidly declining confidence in the whole adventure. Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Nick Cohen. Even Tony Blair, a man who I respect and admire as Prime Minister, had a lot of stirring rhetoric to deliver about Freedom and democracy and all the rest of it. The blogsphere also made its contribution - Harry’s Place, Normblog and Oliver Kamm were all articulate and effective proponents of the war. Andrew Sullivan in America also had much to say about Iraq that I found inspiring and persuasive.But they were all wrong. As was I. It was never going to work. The thinkers who supported the war should have realized several things.

1. Saying 'You go to war with the President you have' represents a gross refusal to face reality. The fact was, Bush was President and Rumsfeld was Defence Secretary and the war was designed and carried out by them. Wanting to see the end of Saddam was the only moral position to take, but to then ignore all other factors when someone proposes to remove him represents a sacrifice of reason and a profound lapse in judgment. Bush was not the President to do it. The time was not right. What was the right time? Not then, not now, not with the Junta in charge.

2. For a while I thought that sending more troops was the answer. Supporters of the war (once again, I include myself amongst them) dodged their own culpability by throwing out the charge of incompetence at the Administration. Of course, this charge is completely true, but it came too late. We should have been saying it before the war started. We should have realised that the Junta had no interest in doing the right thing. We should have doubted. Many of us did, but we thought we would give it a shot anyway. We dealt in possibilities, in what might happen and wishful thinking overtook us. We looked at the successful society that surrounds us and expected others to rush to build it straight away. They would understand that we were there to help them. Ours was the language of hopes, dreams and vagueness. Orwell spoke of the danger of such thinking in his Politics and the English Language:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia

Undoubtedly many were sincere in their wish to see the Iraqis succeed, but as things spiraled into the abyss we started muttering increasingly meaningless phrases such as 'staying the course' and 'no cutting and running' with no thought as to what they meant. Our euphemisms were resulting in people being killed. Our idealism had already cost the lives of thousands upon thousands.

There is seldom something as dangerous as a zealous idealist infected with a sense of 'destiny'. History is littered with examples of tragedies being wrought by those who had ostensibly noble aims. The French and Russian Revolutions are perhaps the two best examples of this. Hitchens is perhaps the worst offender here. So convinced is he that his cause is right and his fight just, that he sweeps under the carpet the death and destruction the war in Iraq has sparked. His ideological fervour is something that I do not share, having never been a revolutionary Marxist. His belief that America under Bush has become a Jeffersonian-Thomas Paine-esque 'Empire for democracy' which spreads freedom with power is flawed. I admire America very much, but it is still a nation-state; and nation states have interests and, no matter how much Hitchens wishes it were so, those interests are not based on any good sense of morality. Kissinger may be an odious man, but he is closer to reality than Hitchens. Being able to change your mind is a very precious thing. I was wrong. I turned into an idealist, perhaps even an ideologue. A better appreciation of the limits of my own judgement and of the ability of government to effect change in such a drastic way in a part of the world we little understood would have resulted in a more reality-based position.

-posted by Adam

Ming Campbell wants troops out of Iraq:

"There is a moral obligation - even those of us who were opposed to the war accepted a moral obligation to the people of Iraq - but it can't be open-ended.

"It's got to be somehow reflected in Iraqi government and in the Iraqi people taking responsibility for themselves."

He said the government needed to explain to Parliament and the UK public what was happening, as there had not been a debate on Iraq for two years.

I prefer, however, the view of the deputy Iraqi Prime Minister:

Iraq deputy PM Barham Salih said his country still needed the international community to help fight extremists.

"We need to work together to ensure that that day will come when Iraqis are fully in charge of security," he said.

The fact is, we've made such a massive pig's ear of the whole thing, that we cannot just abandon Iraq now. We must keep troops in Iraq until the country is stable enough to look after itself. For better or worse.

Cory

Certainly, one of the main criticisms of the US intervention in Iraq has been that not enough troops were sent to occupy the country and oversee the transition from Baathist fascism to some sort of democratic state. In a country of 20 million people, 160,000 troops just does not cut the mustard. In this sense, the US could have benefited from more imperialism. As Geoffrey Wheatcroft says here, the Euston group should not be ashamed to openly advocate benign Western imperialism in place of native dictatorships. 

Perhaps some form of imperial occupation is necessary in the short term, in order to ensure that the country under Western jurisdiction comes out in the end with the proper institutions, constitution, infrastructure and welfare appartus necessary for a democratic society to function? I recently read Niall Fergusons excellent book Colossus, in which he argues that America need to become more imperialist, not less, if it wants to succeed in its mission to spread liberty throughout the world.

Think about it - if the US had sent 500,000 troops to Iraq and imposed martial law straight after the destruction of Saddams regime, thus preserving much of the Iraqi state and infrastructure, and had not abolished completly the Iraqi armed forces - the country would arguably be in much better shape than it is today. The insurgency would not have had a massive influx of Iraqi army recruits, it would not have had access to old Iraqi army caches of weapons and explosives, the army could have been used to guard the borders against infiltration by foreign jihadist forces etc.

When Norman Geras says in his response to Wheatcroft that:

The support for the aforementioned interventions by the people Wheatcroft is talking about was based on human rights and just war considerations, not on empire-building ones. Indeed, the very principles informing that support rule out support for imperialism, even a putatively 'progressive' imperialism. Self-determination and political independence for all peoples is one of the basic rights we Eustonians defend.

Self determination and political independence is very hard for a nation to acheive when it is infested with terrorists and fascists, the existence of which could have been prevented by a more headstrong imperial approach from the start.

-posted by Adam