Big Sticks and Small Carrots

Try as I might, I can’t resist highlighting this extraordinary CiF entry by the former director of communications and press secretary at the Foreign Office, John Williams. It’s a bizarre combination of revisionism, an admission of culpability and, well, idiocy.

There’s a bit of controversy over at CiF over the Guardian’s stealthy rewriting of the sub-heading; they changed “I don’t remember anyone questioning the intelligence” to “I don’t recall my colleagues questioning the intelligence”.  The second version is the more accurate representation of what he was trying to say but it doesn’t really help his cause.

He wrote:

It’s very frustrating, as a minor participant, to have learned afterwards that that the head of MI6 felt the intelligence was being made to fit around the policy. I took the intelligence seriously. Nobody ever cast doubt on it in my presence at the time. And those last three words are crucial - at the time. Hindsight is a luxury government doesn’t have.

Nobody? At the time? Hindsight?

The Westminster bubble is clearly a much better insulator than we’d previously thought.

The admission which Williams sweetens with a little light revisionism is that the government as a whole wilfully refused to listen to the many doubts which were being expressed at the time. More than that, those of us with semi-functioning memories can recall that Blair dismissed these doubts by implying that if only we knew what he knew, if only he could give us the full picture, we’d see how ridiculous these doubts were. And didn’t we just…

Williams worked for Robin Cook, for crying out loud. You know, the Foreign Secretary who who, on the eve of war, resigned saying that “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term”. But John doesn’t recall his “colleague” saying that. Maybe Cook never told the Foreign Office’s director of communications why he was resigning as Foreign Secretary. Maybe Williams somehow managed to avoid every single instance of the widespread media coverage of the reasons for his boss’s resignation. Or maybe… No, I’ll stop now before this goes all sweary.

Hindsight? How about using those fleshy things you’ve got on the sides of your head instead?

And what lesson can we learn from this fictional version of events as the government attempts to deal with Iran?

The dossier was a mistake. I say that not with hindsight, but having argued unsuccessfully at the time that Britain should not take on the burden of proving that a country to which we had no access was in possession of illegal weapons. It should have been for Saddam Hussein to prove that he didn’t have them.

Now, it must remain Iran’s duty to show that it is not trying to master the technology necessary to produce a nuclear weapon, not President Bush’s to assert that it is.

I’m thinking of starting a campaign to pressure Mr Williams into acknowledging the existence of the Celestial Teapot. He has, after all, failed to prove that it does not exist.

The Sunday Telegraph asks a senior British Army officer in Iraq to describe victory in Basra.

We would go down there, dressed as Robocop, shooting at people if they shot at us, and innocent people were getting hurt,” he said. “We don’t speak Arabic to explain and our translators were too scared to work for us any more. What benefit were we bringing to these people?

Break out the bunting.

There are, of course, very good reasons why Iraqi translators are too scared to work with British forces. Whatever your views on the war, the campaign to save Iraqi ex-employees of HMG is surely worthy of support.

The Telegraph goes on to report that:

Rather than fight on, they [UK Forces] have struck a deal – or accommodation, as they describe it – with the Shia militias that dominate the city, promising to stay out in return for assurances that they will not be attacked. Since withdrawing, the British have not set foot in the city and even have to ask for permission if they want to skirt the edges to get to the Iranian border on the other side…

With no presence in the city, British forces are hard pushed to keep abreast of what is going on. They say they get their information from local newspapers and from the Iraqi army, although one battalion of that force is isolated inside the city and the other battalion is in training outside. The British have already encountered much the same problem in the neighbouring Maysan province to the north east, which they handed over in April.

And that explains why the government still thinks there’s a possibility that they can spin their way out of this bloody shambles. If an Iraqi ex-employee of HMG is shot in the back of the head and there are no British troops around to hear the gunshot, does it make a sound? The government thinks not.

The working soldiers of the British army are not responsible for this mess; they were asked to perform an essentially impossible task.

John Ware’s documentary “No Plan, No Peace” did raise the question as to why senior military figures didn’t make greater efforts to stop their men being sent into such a situation. It is clear that many were well aware of the US and British governments’ failure to address post-war planning and knew that it’d be by far the hardest aspect of the invasion.

You’d like to think that resignations would have been the order of the day but it didn’t happen. Asked to prioritise the value of their soldiers versus their career, I don’t remember a single senior military figure opting for the squadies. Now, about five years after it might have made a difference, general Sir Mike Jackson has courageously decided to speak out by writing a book. What class…

Ware’s documentary also included interviews with some of the academics who were belatedly brought in to advise Blair on Iraq in the run up to war. The picture which emerged was entirely consistent with similar interviews for a Peter Oborne documentary for Channel 4. The academics briefed Blair on the enormous complexity and numerous dangers which would exist in post-Saddam Iraq. Blair listened politely but was more interested in asking the academics whether they agreed that Saddam was evil.

At this point (January 2003 or there about), it seems that any critical faculties Blair might once have had had become overwhelmed by his own spin. The academics were not supportive of the war because they could see that the US and UK government’s were totally unprepared for what would come after. Blair apparently took this to mean that they were apologists for Saddam.  Instead of giving value to their accurate and informed advice, he demanded that they participate in a Will-You-Condemn-A-Thon. At such a level was policy made and expert advice dismissed.

One of the academics, Dr Tony Dodge I think, rightly pointed out that Blair’s attitude was criminally negligent. Today, the Iraqi people are paying the price for that negligence with their own blood.

Blair, however, has never been held to account for his disastrous inability and/or refusal to understand the consequences of what he was proposing. That simply is not acceptable in a supposedly democratic country.

As a footnote, the documentary also highlighted the reason why those MPs from other parties who voted for the war cannot be allowed to avoid accepting their own responsibility. I’m looking at you Dave.

On the day of the vote, evidence which made it obvious that the invasion was going to lead to disaster was available to me, an average International Relations graduate with a TV, a radio and an internet connection. Are we really being asked to believe that this evidence wasn’t available to members of Her Majesty’s official opposition?

Perhaps that’s what Kim Howells meant when he said “our shared values”.

Or roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and torture.

Or fairness and equality for all (men). (Well, some men anyway.)

Howells also said that “some commentators will focus on our differences and ask how we can talk of shared values”. Well, yes. How can you?

There are many people who believe that the stated priority given to promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East is just so much hot air designed to obfuscate the real motivations behind British foreign policy.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the British government’s involvement and support for the BAE deal to sell 72 Typhoon fighter jets to the Saudi government. This billion pound arrangement to sell highly sophisticated military aircraft to a regime which is corrupt, non-democratic, staunchly authoritarian, a serial abuser of human rights and a regular practitioner of torture cannot be explained by reference to the rhetoric of the “war” on terror. It can only be explained through the prism of narrow national interest considerations coupled with an admission that the promotion of democracy is not the dominant foreign policy influence claimed by the rhetoric.

There are those who will quite happily agree with this assessment and argue that it is nevertheless right to support this deal precisely because governments should pursue their narrow national interest above all other considerations. I don’t have any complaint about that; disagreement yes, but no complaint. There is an entirely separate argument to be had as to the best way to promote the national interest. I’d argue that this deal is likely to be damaging to the national interest, particularly in the longer term,. I’d further argue that decisions taken in pursuit of the national interest are often based on a narrow short term views and are often harmful in the longer term (politicians generally don’t do long term very well).

I do have a complaint when the government insists that it is absolutely committed to promoting democracy and opposing oppressive regimes and refuses to accept that selling powerful military equipment to a regime like the House of Saud flatly contradicts that assertion. The result is that the entire premise of the foreign policy debate as framed by the government is built on a myth. This is not only starkly hypocritical but it also effectively negates the ability of the people to meaningful debate foreign policy with the government.

It is, ironically, entirely undemocratic.

Yesterday, Bush drew parallels between the Iraq and Vietnam wars. I presume that a few spoilt brats in the National Guard, those with influential fathers perhaps, have managed to avoid being sent to Iraq too so he does have a point.

Bush played up the consequences of US withdrawal from Vietnam but failed to mention the consequences of US participation.

Let’s just take one of those consequences. The US military dropped approximately 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other “herbicides” over Vietnam during the course of the war. Here are some photos of the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese population. More than 30 years after the war, parts of Vietnam are still highly contaminated and people are still suffering as a result.

The American government has set up a programme to help US veterans who’ve been affected by exposure to Agent Orange. Under the heading “Agent Orange and Birth Defects”, the government website highlights the fact that “The Veterans’ Benefits Act of 1997 granted benefits for children of Vietnam veterans who were suffering from spina bifida”. Despite that, the US government has resisted paying compensation to Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

In 2005, when Vietnamese victims tried to take the manufacturers of the chemical to court, the case was dismissed. The judge ruled that they had not proved that Agent Orange caused birth defects and illness. This despite the fact that in 1984, several chemical companies paid $180m (£93m) to settle a lawsuit with US war veterans, who said that their health had been affected by exposure to the substance.

Perhaps there’s some scientific reason why American veterans are more susceptible to the ill effects of Agent Orange than the Vietnamese people who had the stuff dropped on themselves, their animals, their farmland and their water. Any scientists out there want to tell me what it is?

There are some signs that the US government may be slowly moving on this, due, no doubt, to the softening of relationships between the two countries rather than any humanitarian concern for the victims. Give it another 10 or 20 years and some sort of reparation might be on the cards for those who’re still alive.

And perhaps, in another 30 years time, people will again draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.

Last week, Neil Clark wrote an extraordinary piece on Comment is Free opposing the campaign to pressure the government into giving political asylum to Iraqi employees of the British. Unsurprisingly to most, but shockingly for Nick Cohen, an overwhelming number of comments condemned Neil’s position. CiF had to shut down the thread after only three hours.

The central thesis of Cohen’s book is that liberal people have turned their backs on the victims of totalitarian movements. How then does he explain the enormous response to Clark’s article? It’s clear that “liberals” lined up in droves to argue that our government should protect these Iraqis who are at particular risk from death squads. Is this not exactly the sort of thing which Cohen maintains no longer happens? It seems pretty clear that in the real world, Clark’s view is very much a minority one.

In any event, Clark’s article didn’t make sense to me so I decided to see if I could narrow down the reason why he arrived at the conclusion he did. On his website, he has now written a number of posts attempting to defend his stance. After reading them, I did try to engage with Neil in the comments to the last of those posts and he did offer one reply. My next question, however, has not seen the other side of the moderation queue. My guess is that the Blogger gremlins ate it; this seems to happen surprisingly often when you ask awkward questions of certain bloggers.

There’s lot’s of stuff there but ultimately, it all boils down to this from the original article:

If more Iraqis had followed the example of the interpreters and collaborated with British and American forces, it is likely that the cities of Iran and Syria would now be lying in rubble.

The argument is that if Iraq had stabilised as the Bush administration thought it would, they’d have then moved on to invade other countries in the Middle East. In effect, by working with the occupying forces, the “quislings” were aiding and abetting the neo-con project.

It is certainly true that the Bush administration did want to use military force to reshape the entire Middle East. The “axis of evil” rhetoric was not just rhetoric. General Wes Clark recalled asking another general at the Pentagon whether the administration was still set on invading Iraq back in late 2001. The answer:

“Oh, it’s worse than that… I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “…This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Given the scale of their ignorance as to what would happen when they invaded Iraq, however, this plan was never realistic. The neo-con project, as was, was defeated the day Bush ordered the invasion. It is important to keep attacking the simplistic notions of the neo-con “Bombing for Freedom” brigade and yes, many neo-cons still want to take military action against Iran but they have been hugely weakened both politically and militarily. The sweeping land invasions they’d dreamt of are still alive only in the heads of the most deluded armchair generals.

With that in mind, in the anarchy of post-Saddam Iraq, attempts to limit human suffering should be given top priority. Iraqis have already suffered far more than pampered Westerners like ourselves can ever understand.

Furthermore, despite the many failings of this catastrophic war, Iraqis should not be punished for attempting to help turn their country into a stable, peaceful, tolerant democracy. You could argue that some were naive for believing that the coalition could deliver what it promised but that goal itself does have value. Who could possibly blame Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam from attempting to help build a better country by working with the coalition? Understandably, they just did what they believed was best for themselves, their families and their country. After failing to deliver on its promises, the government of this county owes a specific duty of care to these people.

It has been argued that the government owes a duty of care to all Iraqis whose lives are in danger because of the invasion. I agree in principle but it simply, tragically, isn’t realistic to suggest that the government would offer asylum to the approximately 4 million people who’ve been displaced by the violence in Iraq.

The We Can’t Turn They Away campaign is a practical effort to achieve what is hoped to be a realistic goal. It’s about saving the lives of as many people as possible in the aftermath of this most bloody of interventions. Please do consider writing to your MP before it’s too late.

Here’s yet another post bashing the US, UK and Israeli governments. He never writes about China’s human rights abuses. Typical America hating leftist…

It’s an old chestnut but it does seem surprisingly common considering just how easy it is to refute. It’s all about degrees of separation; as a UK citizen, my first concern is to the UK government’s policies and actions. In a democracy, it is every citizens right, you might even say duty, to try to ensure that their government lives up to certain standards of behaviour. Scrutiny and criticism of your democratically elected government is not only acceptable, its an essential part of the democratic process.

From that key principle, it’s easy to see why the closest allies of your democratically elected government should also be subjected to greater scrutiny than distant governments over which your own has little or no influence. It’s a sort of responsibility chain; the closer to home, the more responsible you are and the more influence you can generally exert. In short, it’s about trying to keep your own house in order.

This above is so obvious that it feels a bit silly typing it but it does appear that it needs to be said. Anyway, for the reasons above, I feel the need to mention the latest report from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

[T]he committee, in its report entitled Global Security: The Middle East, said a quicker response from the government in July last year “could have led to reduced casualties amongst both Israeli and Lebanese civilians whilst still working towards a long-term solution to the crisis”.

It called some of Israel’s military actions in Lebanon during the war “indiscriminate and disproportionate”.

It particularly highlighted the attacks on United Nations observers and the dropping of more than 3.5 million cluster bombs (90% of the total) in the 72 hours after the UN Security Council passed the resolution which effectively ended the war.

So the committee has concluded that the British government, by refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire, helped enable the continuation of the conflict. At the time, Blair waffled as people died. And why did the government adopted the policy it did when it refused to call for an immediate ceasefire?

From the full report (article 100):

At the time of the conflict, many believed the United States was obstructing calls for an immediate ceasefire to give Israel a chance to defeat overwhelmingly Hezbollah’s militia. The BBC journalist Ed Stourton raised this theory with John Bolton, who had been the US Ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the war. Mr Stourton asked him if the US had been “deliberately obstructing diplomatic attempts” to bring an end to the war so that “Israel could have its head.” Mr Bolton asked “what’s wrong with that?” and added that he was “damn proud of what we did.”

We wrote to Dr Howells to ask him about Mr Bolton’s comments. In his reply, he asserted: The UK was certainly not involved in collusion with either the US or Israel to support the continuation of hostilities or to block a ceasefire. Whilst I cannot speak for the US position [on] this matter, I do not believe they acted differently.

The committee offers three possible reasons for this discrepancy.

1. Mr Bolton misled Stourton by suggesting that the US blocked diplomacy at the UN because it wanted to give Israel the opportunity to destroy Hezbollah.
2. The US did indeed block attempts to find a quick diplomatic solution to bring about a ceasefire, but that the UK was not made aware of this collusion with Israel.
3. The UK was in fact brought into, or at least aware of, the efforts to obstruct the diplomatic process.

The committee does not reach a conclusion as to which possibility might be the truth but it seems unlikely that Bolton would have lied. To what end? In fact, giving the Israelis the time and space and cluster bombs so that they could teach Lebanon a lesson fits exactly with the type of thinking which is so common in the Bush administration. It also ties in exactly with what Ehud Olmert said as hostilities began: “Lebanon is responsible and Lebanon will bear the consequences of its actions”.

Given the above quotation, it is perhaps unsurprising that a UN report found that there was “a significant pattern of excessive, indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by the IDF against Lebanese civilians and civilian objects, failing to distinguish civilians from combatants and civilian objects from military targets… Further, the Commission is convinced that damage inflicted on some infrastructure was done for the sake of destruction.” It is hard to avoid concluding that the Israeli government decided to adopt a policy of collective punishment against the Lebanese people in an attempt to pressure them into doing something about Hezbollah.

What’s wrong with that? Well, morals aside, it’s specifically outlawed by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The British government, silent during the conflict, has remained silent in its aftermath. It has not condemned the dropping of 3.5 million cluster bombs after the conflict was essentially over nor has it condemned the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure for no useful military purpose. That continuing silence can only be seen by Israel and indeed by the rest of the world as a tacit approval of the actions of the Israeli government and the IDF. It seems to me that there is something very wrong with that.

Since John Bolton was ousted from his position as US ambassador to the UN, he appears have taken up permanent residence in the Newsnight studios. Last night, complaining that the IAEA under Elbaradei has refused to say exactly what the neo-cons want him to say on Iran, Bolton came out with this:

“All that Elbaradei has said, and he is an apologist for Iran, in effect, is that he doesn’t have evidence of the programme. I think the intelligence is there for all to see.”

Has a familiar ring to it, wouldn’t you say? Hands up all those who remember being called an apologist for Saddam back in the day.

Bolton was, of course, one of the cheerleaders for the war against Iraq. And he was in the lead in the Bush administration’s attempt to block Elbaradei’s reappointment as head of the IAEA in 2005. Being good at the job and displaying integrity in the face of enormous pressure is not acceptable when it exposes the extent to which political dogma overrides the facts in the Bush Whitehouse. Fortunately, Bolton lost. For the record, 34 of the 35 members of the IAEA board member countries supported Elbaradei’s reappointment. Only one was opposed.

In the now traditional ironic style, the war on Iraq which Bolton was so enthusiastic about has actually strengthened the position of the Iranian regime to unprecedented levels. Bolton should have himself shot for aiding the enemy.

And Iran, unlike Iraq, could theoretically acquire the ability to build nuclear weapons in the not too distant future. Whether they are attempting to, as Elbaradei rightly points out, remains open to doubt. Not for Bolton and chums, of course, but for rational people not blinded by ideology.

There are plenty of commentators who argue that after the monumental disaster of Iraq, the US would not possibly take military action against Iran. I disagree. It is important to realise that Bolton, and indeed the Bush regime generally, are absolutely unable to learn from their own mistakes because they are almost entirely impervious to the facts.

And if that doesn’t scare you, you’re a lot braver than me.