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Blair, speaking in New York accuses Iran of backing terrorism and is warning the world faces a situation akin to 'rising fascism in the 1920s'
Lets make it the 1930's, Wormtongue, and call it correctly — rising fascism is exactly where you are!
(Wormtongue — a wizened figure of a man, with a pale face, heavy lidded eyes and a long pale tongue...
... the wise speak only of what they know, therefore be silent, and keep your forked tongue behind your teeth... )
Or perhaps we should say it's 1929?
Go on, let's just say we're somewhere in the late 1920's
And let's direct our view, not Eastwards, but Westwards
That's it!
Now you've got it
Posse gathering Blair!
For you too! |
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Unspeakable grief and horror
Know them by their fruit: |
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Oh Yes! Blair is responsible.
— Blair and his puppets the rest of the guilty war criminals in the Labour Party
For a country that experienced Coventry to bomb a defenseless other, beggars description
There is a sign inside the destroyed Coventry Cathedral:
'Forgive Them'
I don't forgive them
Kewe — TheWE.cc |
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Monday, 2 June, 2003
In quotes: Blair and Iraq weapons
There are growing calls for an inquiry into the government's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.
Ex-cabinet ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook have both argued evidence about Iraq's weapons was hyped up before the war.
So what claims did the prime minister make about Saddam's weapons? Here are some of his key quotes.
10 April 2002 "Saddam Hussein's regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. "He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also. "Doing nothing is not an option ... Our way of proceeding should be and will be measured, calm and thought through." House of Commons 24 September 2002 "(Saddam's) weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running.... "The intelligence picture (the intelligence services) paint is one accumulated over the past four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. "It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.... "On chemical weapons, the dossier shows that Iraq continues to produce chemical agent for chemical weapons; has rebuilt previously destroyed production plants across Iraq; has bought dual-use chemical facilities; has retained the key personnel formerly engaged in the chemical weapons programme; and has a serious ongoing research programme into weapons production, all of it well funded..." House of Commons 25 February 2003 "The intelligence is clear: (Saddam) continues to believe his WMD programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. "It is essential to his regional power. Prior to the inspectors coming back in he was engaged in a systematic exercise in concealment of the weapons. "The biological agents we believe Iraq can produce include anthrax, botulinum, toxin, aflatoxin and ricin. All eventually result in excruciatingly painful death." House of Commons 11 March 2003 "We have 300,000 troops down there now sitting on his doorstep. You've got the UN inspectors in. It's unlikely at this very moment in time as we speak that Saddam is going to do anything; that's true. "But what happened before when he was first given the opportunity to disarm completely was in April 1991 and he was given 15 days then to come forward with an honest declaration of what he had... "If we don't act now, then we will go back to what has happened before and then of course the whole thing begins again and he carries on developing these weapons and these are dangerous weapons, particularly if they fall into the hands of terrorists who we know want to use these weapons if they can get them." MTV debate 25 February 2003 "We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years-contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence-Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." House of Commons
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March 29, 2003
The Madness of Tony Blair Matthew Parris 
Most of us have experienced the discomfort of watching a friend go off the rails. At first his oddities are dismissed as eccentricities. |
An absurd assertion, a lunatic conviction, a sudden enthusiasm or unreasonable fear, are explained as perhaps due to tiredness, or stress, or natural volatility.
We do not want to face the truth that our friend has cracked up.
Finally we can deny it no longer — and then it seems so obvious: the explanation, in retrospect, of so much we struggled to reconcile.
Sometimes the realisation comes fast and suddenly.
It did for me at university when my Arab fellow student Ahmed, who for months had been warning me of the conspiracies of which he suspected we might be victims, pulled me into his room to show me the death-ray he could see shining through his window.
It was somebody’s porch-light.
Likewise, the madness of King George III, which came in spells, was undeniable when it came.
At other times the realisation is a slow, sad dawning of the obvious.
Sometimes it is a friend about whom we worry.
Sometimes it is a prime minister.
I will accept the charge of discourtesy, but not of flippancy, when I ask whether Tony Blair may now have become, in a serious sense of that word, unhinged.
Genius and madness are often allied, and nowhere is this truer than in political leadership.
Great leaders need self-belief in unnatural measure.
Simple fraudsters are rumbled early, but great leaders share with great confidence tricksters a capacity to be more than persuaded, but inhabited, by their cause.
Almost inevitably, an inspirational leader spends important parts of his life certain of the uncertain, convinced of the undemonstrable.
So do the mentally ill.
It can be extremely difficult to distinguish between a person who is sticking bravely to a difficult cause whose truth is far from obvious, and a person who is going crazy.
It took us quite a while to explain David Icke’s beliefs in the only useful way in which they could be explained — and he was on the political fringe.
A national leader commands vastly more respect and will be given the benefit of many more doubts than Mr Icke ever was.
Colleagues, commentators and the wider public are usually late to face up to evidence that the boss has gone berserk, even though the evidence may have been around for quite some time.
There are good reasons for this.
To call somebody mad is bad manners even when fair comment.
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To tackle your opponent’s argument by questioning his sanity can look like a childish copping-out from sensible discussion.
How can the victim answer back?
But the charge is sometimes germane.
It may become the only thing worth considering.
Winston Churchill had lost the plot long before the proper public discussion this deserved got under way.
And I myself believe that one of my political heroes, Margaret Thatcher, began to lose her mental balance well before the end, and before those close to her allowed themselves to consider this explanation of her behaviour.
For me the suspicion first dawned when the then Prime Minister devised for the Lord Mayor’s banquet a dress with such an extravagant train that she needed someone to help her with it into the Mansion House.
This was when she was beginning to refer to herself as “we”, and treating friends who warned her of her fate as treacherous.
A telltale of incipient insanity is when the victim begins to take a Manichaean view of the universe.
There are good reasons why those at the top can go quietly bonkers before their inferiors wake up to the warning signs.
The first is obviously deference.
“The Madness of King Tony” might — I accept — seem an impertinent way of discussing our leader during a war when, whatever application it may have in Tony Blair’s case, it applies to Saddam Hussein in spades.
Beyond deference, however, those at the top of the pyramid who are anxious to impress us with truths which are not obvious have another powerful weapon at their disposal.
They can credibly claim to know more than we can be told.
To the man in the street, the most potent of Mr Blair’s arguments for invading Iraq is that he and George W. Bush are in possession of special intelligence which supports their stand but which cannot be divulged.
And no doubt that is true.
The question is about the amount of support such intelligence lends, not its existence.
Note from your own experience, as well as from the history books, how those with a claim which sounds incredible tend to support it by claiming a private source of information they are unable to share.
Joan of Arc heard voices.
Ahmed said he could feel the lethal qualities of the apparent porch-light and reminded me that his enemies would obviously decoy the ignorant by disguising death-rays in this way.
One or another version of God has been a time-honoured way for madcap leaders to give their actions an authority not apparent to the five senses of their audiences.
Cornered by reality, “private sources” are the last refuge of the deluded.
Is Mr Blair among them? Let me outline some of my grounds for worry.
Any one of these grounds might be dismissed as negligible, or indicative of nothing more sinister than conviction; but cumulatively I find them worrying.
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Mr Blair has stopped sounding like a career politician.
He has lost the professional polish of a man doing a job, and developed that fierce, quiet intensity which, from long experience of dealing with mad constituents, I know that the slightly cracked share with the genuinely convinced.
He has lost his feel for whom to confront, or when and where, and puts himself into situations (like the slow handclapping by anti-war women) which do not assist his case.
Historians may point to Mr Blair’s private — but publicised — audience with the Pope as an early sign of a dawning unrealism about the perceptions of others.
Did he this week stop for a moment to think what impression would be made on grieving parents by his wild-eyed suggestion (based on misinformation) that two British soldiers had been executed by the Iraqis in cold blood?
Blair’s long-standing tendency to compartmentalise logic (a habit all politicians share to some degree) is now being pushed to extremes.
The speeches the “old” Europeans are making — about giving Iraq more time, accepting gradual progress and not sticking to a literal interpretation of earlier demands — are exactly the speeches Mr Blair himself gives (persuasively) in defence of letting the IRA off the decommissioning hook.
This logic-chopping alarms.
The Prime Minister has lost his sense of how his indignation at Iraqi brutality jars, coming from someone attacking a country whose puny forces are grotesquely outgunned by ours.
His anger at the French (whose position has been consistent and identical to that which Blair held until a year ago) is inexplicable to those of us who are not doctors.
He displays a demented capacity to convince himself that it is the other guy who is cheating.
He has started saying things which are not only unsustainable, but palpably absurd.
The throwaway remark to Parliament that he would ignore Security Council vetoes which were “capricious” or “unreasonable” was more than ill-considered: coming from a trained lawyer it was stark, staring bonkers.
It was breathtaking.
For risibility I would bracket it with Ahmed’s death-ray.
The whole country should have been crying with laughter.
That the British media should have been mesmerised into reporting him in any other way still leaves me dumbfounded.
No sane lawyer could have said what Blair said.
He keeps retreating into a hopeless, desperate optimism: another sign of lunacy.
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He seems to have promised the Americans he could deliver Europe, and told the Europeans he could tame America.
There was scant ground for hope on the first score and none on the second.
The belief that irreconcilables can be reconciled by one’s personal contacts and powers of persuasion is a familiar delusion among people who are not quite right in the head.
While each futile promise is in the process of being demonstrated to be undeliverable, he goes into a sort of nose-tapping, “watch this space” denial.
When finally the promise is abandoned he turns insouciantly away — and makes a new promise.
This week he has been promising to sort out the Americans, and persuade them to let the United Nations supervise the post-conflict administration of Iraq.
He is probably telling the Americans he can sort out the Security Council.
He can do neither.
Meanwhile, he has forgotten that his previous position was that the coalition partners invaded as agents of the UN anyway, so it isn’t up to Washington to give permission.
Any bank manager used to dealing with bankrupts with a pathological shopping habit who have severed contact with arithmetic will recognise the optimism.
Have the rest of the Cabinet tumbled yet to the understanding that this may not be about Iraq at all, but about the Prime Minister?
My guess is that those closest to Mr Blair must be beginning to wonder privately.
It is time people pooled their doubts.
Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Ltd |
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But you cannot kill this many people...
— as Bush and Blair
The British Labour Party
The Conservative Party
The U.S. Democratic Party
The Republican Party
The US, UK military forces
As all have killed and injured
You cannot kill and injure this many people without there being real evil involved
This is not just madness
This is more than madness
Kewe — TheWE.cc |
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May 10, 2007 Bush's Zombie Shuffles Off Stage
By TARIQ ALI
Tony Blair's success was limited to winning three general elections in a row.
A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician, but without much substance; bereft of ideas he eagerly grasped and tried to improve upon the legacy of Margaret Thatcher.
But though in many ways Blair's programme has been a euphemistic, if bloodier, version of Thatcher's, the style of their departures is very different.
Thatcher's overthrow by her fellow-Conservatives was a matter of high drama: an announcement outside the Louvre's glass pyramid during the Paris Congress brokering the end of the Cold War; tears; a crowded House of Commons.
Against backdrop of car-bombs and mass carnage in Iraq
Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car-bombs and mass carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack.
Thatcher's supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done.
Even Blair's greatest sycophants in the British media: Martin Kettle and Michael White (The Guardian), Andrew Rawnsley (Observer), Philip Stephens (FT) confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.
Adieu, Blair, Adieu |
Who bothers with the monkey
A true creature of the Washington Consensus, Blair was always loyal to the various occupants of the White House.
In Europe, he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merckel to Schroeder, was seriously impressed by to Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his desire that Sarkozy was his candidate in France.
He understood that privatisation/deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as the wars abroad.
If this judgement seems unduly harsh let me quote Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on 2, August, 2006:
"A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud's.
This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe.
Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency's box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent...
Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago.
In the past 100 years — to take the highlights — we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf.
So we do them with the Americans
We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans.
Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?..." |
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More cultured critics sometimes compare him to the Cavaliere Cipolia, the vile hypnotist of fascist Italy
This, too, is mild compared to what is said about Blair in the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.
Senior diplomats have told me on more than one occasion that it would not upset them too much if Blair were to be tried as a war criminal.
More cultured critics sometimes compare him to the Cavaliere Cipolia, the vile hypnotist of fascist Italy, so brilliantly portrayed in Thomas Mann's 1929 novel 'Mario and the Magician'.
Blair is certainly not Mussolini, but like the Duce he enjoyed to simultaneously lead and humiliate his supporters.
What much of this reveals is anger and impotence.
There is no mechanism to get rid of a sitting Prime Minister unless his or her party loses confidence.
The Conservative leadership decided that Thatcher simply had to go because of her negative attitude to Europe.
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In Parliament, the Conservatives simply followed Blair.
Labour tends to be more sentimental towards its leaders and in this case they owed so much to Blair that nobody close to him wants to be cast in the role of Brutus.
In the end he decided to go himself.
The disaster in Iraq had made him a much hated politician and slowly support began to ebb.
One reason for the slowness was that the country is without a serious opposition.
In Parliament, the Conservatives simply followed Blair.
The Liberal-Democrats were ineffective.
Blair had summed up Britain's attitude to Europe at Nice in 2000:
"It is possible, in our judgement, to fight Britain's corner, get the best out of Europe for Britain and exercise real authority and influence in Europe.
That is as it should be.
Britain is a world power."
Anti-war, anti-Trident, defence of public services is confined to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales
This grotesque, self-serving fantasy that 'Britain is a world power' is to justify that it will always be EU/UK.
The real union is with Washington.
France and Germany are seen as rivals for Washington's affections, not potential allies in an independent EU.
The French decision to re-integrate themselves into NATO and pose as the most vigorous US ally was a serious structural shift which weakened Europe.
Britain responded by encouraging a fragmented political order in Europe through expansion and insisted on a permanent US presence on the continent.
Blair's half-anointed, half-hated successor, Gordon Brown, is far more intelligent (he reads books) but politically no different.
There might be a change of tone, but little else.
It is a grim prospect with or without Blair and an alternative politics.
Anti-war, anti-Trident, defence of public services is confined to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales.
Its absence nationally fuels the anger felt by substantial sections of the population, reflected in voting (or not) against those in power.
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“Inside Downing Street Tony Blair had gathered some of his senior ministers and advisers for a pivotal meeting in the build-up to the Iraq war.
It was 9am on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion began and long before the public was told war was inevitable.” |  |
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Blair is wildly exaggerating the threat posed by terrorism
Craving a monstrous enemy, the prime minister has vastly overstated this supposed threat to world security
Simon Jenkins Wednesday November 22, 2006 The Guardian What is it about a desert that drives men mad? On Monday morning the prime minister stood on the Afghan sand and said: "Here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the fate of world security in the early 21st century is going to be decided." Tony Blair was talking to soldiers he had sent to fight the toughest guerrillas on earth for control of southern Afghanistan. He told them: "Your defeat [of the Taliban] is not just on behalf of the people of Afghanistan but the people of Britain ... We have got to stay for as long as it takes."
Lost touch with reality
The prime minister's brain has clearly lost touch with reality.
Even under the Raj there was no conceivable way Britain could conquer and hold the arc of territory to which Blair was referring.
It stretches from the Persian Gulf through Iranian Baluchistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan.
No central government has come near to controlling this region, and its aversion to outside intervention is ageless and ruthless, currently fuelled by the world's voracious appetite for oil and opium.
But it poses no threat to world security.
The sole basis for Blair's statement is Mullah Omar's hospitality to the fanatic, Osama bin Laden, at the end of the 1990s.
As we now know, this was never popular (an Arab among Pashtuns); after 9/11, when the Taliban had collaborated with the west over opium, either Bin Laden would eventually have had to leave or the Tajiks would have taken revenge for his killing of their leader, Sheikh Massoud.
Even the Pakistanis were on his tail.
Either way, Talib Afghanistan was no more a "threat" after 9/11 than were the American flying schools at which the 9/11 perpetrators trained.
So what is Blair getting at?
He once confessed to his hero, Roy Jenkins, that he regretted not having studied history at Oxford.
He never spoke a truer word.
War clearly not being won
The concept of world security as holistic and vulnerable to incidents such as 9/11 is nonsensical.
Politics is not a variant of the Gaia thesis, in which each component of an ecosystem depends on and responds to every other.
There is no butterfly effect in international relations.
For want of a victory in Helmand, the Middle East is not lost, nor for want of victory in the Middle East is western civilisation lost.
This is as well, since Blair's resumed war in Afghanistan is clearly not being won.
We know from the former army chief Lord Guthrie that Blair, despite promising to "give the army anything it takes", has refused the extra troops and armour needed by the pathetically small expeditionary force of 7,000 in Helmand.
He has already had to switch tactics from winning hearts and minds to American-style "search and destroy", blowing up villages with 1,000lb bombs (as we saw on TV last week).
British commanders are describing "successes" in terms of enemy kills.
Army killings only presage revenge attacks
They should recall that Victorian officers in the Punjab were told that such boasts would be treated as a sign of failure, not success.
Such killings infuriated the population and presaged revenge attacks.
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FLASHBACK: JULY 18, 2004
Malcom Lagauche
The number of deaths attributed to Saddam Hussein by the West is incomprehensible.
If you add them all up, it seems he killed more people than the number who inhabit Iraq.
He had to work overtime and must have had advanced weaponry of which no one is aware.
Numbers and techniques abound: 180,000 during the Anfal campaign (Despite the numbers, not one body has been found.
Maybe Saddam had a secret vaporizing ray); 5,000 in Halabja (About 300 bodies were found and there is much doubt as to the origin of the gas used against the Kurds); 400,000 in the south of Iraq.
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Let’s talk about the 400,000.
400,000 bodies — whole country mass graveyard
In November 2003, word came out that more than 400,000 bodies had been discovered in mass graves in the south of Iraq.
"The whole country is a mass graveyard" was the slogan of the day.
Finally, proof of Saddam being the Butcher of Baghdad was there for the whole world to see.
Case closed.
Let’s go forward a few months from the discovery of the almost half million bodies in the south of Iraq.
On July 18, 2004, the headline of the day for the British paper The Independent read, "British Prime Minister Admits Graves Claim Untrue."
How could that be?
George Bush and Tony Blair don’t lie.
If we can’t trust them, who can we trust?
Certainly not Saddam, even though he told the truth about WMD.
That must have been a fluke. |
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According to the article:
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that "about 400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves" is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year (2003) were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a U.S. government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.
In that publication, Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves, produced by USAID, the U.S. government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves."
Here’s what the USAID website stated:
If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.
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Two million Iraqis who died due to U.S.-imposed embargo
I assume that USAID did not hear about the two million Iraqis who died at the hands of the U.S.-imposed embargo from 1990-2003.
After all, they’re Iraqis: they don’t count.
The same article delved into the regression of other elevated figures attributed to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath regime in the north of the country.
For instance, it mentioned that Human Rights Watch admitted it had to drastically decrease figures of deaths.
Not one person went to corroborate figures
The irony here is that not one person went to the north of Iraq to corroborate the figures.
Human Rights Watch and other groups just took the figures given to them as accurate.
Hania Mufti, who performed research that produced the original inflated figures in the north stated:
"Our estimates were based on estimates.
The eventual figure was based in part on circumstantial information gathered over the years."
Imagine even the most lowly offense being tried in a U.S. court system and the prosecutor said that his case was based on estimates of estimates.
The case would be dismissed and the judge would reprimand the prosecution for even making a case.
However, this is not so with Iraq.
Just say "Saddam did it" and affix a preposterous scenario and figures and it is taken for truth.
Blood of millions lie on hands of those who demonize
The blood of millions of Iraqis lies on the hands of these despicable groups and people who have tried to outdo themselves in demonizing Saddam Hussein, the Ba’ath Party, and the Iraqi public in general.
The list is long: Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International; all the foreign-domiciled Iraqi stooges who came back to Iraq after April 2003; with the exception of a few individuals, the entire U.S. government (Democrat and Republican alike); Tony Blair; the U.S. mainstream media; and many, many, many more.
They all are involved in the mass murder of millions of Iraqis.
The date of July 18, 2004 should be heralded as much as other dates in world history.
It was the date on which the truth about Iraqi mass graves was published.
However, not one word appeared in the U.S. press.
Blair quickly came up with other ploys
And, within a day or two, Blair quickly changed directions and came up with other ploys to downplay the announcement that he had lied on a massive scale.
If we take a look at the existing 5,000 bodies, most, if not all, are males of military age.
It is probable that many were killed by U.S. bombs in Desert Storm.
If you look at a map, you will see that the south of Iraq was heavily bombed in January and February 1991.
Add to that the possibility of some bodies being from the Iraqi army that fought the 1991 Shi’ite attempt at overthrowing the Iraqi government and we see that the number of innocent civilians killed by Saddam has quickly decreased from 400,000 to many less than 5,000, if any.
Fairy tales under the guise of history
The statement "history is written by the victors" is only partially true in the case of Iraq.
Here, fairy tales of the most outrageous kind have been written under the guise of history.
Remember July 18, 2004.
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©2006 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights reserved |
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I returned from Mosul to London earlier this month just in time to hear Tony Blair speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet.
It was a far more extraordinary performance than his audience appreciated.
As the prime minister spoke with his usual Hugh Grant charm it became clear that he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing in three-and-a-half years of war.
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Misconception after misconception poured from his lips.
Contrary to views of his own generals and every opinion poll assessing Iraqi opinion he discounted the idea that armed resistance in Iraq is fueled by hostility to foreign occupation.
Instead he sees dark forces rising in the east, dedicated like Sauron in the Lord of the Rings to principles of pure evil.
The enemy, in this case, is "based on a thoroughly warped misinterpretation of Islam, which is fanatical and deadly."
Even by the standard of Middle Eastern conspiracy theories it was puerile stuff.
Everywhere Blair saw hidden hands — "forces outside Iraq that are trying to create mayhem" — at work.
An expert on the politics of Iraq and Lebanon recently said to me: "The most dangerous error in the Middle East today is to believe that the Shia communities in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran."
But this is exactly what the prime minister does believe.
Largest Shia militia anti-Iranian
The fact that the largest Shia militia in Iraq — the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr — is anti-Iranian and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently ignored.
These misconceptions are important in terms of practical policy because they give support to the dangerous myth that if the US and Britain could only frighten or square the Iranians and Syrians then all would come right as their Shia cats-paws in Iraq and Lebanon would inevitably fall into line.
In a very British way [and American too, of course] opponents of the war in Iraq have focused not on current events but on the past sins of the government in getting us into the war.
No doubt it was all very wrong for Downing Street to pretend that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction and was a threat to the world when they knew he was not.
But this emphasis on the origins of the war in Iraq has diverted attention from the fact that, going by official statements, the British government knows no more about what was going on in Iraq in 2006 than it did in 2003.
The picture Blair paints of Iraq seldom touches reality at any point.
For instance he says Iraqis 'voted on an explicitly non-sectarian government,' but every Iraqi knows that the vote in two parliamentary elections in 2005 went wholly along sectarian and ethnic lines.
The polls were the starting pistol for the start of the civil war.
Blair steadfastly refuses to accept the fact that opposition to the American and British occupation of Iraq has been the main cause of the insurgency.
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Anglo-AmericanAggression in Iraq |
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Has the British army learned nothing?
Blair has not been able to persuade his Nato allies in Europe of his apocalyptic world-view.
The use of the word terrorism to imply some grand military offensive against the west may sound good in White House national security documents and Downing Street speeches.
But terrorism is not an enemy or an ideology, let alone a country or an army.
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It is a weapon, like a gun or a bomb.
It is not something that can be defeated, only guarded against.
Nor can terrorism ever win.
Blair's flattering reference to it was in reality to al-Qaida and to the Islamist jihadism whose cause he has so incessantly advertised.
As the American strategist Louise Richardson points out in What Terrorists Want, al-Qaida has not the remotest chance of defeating the west or undermining its civilisation.
Only a deranged paranoid could think that.
Some group or other will always look for ways to commit random killings, against which national security services need to be vigilant.
But this is not war.
Richardson points out that these groups are being grotesquely overrated.
They cannot plausibly deploy weapons of true mass destruction, and remain stuck with the oldest terrorist tool of all, the man with a bomb (and if we are really negligent, with a plane).
While terrorism can take on different guises, it is not new and is not a threat to human society to rank with a world war or a nuclear holocaust - as the home secretary, John Reid, has absurdly claimed.
Terrorist incidents are the outcome of someone's mental pathology and are of no political significance - unless cynical leaders in a targeted community choose otherwise.
What is sad about Blair's statement is not its strategic naivety but the psychology behind it.
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Anglo-AmericanAggression in Iraq |
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Wildly distorted concept of menace
Why have the leaders of Britain and America felt driven to adopt so wildly distorted a concept of menace?
In an analysis of terrorism in the latest New York Review of Books, Max Rodenbeck offers plausible but depressing answers.
They include the short-term popularity that war offers democratic leaders, the yearning of defence chiefs and industries to prove the worth of expensive kit and, in Iraq's case, "the influence of neoconservatives and of the pro-Israeli lobby, seeing a chance to set a superpower on Israel's enemies".
All this is true, but I sense a deeper disconnect.
The west is ruled by a generation of leaders with no experience of war or its threat.
Blair and his team cannot recall the aftermath of the second world war, and in the cold war they rushed to join CND.
They were distant from those real global horrors.
Crave an enemy
Yet now in power they seem to crave an enemy of equivalent monstrosity.
Modern government has a big hole in its ego, yearning to be filled by something called a "threat to security".
After 1990 many hoped that an age of stable peace might dawn.
Rich nations might disarm and combine to help the poor, advancing the cause of global responsibility.
Instead two of history's most internationalist states, America and Britain, have returned to the trough of conflict, chasing a chimera of "world terrorism", and at ludicrous expense.
They have brought death and destruction to a part of the globe that posed no strategic threat.
Now one of them, Tony Blair, stands in a patch of desert to claim that "world security in the 21st century" depends on which warlord controls it.
Was anything so demented?
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 |
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TheWE.cc comment by Kewe -
The author of the above assesses a threat to the West by resistance forces as not credible.
That is true in two aspects:
1) Resistance fighters in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq have no aim to control or 'take over' the West.
2) Resistance attacks are to stop us messing with them, as resistance forces in the West would similarly do if we were attacked on a par that we are attacking them.
However there is another most serious consideration to this.
Defeated
The West — The United States in particular — is being defeated.
It is being defeated in every way possible, but most in the collapse of its system of economics.
While the United States is waging its insane war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and paying Israel to attempt to kill as many people as it can in Gaza and the West Bank Palestine, its economic engine is being destroyed, is destroyed.
The largest debtor nation in the world can only sustain its activity while its creditors in the East, chiefly China, decide to allow it.
Once China feels it is in its interest to pull the plug, no amount of fire power, or worn out military force, will allow the United States to continue to control the world.
300 million people cannot control 6 billion.
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The evil that has been committed already rears its head.
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Tony Blair Confirms Authenticity of Downing Street Memo-51 Congressmembers File FOIA Request
SAN STEFFAN / WESTMINSTER DATGANIAD I’R WASG PLAID CYMRU THE PARTY OF WALES PRESS RELEASE Wednesday 29 June 2005 — for immediate release
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The Prime Minister has confirmed the authenticity of a Downing Street memo in which Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, tells Mr Blair that the Bush administration was "fixing" the intelligence and facts about Saddam Hussein’s regime to back up a decision that had been taken to invade Iraq as early as July 2002.
The Downing Street memo which was leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in May 2005 has become a critical issue in the US. Senators Kennedy and Kerry have joined the escalating debate by writing to the President asking whether or not the memo was authentic and accurate.
Downing Street has previously refused to comment on the memo’s authenticity, but challenged for the first time on the floor of the House of Commons the Prime Minister has finally confirmed its authenticity.
Speaking after Prime Minister’s Questions, Adam Price MP said:
"The confirmation that the memo is authentic will cause ripples throughout the United States where 122 Members of the US Congress have written to the President asking if Sir Richard Dearlove’s statement in the memo, that ’the intelligence and the facts are being fixed around the policy’ is correct.
"I challenged the Prime Minister on whether Sir Richard Dearlove was a reliable intelligence source, and if so, could he confirm whether his statement was an accurate assessment of the Bush administration’s intentions and actions.
In his answer, the Prime Minister refuses to distance himself from the assessment made by the former head of MI6 and simply goes on to say resolution 1441 changed the position.
I fail to see how this is relevant to my question.
"Today is a significant step forward in establishing the truth about the US and UK’s policy to invade Iraq.
However difficult it proves to extract information about the war from the government, the Prime Minister must be held to account by Parliament, and the President must be held to account by Congress."
Representative John Conyers, Jr., (D-MI) House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member, along with 51 other Members today submitted a broad and comprehensive FOIA request to the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State seeking any and all documents and materials concerning the Downing Street Minutes and the lead up to the Iraq war, RAW STORY has learned.
In addition, the Members also formally requested that the House Committees on Judiciary, Armed Services, International Relations, and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence commence hearings on the Downing Street Minutes.
"This is the next stage of the Downing Street investigation and brings the investigation to a new more and more aggressive stage," one Democratic Judiciary aide said.
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Adam Price MP (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) asked the Prime Minister:
Does the Prime Minister still regard Sir Richard Dearlove as having been a reliable source of information on Iraq?
And if he does, is it safe to assume that Sir Richard's statement in the summer of 2002 that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" was an accurate assessment of the intentions and actions of the Bush administration?
The Prime Minister:
First of all, as I'm sure the honourable Member knows that memo and other documents of the time were covered by the Butler Review (1).
In addition to that I have to say to him that this was of course before we went to the United Nations and secured a second resolution, the resolution 1441 that had unanimous support and I would also say to the honourable gentleman that contrary to his view when I stood next to the new PM of Iraq, somebody who has had five of his relatives assassinated by Saddam, when I stood by him and realised that he was in power because of the democratic vote of 8 million Iraqis then I was glad that we took the action that we did and made sure that Iraq was no longer governed by a dictatorship but by a democracy.
(1) Butler Review paragraph 287 refers to Downing Street meeting on 23 July 2002 but omits to mention key statement that "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy"
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The Real News in the Downing Street Memos
By Michael SmithMichael Smith writes on defense issues for the Sunday Times of London. June 23, 2005 It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the "Downing Street memos," thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink. At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He'd given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this. The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush. |
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They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become.
Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.
The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year's British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair's war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.
I did not then regard the now-infamous memo — the one that includes the minutes of the July 23 meeting — as the most important. My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.
It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change." Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was "necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action."
But Downing Street had a "clever" plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.
Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.
British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.
American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.
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Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.
British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.
But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.
The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.
In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.
The way in which the intelligence was "fixed" to justify war is old news.
The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
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| The unofficial war: Raw Story tracked allied bombing of Iraq, 2001-2003  |
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| "We are not having any of this nonsense about it. It's nothing to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense, and we have got to confront it as that." |
| The Zoo Translator | |||
| What Blair said: "It is a sad day for the British people, but we will hold true to the British way of life." | What Blair meant: "It is a very said day for the British people. But it might save my ID card scheme. I can do a moving speech in front of the world, where I can pause dramatically between words for theatrical effect, like a public school Christopher Walkin. Also I can push through some more terror legislation, then justify the war in Iraq even more by saying the world's a safer place." | ||
| Zoo 15-21 July, 2005 | |||
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Condoleezza Rice
"Parties unknown burgle the Nigerien embassy in Rome. Stolen from the torn-up offices are various valuables along with stationery and official seals, which the Italian police warn might be used to forge documents."
"None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting."
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Condoleezza Rice Condi Rice at the Center They are such liars |
The Sunday Times — Britain
June 12, 2005
Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
Michael Smith MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.
The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.
This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.
“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.
The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.
The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.
“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.
The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.
The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.
There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.
The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.
The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush- Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.
John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy.
He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.
He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.
Frustrated at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen have set up a website — www.downingstreetmemo.com — to collect signatures on a petition demanding the same answers.
Conyers promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.
AfterDowningStreet.org, another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute grounds for impeachment.
It has been flooded with visits from people angry at what they see as media self-censorship in ignoring the memo. It claims to have attracted more than 1m hits a day.
Democrats.com, another website, even offered $1,000 (about £550) to any journalist who quizzed Bush about the memo’s contents, although the Reuters reporter who asked the question last Tuesday was not aware of the reward and has no intention of claiming it.
The complaints of media self-censorship have been backed up by the ombudsmen of The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, who have questioned the lack of attention the minutes have received from their organisations.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd. |
Ludicrous Diversion - 7/7 London Bombings Documentary
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The Sunday Times — Britain
May 01, 2005
Blair planned Iraq war from start
Michael Smith
INSIDE Downing Street Tony Blair had gathered some of his senior ministers and advisers for a pivotal meeting in the build-up to the Iraq war.
It was 9am on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion began and long before the public was told war was inevitable.
The discussion that morning was highly confidential.
As minutes of the proceedings, headed “Secret and strictly personal — UK eyes only”, state: “This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.”
In the room were the prime minister, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, and military and intelligence chiefs.
Also listed on the minutes are Alastair Campbell, then Blair’s director of strategy, Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Sally Morgan, director of government relations.
What they were about to discuss would dominate the political agenda for years to come and indelibly stain Blair’s reputation; and last week the issue exploded again on the political scene as Blair campaigned in the hope of winning a third term as prime minister.
For the secret documents — seen by The Sunday Times — reveal that on that Tuesday in 2002:
By the end of the meeting, a possible path to invasion was agreed and it was noted that Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defence staff, “would send the prime minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week”.
Outside Downing Street, the rest of Britain, including most cabinet ministers, knew nothing of this.
True, tensions were running high, and fears of terrorism were widespread.
But Blair’s constant refrain was that “no decisions” had been taken about what to do with Iraq.
The following day in the House of Commons, Blair told MPs: “We have not got to the stage of military action . . . we have not yet reached the point of decision.”
It was typical lawyer’s cleverness, if not dissembling: while no actual order had been given to invade, Blair already knew Saddam Hussein was going to be removed, sooner or later.
Plans were in motion.
The justification would come later.
AS a civil service briefing paper specifically prepared for the July meeting reveals, Blair had made his fundamental decision on Saddam when he met President George W Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002.
“When the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April,” states the paper, “he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.”
Blair set certain conditions: that efforts were first made to try to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) through weapons inspectors and to form a coalition and “shape” public opinion.
But the bottom line was that he was signed up to ousting Saddam by force if other methods failed.
The Americans just wanted to get rid of the brutal dictator, whether or not he posed an immediate threat.
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This presented a problem because, as the secret briefing paper made clear, there were no clear legal grounds for war.
“US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community,” says the briefing paper.
“Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law.”
To compound matters, the US was not a party to the International Criminal Court, while Britain was.
The ICC, which came into force on 1 July, 2002, was set up to try international offences such as war crimes.
Military plans were forging ahead in America but the British, despite Blair’s commitment, played down talk of war.
In April, Straw told MPs that no decisions about military action “are likely to be made for some time”.
That month Blair said in the Commons: “We will ensure the house is properly consulted.”
On July 17 he told MPs: “As I say constantly, no decisions have yet been taken.”
Six days later in Downing Street the man who opened the secret discussion of Blair’s war meeting was John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee.
A former MI6 officer, Scarlett had become a key member of Blair’s “sofa cabinet”.
He came straight to the point — “Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear.
The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action”.
Saddam was expecting an attack, said Scarlett, but was not convinced it would be “immediate or overwhelming”.
His assessment reveals that the primary impetus to action over Iraq was not the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction — as Blair later told the country — but the desire to overthrow Saddam. There was little talk of WMD at all.
The next contributor to the meeting, according to the minutes, was “C”, as the chief of MI6 is traditionally known.
Sir Richard Dearlove added nothing to what Scarlett had said about Iraq: his intelligence concerned his recent visit to Washington where he had held talks with George Tenet, director of the CIA.
“Military action was now seen as inevitable,” said Dearlove. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.”
The Americans had been trying to link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks; but the British knew the evidence was flimsy or non-existent. Dearlove warned the meeting that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.
It was clear from Dearlove’s brief visit that the US administration’s attitude would compound the legal difficulties for Britain. The US had no patience with the United Nations and little inclination to ensure an invasion was backed by the security council, he said.
Nor did the Americans seem very interested in what might happen in the aftermath of military action. Yet, as Boyce then reported, events were already moving swiftly.
“CDS (chief of the defence staff) said that military planners would brief (Donald) Rumsfeld (US defence secretary) on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.”
The US invasion plans centred around two options. One was a full-blown reprise of the 1991 Gulf war, a steady and obvious build-up of troops over several months, followed by a large-scale invasion.
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The other was a “running start”.
Seizing on an Iraqi casus belli, US and RAF patrols over the southern no-fly zone would knock out the Iraqi air defences.
Allied special forces would then carry out a series of small-scale operations in tandem with the Iraqi opposition, with more forces joining the battle as they arrived, eventually toppling Saddam’s regime.
The “running start” was, said Boyce, “a hazardous option”.
In either case the US saw three options for British involvement. The first allowed the use of the bases in Diego Garcia and Cyprus and three squadrons of special forces; the second added RAF aircraft and Royal Navy ships; the third threw in 40,000 ground troops “perhaps with a discrete role in northern Iraq entering from Turkey”.
At the least the US saw the use of British bases as “critical”, which posed immediate legal problems. And Hoon said the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime.
AMID all this talk of military might and invasion plans, one awkward voice spoke up. Straw warned that, though Bush had made up his mind on military action, the case for it was “thin”. He was not thinking in purely legal terms.
A few weeks later the government would paint Saddam as an imminent threat to the Middle East and the world. But that morning in private Straw said: “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
It was a key point. If Saddam was not an immediate threat, could war be justified legally? The attorney-general made his position clear, telling the meeting that “the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action”.
Right from the outset, the minutes reveal, the government’s legal adviser had grave doubts about Blair’s plans; he would only finally conclude unequivocally that war was legal three days before the invasion, by which time tens of thousands of troops were already on the borders of Iraq.
There were three possible legal bases for military action, said Goldsmith. Self-defence, intervention to end an humanitarian crisis and a resolution from the UN Security Council.
Neither of the first two options was a possibility with Iraq; it had to be a UN resolution. But relying, as some hoped they could, on an existing UN resolution, would be “difficult”.
Despite voicing concerns, Straw was not standing in the way of war. It was he who suggested a solution: they should force Saddam into a corner where he would give them a clear reason for war.
“We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors,” he said.
If he refused, or the weapons inspectors found WMD, there would be good cause for war. “This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force,” said Straw.
From the minutes, it seems as if Blair seized on the idea as a way of reconciling the US drive towards invasion and Britain’s need for a legal excuse.
“The prime minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors,” record the minutes. “Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD . . . If the political context were right, people would support regime change.”
Blair would subsequently portray the key issue to parliament and the people as the threat of WMD; and weeks later he would produce the now notorious “sexed up” dossier detailing Iraq’s suspected nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes.
But in the meeting Blair said: “The two key issues are whether the military plan works and whether we have the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.”
Hoon said that if the prime minister wanted to send in the troops, he would have to decide early. The defence chiefs were pressing to be allowed to buy large amounts of equipment as “urgent operational requirements”. They had been prevented from preparing for war, partly by Blair’s insistence that there could be no publicly visible preparations that might inflame splits in his party, partly by the fact there was no authorisation to spend any money.
The meeting concluded that they should plan for the UK taking part in any military action. Boyce would send Blair full details; Blair would come back with a decision about money; and Straw would send Blair the background on the UN inspectors and “discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam”.
The final note of the minutes, says: “We must not ignore the legal issues: the attorney-general would consider legal advice with (Foreign Office/Ministry of Defence) legal advisers.”
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It was a prophetic warning.
Also seen by The Sunday Times is the Foreign Office opinion on the possible legal bases for war.
Marked “Confidential”, it runs to eight pages and casts doubt on the possibility of reviving the authority to use force from earlier UN resolutions.
“Reliance on it now would be unlikely to receive any support,” it says.
Foreign Office lawyers were consistently doubtful of the legality of war and one deputy legal director, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, ultimately resigned because she believed the conflict was a “crime of aggression”.
The Foreign Office briefing on the legal aspects was made available for the Downing Street meeting on July 23.
Ten days ago, when Blair was interviewed by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, the prime minister was asked repeatedly whether he had seen that advice.
“No,” said Blair. “I had the attorney-general’s advice to guide me.”
But as the July 23 documents show, the attorney-general’s view was, until the last minute, also riven with doubts.
Three years on, it and the questionable legality of the war are still hanging round Blair’s neck like an albatross.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd. |
| Caught in crossfire between US controlled puppet Iraq forces and Iraq resistance |
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Greg Palast — Correspondent for the BBC
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February 2001 — Only one month after the first Bush-Cheney inauguration, the State Department's Pam Quanrud organizes a secret confab in California to make plans for the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam.
US oil industry advisor Falah Aljibury and others are asked to interview would-be replacements for a new US-installed dictator.
On BBC Television's Newsnight, Aljibury himself explained,
"It is an invasion, but it will act like a coup. The original plan was to liberate Iraq from the Saddamists and from the regime."
March 2001 — Vice-President Dick Cheney meets with oil company executives and reviews oil field maps of Iraq.
Cheney refuses to release the names of those attending or their purpose. Harper's has since learned their plan and purpose — see below.
October/November 2001 — An easy military victory in Afghanistan emboldens then-Dep. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to convince the Administration to junk the State Department "coup" plan in favor of an invasion and occupation that could remake the economy of Iraq.
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And elaborate plan, ultimately summarized in a 101—page document, scopes out the "sale of all state enterprises" — that is, most of the nation's assets, "...especially in the oil and supporting industries."
2002 — Grover Norquist and other corporate lobbyists meet secretly with Defense, State and Treasury officials to ensure the invasion plans for Iraq include plans for protecting "property rights."
The result was a pre—invasion scheme to sell off Iraq's oil fields, banks, electric systems, and even change the country's copyright laws to the benefit of the lobbyists' clients. Occupation chief Paul Bremer would later order these giveaways into Iraq law.
Fall 2002 — Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, is brought in by the Pentagon to plan the management of Iraq's oil fields.
He works directly with Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
"There were plans," says Carroll, "maybe even too many plans" — but none disclosed to the public nor even the US Congress.
January 2003 — Robert Ebel, former CIA oil analyst, is sent, BBC learns, to London to meet with Fadhil Chalabi to plan terms for taking over Iraq's oil.
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March 2003 — What White House spokesman Ari Fleisher calls "Operations Iraqi Liberation" (OIL) begins.
(Invasion is re-christened "OIF" — Operation Iraqi Freedom.)
Defense Department is told in confidence by US Energy Information Administrator Guy Caruso that Iraq's fields are incapable of a massive increase in output.
Despite this intelligence, Dep. Secretary Wolfowitz testifies to Congress that invasion will be a free ride.
He swears, "There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. ...We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," a deliberate fabrication promoted by the Administration, an insider told BBC, as "part of the sales pitch" for war.
General Jay Garner, appointed by Bush as viceroy over Iraq, is fired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The general revealed in an interview for BBC that he resisted White House plans to sell off Iraq's oil and national assets.
"That's just one fight you don't want to take on," Garner told me.
The general also disclosed that these invade-and-grab plans were developed long before the US asserted that Saddam still held WDM:
"All I can tell you is the plans were pretty elaborate; they didn't start them in 2002, they were started in 2001."
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November/December 2003 — Secrecy and misinformation continues even after the invasion.
The oil industry objects to the State Department plans for Iraq's oil fields and drafts for the Administration a 323-page plan, "Options for [the] Iraqi Oil Industry."
Per the industry plan, the US forces Iraq to create an OPEC-friendly state oil company that supports the OPEC cartel's extortionate price for petroleum.
Harper's and BBC obtained the plans despite official denial of their existence, then footdragging when confronted with the evidence of the reports' existence.
Still today, the State and Defense Departments and White House continue to stonewall our demands for the notes of the meetings between lobbyists, oil industry consultants and key Administration officials that would reveal the hidden economic motives for the war.
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SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL — UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear.
The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming.
His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude.
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record.
There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
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CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.
The two broad US options were:
(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).
(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.
The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:
(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.
(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.
(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.
The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime.
No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week.
It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin.
Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.
We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors.
This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
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| Iraq today |
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The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action.
There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation.
The first and second could not be the base in this case.
Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors.
Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran.
If the political context were right, people would support regime change.
The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.
On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.
For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait.
Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.
The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged.
But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.
John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.
The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route.
It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.
Conclusions:
(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action.
But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions.
CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.
(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.
(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.
(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.
He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.
(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.
(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.
(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)
MATTHEW RYCROFT |
Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action
The paper, produced by the Cabinet Office on July 21, 2002, is incomplete because the last page is missing. The following is a transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the source.
PERSONAL SECRET — UK EYES ONLY
IRAQ: CONDITIONS FOR MILITARY ACTION (A Note by Officials)
Summary
Ministers are invited to:
(1) Note the latest position on US military planning and timescales for possible action.
(2) Agree that the objective of any military action should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD.
(3) Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq.
This should include a call from the Prime Minister to President Bush ahead of the briefing of US military plans to the President on 4 August.
(4) Note the potentially long lead times involved in equipping UK Armed Forces to undertake operations in the Iraqi theatre and agree that the MOD should bring forward proposals for the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements under cover of the lessons learned from Afghanistan and the outcome of SR2002.
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(5) Agree to the establishment of an ad hoc group of officials under Cabinet Office Chairmanship to consider the development of an information campaign to be agreed with the US.
Introduction
1. The US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework.
In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.
2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.
3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones.
This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action.
Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.
4. In order to fulfil the conditions set out by the Prime Minister for UK support for military action against Iraq, certain preparations need to be made, and other considerations taken into account. This note sets them out in a form which can be adapted for use with the US Government. Depending on US intentions, a decision in principle may be needed soon on whether and in what form the UK takes part in military action.
The Goal
5. Our objective should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or to international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD.
It seems unlikely that this could be achieved while the current Iraqi regime remains in power.
US military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, followed by elimination if Iraqi WMD.
It is however, by no means certain, in the view of UK officials, that one would necessarily follow from the other.
Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD, it is certainly not a sufficient one.
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US Military Planning
6. Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq.
In a 'Running Start', military action could begin as early as November of this year, with no overt military build-up.
Air strikes and support for opposition groups in Iraq would lead initially to small-scale land operations, with further land forces deploying sequentially, ultimately overwhelming Iraqi forces and leading to the collapse of the Iraqi regime.
A 'Generated Start' would involve a longer build-up before any military action were taken, as early as January 2003.
US military plans include no specifics on the strategic context either before or after the campaign.
Currently the preference appears to be for the 'Running Start'.
CDS will be ready to brief Ministers in more detail.
7. US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia.
This means that legal base issues would arise virtually whatever option Ministers choose with regard to UK participation.
The Viability of the Plans
8. The Chiefs of Staff have discussed the viability of US military plans. Their initial view is that there are a number of questions which would have to be answered before they could assess whether the plans are sound.
Notably these include the realism of the 'Running Start', the extent to which the plans are proof against Iraqi counter-attack using chemical or biological weapons and the robustness of US assumptions about the bases and about Iraqi (un)willingness to fight.
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UK Military Contribution
9. The UK's ability to contribute forces depends on the details of the US military planning and the time available to prepare and deploy them.
The MOD is examining how the UK might contribute to US-led action. The options range from deployment of a Division (ie Gulf War sized contribution plus naval and air forces) to making available bases.
It is already clear that the UK could not generate a Division in time for an operation in January 2003, unless publicly visible decisions were taken very soon.
Maritime and air forces could be deployed in time, provided adequate basing arrangements could be made.
The lead times involved in preparing for UK military involvement include the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements, for which there is no financial provision.
The Conditions Necessary for Military Action
10. Aside from the existence of a viable military plan we consider the following conditions necessary for military action and UK participation: justification/legal base; an international coalition; a quiescent Israel/Palestine; a positive risk/benefit assessment; and the preparation of domestic opinion.
Justification
11. US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law.
But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful.
We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council.
A detailed consideration of the legal issues, prepared earlier this year, is at Annex A. The legal position would depend on the precise circumstances at the time.
Legal bases for an invasion of Iraq are in principle conceivable in both the first two instances but would be difficult to establish because of, for example, the tests of immediacy and proportionality. Further legal advice would be needed on this point.
12. This leaves the route under the UNSC resolutions on weapons inspectors. Kofi Annan has held three rounds of meetings with Iraq in an attempt to persuade them to admit the UN weapons inspectors. These have made no substantive progress; the Iraqis are deliberately obfuscating.
Annan has downgraded the dialogue but more pointless talks are possible. We need to persuade the UN and the international community that this situation cannot be allowed to continue ad infinitum. We need to set a deadline, leading to an ultimatum.
It would be preferable to obtain backing of a UNSCR for any ultimatum and early work would be necessary to explore with Kofi Annan and the Russians, in particular, the scope for achieving this. |
| The mother of Iraqi police officer Abbass Rahman, who died of his wounds after he was shot, grieves during her son's funeral in Baghdad July 25, 2004. Abbass Rahman was one of seven Iraqi police wounded when Iraq resistance opened fire at them while they were manning a checkpoint in southeast Baghdad. |
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13. In practice, facing pressure of military action, Saddam is likely to admit weapons inspectors as a means of forestalling it.
But once admitted, he would not allow them to operate freely.
UNMOVIC (the successor to UNSCOM) will take at least six months after entering Iraq to establish the monitoring and verification system under Resolution 1284 necessary to assess whether Iraq is meeting its obligations.
Hence, even if UN inspectors gained access today, by January 2003 they would at best only just be completing setting up.
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It is possible that they will encounter Iraqi obstruction during this period, but this more likely when they are fully operational.
14. It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community.
However, failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action by January 2003.
An International Coalition
15. An international coalition is necessary to provide a military platform and desirable for political purposes.
16. US military planning assumes that the US would be allowed to use bases in Kuwait (air and ground forces), Jordan, in the Gulf (air and naval forces) and UK territory (Diego Garcia and our bases in Cyprus).
The plans assume that Saudi Arabia would withhold co-operation except granting military over-flights.
On the assumption that military action would involve operations in the Kurdish area in the North of Iraq, the use of bases in Turkey would also be necessary.
17. In the absence of UN authorisation, there will be problems in securing the support of NATO and EU partners. Australia would be likely to participate on the same basis as the UK.
France might be prepared to take part if she saw military action as inevitable. Russia and China, seeking to improve their US relations, might set aside their misgivings if sufficient attention were paid to their legal and economic concerns.
Probably the best we could expect from the region would be neutrality. The US is likely to restrain Israel from taking part in military action.
In practice, much of the international community would find it difficult to stand in the way of the determined course of the US hegemon. However, the greater the international support, the greater the prospects of success.
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A Quiescent Israel-Palestine
18. The Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank has dampened Palestinian violence for the time being but is unsustainable in the long-term and stoking more trouble for the future.
The Bush speech was at best a half step forward. We are using the Palestinian reform agenda to make progress, including a resumption of political negotiations.
The Americans are talking of a ministerial conference in November or later.
Real progress towards a viable Palestinian state is the best way to undercut Palestinian extremists and reduce Arab antipathy to military action against Saddam Hussein.
However, another upsurge of Palestinian/Israeli violence is highly likely.
The co-incidence of such an upsurge with the preparations for military action against Iraq cannot be ruled out.
Indeed Saddam would use continuing violence in the Occupied Territories to bolster popular Arab support for his regime.
Benefits/Risks
19. Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks.
In particular, we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective as set out in paragraph 5 above.
A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden.
Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired endstate would be created, in particular what form of Government might replace Saddam Hussein's regime and the timescale within which it would be possible to identify a successor.
We must also consider in greater detail the impact of military action on other UK interests in the region.
Domestic Opinion
20. Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein.
There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament.
An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community.
This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.
Timescales
21. Although the US military could act against Iraq as soon as November, we judge that a military campaign is unlikely to start until January 2003, if only because of the time it will take to reach consensus in Washington.
That said, we judge that for climactic reasons, military action would need to start by January 2003, unless action were deferred until the following autumn.
22. As this paper makes clear, even this timescale would present problems. This means that:
(a) We need to influence US consideration of the military plans before President Bush is briefed on 4 August, through contacts betweens the Prime Minister and the President and at other levels;
Memo ends here. Last page was not published by The Sunday Times
They state they did not receive it. |
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Video taken from Sky News, placed on YouTube:
Galloway wipes the floor with Sky News anchor
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"It’s tempting in the flurry of minutes and memos and articles to get so wrapped up in the story that you forget exactly who the story is about.
It’s not about impeaching the President.
It’s not about Republicans and Democrats.
It has, and always will be, about them.
About those heroes who sacrificed and trusted their government.
About those with brave hearts who cannot speak now from the grave.
And so, it is up to us to speak for them.
It is up to the media to ask the questions that would have flowed from their lips, were those heroes alive today."
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Editorial: Memorial Day/Praise bravery, seek forgiveness
Star Tribune Minneapolis/St. Paul May 30, 2005
Nothing young Americans can do in life is more honorable than offering themselves for the defense of their nation. It requires great selflessness and sacrifice, and quite possibly the forfeiture of life itself. On Memorial Day 2005, we gather to remember all those who gave us that ultimate gift. Because they are so fresh in our minds, those who have died in Iraq make a special claim on our thoughts and our prayers.
In exchange for our uniformed young people's willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country.
In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them.
Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes.
Perhaps it happened because Americans, understandably, don't expect untruths from those in power.
But that works better as an explanation than as an excuse.
The "smoking gun," as some call it, surfaced on May 1 in the London Times. It is a highly classified document containing the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting at 10 Downing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair on talks he'd just held in Washington. His mission was to determine the Bush administration's intentions toward Iraq.
At a time when the White House was saying it had "no plans" for an invasion, the British document says Dearlove reported that there had been "a perceptible shift in attitude" in Washington. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
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But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
It turns out that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by summer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade.
Walter Pincus, writing in the Washington Post on May 22, provides further evidence that the administration did, indeed, fix the intelligence on Iraq to fit a policy it had already embraced: invasion and regime change. Just four days before Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, Pincus writes, the National Security Council staff "put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims" about Saddam Hussein's WMD programs. The call went out because the NSC staff believed the case was weak.
Moreover, Pincus says, "as the war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs." But no one at high ranks in the administration would listen to them.
On the day before Bush's speech, the CIA's Berlin station chief warned that the source for some of what Bush would say was untrustworthy.
Bush said it anyway.
He based part of his most important annual speech to the American people on a single, dubious, unnamed source. The source was later found to have fabricated his information.
Also comes word, from the May 19 New York Times, that senior U.S. military leaders are not encouraged about prospects in Iraq. Yes, they think the United States can prevail, but as one said, it may take "many years."
As this bloody month of car bombs and American deaths — the most since January — comes to a close, as we gather in groups small and large to honor our war dead, let us all sing of their bravery and sacrifice.
But let us also ask their forgiveness for sending them to a war that should never have happened.
In the 1960s it was Vietnam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mistake again. Our young people are simply too precious. |
Published on Tuesday, June 7, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Bring It Down. Now! by David Michael Green The Downing Street Memo is the gift that just keeps on giving. And well it should. It is the smoking gun which proves that the gravest possible crime was committed by the Bush administration, and among its victims were the American people. I am more hopeful about American politics than I have been in a long time, though still cautious.
For nearly five years now, the Bush administration has gotten away with murder — literally and figuratively — with seemingly immutable impunity, always defying the laws of political gravity, at least as they are known in this universe.
So I've come to be tentative and rather pessimistic about the possibilities of ending this national nightmare of reaction, thievery and militarism, and bringing these criminals to justice.
But Downing Street seems to have legs, and I feel a critical mass building now.
It is different this time, in part, because this is the first true insider smoking gun, set down in black and white.
But it is also different, in part, because the context has changed.
Unlike previous revelations, from the Clarke or O'Neill (Suskind) books, for example, the evidence this time comes against the background of growing discontent at home with the disaster of Iraq, and the diminished credibility of a president and the movement of regressive politics he leads.
Generally content or frightened people will forgive a lot, sometimes even murderous lies of this magnitude.
But angry, deceived people will not.
Bush has built himself a credibility gap of which Lyndon Johnson could be proud, which probably accounts more than anything for his inability to sell the bundle of Social Security deceits he's been peddling.
He said he was going to get Osama 'dead or alive'. He didn't.
He said his tax scheme would revive the economy. It didn't.
He said it wouldn't add to the national debt. Boy, did it.
He and his minions said Iraq was a necessary war, in response to an urgent threat, and that American 'liberators' would be greeted with flowers and chocolate.
None of that came true, of course, and now the public no longer supports George and Dick's Excellent Adventure in the Cradle of Civilization.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans perceive the war as going badly.
Only forty percent think that it's been worth it to remove Saddam from power given the costs in troops and dollars.
And only thirty-eight percent approve of how Bush is handling the war.
Moreover, Iraq echoes the tragedy of Vietnam in every salient way, from the lies going in, to the 'everything's just fine' detachment of the political class, the international opprobrium, the inability to effectively fight counter-insurgency warfare, and the lack of any sort of remotely appealing exit scenario.
And on the Nam trajectory, it feels like we are at 1970 or so in terms of public disenchantment.
(In part, we should note, that is precisely because of the lessons learned from that war, which produced a healthy increase in political skepticism among the American public.)
But in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive had already occurred by 1970, and so, for many years, had the draft.
Imagine what will happen to already low and falling support for the Iraq debacle if in the coming months there is a single, highly demoralizing reversal for the US military in Iraq, a la Tet, or if a starved military is forced to reinstitute the draft.
This is the context in which the damning evidence of the Downing Street Memo arrives, and it is part of the explanation for why the Bush administration may now finally find itself in the deep trouble it so richly deserves.
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The Memo itself lays out in clear text the game of deceit played by the Bush and Blair gangs in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Among its highlights, the DSM confirms that the war had been decided upon well before Congressional or UN Security Council action, and before weapons inspectors were inserted and then removed because of the 'urgency' of Iraq's threat (of course, the real urgency and real threat was that the absence of WMD would kill Bush's pretext for war).
The Memo then goes on to show, most significantly, that the war planners knew their case was "thin", so they distorted — "fixed" — the intelligence and facts in order to market the war.
(For a more complete discussion of the Memo itself and the wholesale failures of the mainstream media to treat this earth-shattering story with anything approaching the coverage it deserves.
(see http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0513-20.htm.)
Eighty-nine members of the House sent a letter to the president asking for clarification of the ominous implications of the Memo, and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan soon began getting questions about it.
It will hardly surprise attentive readers that his response to these questions was smug, condescending, and maximally disingenuous.
Without addressing the content or implications of the Memo (and, most absurdly of all, while claiming not to have read it), McClellan refers us to the president's statements of the time, which he says provide a clear record of Bush's honest and very public diplomacy on the Iraq issue.
It turns out, however, that if one examines that record just as McClellan suggests, one finds anything and everything but honesty from Bush and his team.
Instead, precisely as the DSM prescribes, we were given a boatload of knowing lies from the administration, often in the most visible of fora, like the State of the Union address.
(see http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0519-30.htm)
Since these initial developments, much has happened in just a short time.
First, knowledge of the Memo's existence is becoming more widespread.
As of this moment, I doubt more than one percent of Americans are aware of the story, but that number is increasing rapidly, especially through the alternative media.
More and more articles written on a variety of subjects make reference to it, even in passing, and it is flying across email networks with accelerating rapidity.
Google "Downing Street Memo" and about 267,000 hits are returned at present, with that number rising fast.
The story feels at this moment like a virus about to kick into the exponential phase of its growth curve, or a pregnant cloud about to burst showers over the parched land.
The mainstream media is addressing the DSM, but still only in bits, and — it would appear — only reluctantly.
No doubt the experiences of CBS and Newsweek have been precisely as intimidating as the White House intended them to be, and no doubt fears of lost profits prove even more sobering.
Just the same, there is movement, and some of it has been forced by us.
Two weeks too late, for example, the New York Times finally ran a brief single-column story.
Of course, they buried it on page 10, and they gave the story the wrong emphasis.
Its first paragraph reads "More than two weeks after its publication in London, a previously secret British government memorandum that reported in July 2002 that President Bush had decided to 'remove Saddam, through military action' is still creating a stir among administration critics.
They are portraying it as evidence that Mr. Bush was intent on war with Iraq earlier than the White House has acknowledged."
The article goes on to develop this theme of timing, which is by far the lesser of the two main deceits proven by the DSM.
Almost no mention is made in the article of the much more egregious crime of lying about the necessity of the invasion for American security needs, and willfully constructing an entire campaign of disinformation to market the war.
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The Times also felt the pressure of its readership on this issue to such an extent that the new Public Editor, Byron Calame, was compelled to publish an online response to the "flood" of angry email from readers expressing disappointment and worse at America's so-called newspaper of record.
Mr. Calame writes "My checks find no basis for Ms. Lowe's [a sample incensed correspondent] concern about censorship or undue outside pressures.
Rather, it appears that key editors simply were slow to recognize that the minutes of a high-powered meeting on a life-and-death issue — their authenticity undisputed — probably needed to be assessed in some fashion for readers.
Even if the editors decided it was old news that Mr. Bush had decided in July 2002 to attack Iraq or that the minutes didn't provide solid evidence that the administration was manipulating intelligence, I think Times readers deserved to know that earlier than today's article [Calame is referring here to the article discussed in the previous paragraph]."
Again, this goes to the lesser issue raised by the DSM, but Calame then interviews Phil Taubman, the NYT Washington Bureau Chief, who addresses the more salient question of the manipulation of intelligence to sell the war.
Says Taubman: "It is mighty suggestive that Lord Dearlove, the chief of MI6, came home with the impression, or interpretation, that 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'
However, that's several steps removed from evidence that such was the case.
The minutes did not say that Mr. Tenet had told that to Lord Dearlove or that Lord Dearlove had seen specific examples of that.
The minutes, in my estimation, were not a smoking gun that proved that Bush, Tenet and others were distorting intelligence to support the case for war."
There are two huge problems with this alibi for the Times' obscene failure.
First, by any reasonable standard, the Memo absolutely does provide such 'evidence' that the facts were being fixed.
It says so itself.
And, remember that it is an internal British government document, leaked to the public. As such, and since it was never intended to see the light of day, there would be no reason for it to be dishonest or distorted for the benefit of its original readers.
Remember also that Tony Blair has in fact commented briefly on the Memo, but never denied its veracity in any fashion.
Recall that a member or former member of the Bush team who was privy to these discussions has confirmed, off the record, the accuracy of the Memo.
And remember that the Memo's blueprint fits precisely with what are now established facts from the period, namely, that the Bush people told lie after whopping lie about Iraq's WMD capabilities, and did so knowingly.
All told, this amounts to an extremely powerful case, one which would certainly prove highly persuasive in a criminal case, where the standards of proof are far higher than they are for a public's evaluation of their political leaders in a democracy.
But, even if this extremely persuasive evidence were not on the table, the second problem with the Times' lame excuse is that unassailable evidence of a crime (do we ever have that?) is hardly necessary for publication of a news story, anyhow.
We don't 'know' yet whether Tom DeLay is guilty of the accusations which have been made against him, but those accusations are themselves highly newsworthy, and have been treated, appropriately, as such.
We don't yet 'know' definitively whether John Bolton is a 'kiss up, kick down' sort of fellow, but the fact that there is some evidence suggesting that might be the case deserves, and got, plenty of media coverage.
And I sure don't remember a lot of media hesitation over Whitewater or Monicagate.
Me, I'm just one guy out here in the hinterlands, but where I come from, very powerful evidence of a president lying to sell a war — evidence which has not been disputed, evidence which has been independently corroborated in multiple ways, and evidence which has caused deep concern among a large portion of Congress — well, that's worthy of a wee bit more coverage than we've seen to date.
Indeed, apart from 9/11, what story of the last decade is bigger than this?
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The arguments proffered by the Times for its poor coverage of the DSM render this news blackout and associated coverup distortions looking very much like a case of disingenuousness of which the White House would be proud.
Together, they would constitute a crime on top of a crime, but for the fact that it is not, alas, the first episode in this ugly story.
By its own (very late) admission, the Times betrayed its responsibility to the American public during the run-up to the war — precisely the period described in the Memo — by failing to question the 'evidence' and claims offered by the administration for the necessity of going to war, serving instead as a virtual government stenographer.
That makes the current fiasco — at best — a perfect trifecta of botched journalism from America's paper of record.
But it also makes that 'at best' interpretation seem increasingly implausible.
Far more likely with such a series of failings, all in the same direction of massively favoring the administration, is that the Times is purposely abdicating its duty as a government watchdog.
Whether that is because of cowardice, profits, both, or some other explanation is as yet unclear.
My, how far we've traveled.
In this week full of Watergate reminiscences, the irony of our present condition could not be more complete.
Three decades ago, two cub reporters with the backing of a great patriotic paper struggled to uncover, bit by painstaking bit, information which saved the republic from a highjacking.
Today, the story is out there in plain sight, and yet the no-longer-remotely-great journalistic organs not only fail to present it, they conspire to cover it up, adding their own special contribution to the current unraveling of constitutional government.
Increasing numbers of Americans are coming to realize that learning the truth about their country requires going to foreign sources like the BBC, or to alternative electronic media.
Fortunately, however, American journalism still exhibits a pulse in a few parts of the country.
Most significant so far has been a stunning cri de coeur out of Minneapolis, deep within America's heartland and hardly a Havana, Falluja or even Berkeley.
In a devastating Memorial ('Memo'rial?) Day editorial, the Star Tribune called the president what he is, a liar who has committed the gravest sin any commander-in-chief ever could, "spending [American soldiers'] blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction".
Wow. One can only imagine the shivers running down the spines of Rove, Bush, Cheney and the rest as they read those words and consider the (very mainstream) source.
Already unpopular and no longer trusted, the Memo has the capacity to devastate if not destroy this White House, and potentially even to sentence its occupants to financial ruin and long prison terms.
(If this were to get any sweeter, more deserved, or more ironic, those jail cells would turn out to be in The Hague, rather than Leavenworth. Nobody pinch me yet, please, this is too good.)
Indeed, the ironies which may ensue from this point forward are exquisite to contemplate.
Those who have recklessly dismantled American democracy over the last two decades in a naked pursuit of power may well in turn become victims of several of the destructive precedents they themselves have established.
For starters, consider Karl Rove's dilemma right now.
He is in precisely the position he has long loved to place his opponents (such as Democratic members of Congress over the Iraq war vote just before the elections of 2002, to choose just one example).
If he says nothing about the DSM, he risks it continuing to proliferate exponentially, with more and more mainstream, heartland, media hurling devastating and unanswered body blows at the Bush administration, until ultimately a tidal wave of rage crests over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But if he addresses it head on, he risks making tens of millions of Americans aware of something they presently are not, with most of them likely to then see the plain message of this evidence for exactly what it is.
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Hobson's choice or not, at the rate things are progressing, the White House will have to respond, and likely soon.
Just this week a chorus of impeachment calls has echoed across the alternative media, including even one (at least) from a conservative source, Paul Craig Roberts of the Hoover Institution, who accuses Bush of "intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States".
He goes on to note, quite accurately, that "As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush's far more serious lies".
To get a sense of how frightened and vulnerable the Bush team is, consider McClellan's response to a reporter's question about the letter sent by 89 members of the House calling for an explanation of the Downing Street Memo.
McClellan said the White House saw "no need" to answer the letter.
This tells us three things, right off the bat.
First, the Bush administration is blocking Congress from performing its constitutionally mandated duty of oversight of the executive.
Well, no surprise there.
Second — and, again, absolutely no surprise — this White House has once more demonstrated its seemingly inexhaustible capacity to break all prior records for arrogance.
Napoleon couldn't touch this stuff, and neither could Nero.
Imagine believing that you're above answering basic questions posed by Congress about the single biggest issue of our time.
Imagine seeing "no need" to explain to the country why documentary evidence exists showing that you lied your way into a war which continues to consume American soldiers by the thousands, with no end in sight. Now, that's how they do it in the big leagues.
But experience reminds us that arrogance and bullying behavior almost always serve to mask massive insecurities just beneath, bringing us to the third revelation which can be extrapolated from McClellan's non-comment.
Think about it.
The gravest possible accusation has been made against the president and his team, emanating from, among others, one-fifth of the House of Representatives.
In addition to its moral implications, it has the political capacity to topple the presidency and perhaps kill the entire regressive right movement of the last quarter-century.
It is, in short, some very serious business.
Knowing what we know about how these folks viciously attack anyone who besmirches them in the slightest, what are we to make of their silence on this most lethal — this most existential — of political attacks?
No doubt they are completely trapped by the evidence and can only hope and pray the Memo just goes away.
But ever true to form, McClellan, Bush, Cheney and the whole lot of them would be strewing carnage across the landscape on this issue if they could get away with it.
Just ask CBS, Newsweek, Amnesty International, Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, John McCain or John Kerry.
Get in their way, and the attacks come hard, fast and personal.
That they are not now in full assault mode further affirms the accuracy and power of the Memo, as well as suggesting that the White House is strategically trapped between a rock and a hard place.
Perhaps they even find themselves in shock and awe.
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It is crucial now for progressives and patriots of all stripes to push this opportunity as hard as possible, down multiple paths.
The mainstream media is the most significant avenue for advancing this initiative which has the potential to take down Bush.
We must continue to exert unrelenting pressure on media outlets simply to do their jobs, so that the public may be informed of this gravest breach of its trust.
Members of Congress, led by John Conyers, have also played an important role so far by providing legitimacy to the critique, a rallying point around which other vectors can agglomerate, and an important angle the media can exploit should they ever decide one day to earn their salaries.
We must do more to pressure Congress, particularly vulnerable Republicans (and I predict there may be quite a lot of them in 2006) to take this question seriously or explain to their constituents why they do not.
Impeachment is completely warranted for the crimes committed by the Bush administration, and we must relentlessly demand this outcome.
As mentioned above, there are potentially exquisite ironies in this case, and this is one of them.
Having impeached Clinton for lying about oral sex, how ridiculous would Republicans now appear trying to argue that there is no impeachable offense here?
Another example of sublime irony might be produced by a court case, perhaps over a wrongful death charge.
Cindy Sheehan (bless you for your sacrifice, and for your tireless work to save others from the same fate), are you reading this?
History is calling your name.
And once again, imagine the patently obvious hypocrisy of Republicans trying to prevent the president from having to testify in such a case, after they just got through establishing a legal precedent for the same by forcing Clinton to do so, while in office, over the far less harmful allegation of sexual harassment.
And, in yet another example of exquisite irony, imagine how unsympathetic the judiciary is likely to be toward them, after the radical right has excoriated judges who don't bend to their will, to the point that GOP senators have offered justifications for recent violence directed against judges.
The regressive movement of the last several decades has provided a vicious spectacle, to the extent that internal cannibalization always seemed one likely avenue for its ultimate demise, with, for example, the far right running a nearly successful primary candidate against sitting Republican Senator Arlen Specter last year.
But this is better.
Lots better.
After a quarter century of scorched earth politics, I could not have designed a more appropriate fate for these destroyers of democracy than to be hoisted by their own petards, and then taken out by their own destructive precedents.
America has gone seriously astray due to the regressive right movement that began in earnest with Reagan, incubated under Gingrich, and blossomed full-blown in the era of Bush, Scalia and DeLay.
This political cancer has yielded death, destruction, environmental wreckage, massive debt, wholesale violations of human rights, diminishment of national security, dismantling of constitutional democracy at home and widespread hatred for America abroad. And that's just the first term.
It is difficult to imagine that one could ruin a country so thoroughly in just four years, but the Bush team has succeeded famously (with a good deal of help from the press, the Democrats and the public).
Finally, it appears that we have in the Downing Street Memo a weapon, and with it the proper context, to end our long national nightmare.
Impeachment. Now.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. Common Dreams © 1997-2005 |
| Daughter of loved ones — in home in Fallujah when U.S. attacked |
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The Sunday Times — Britain
June 19, 2005
British bombing raids were illegal, says Foreign Office
Michael Smith A SHARP increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war “to put pressure on the regime” was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice. The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began “spikes of activity” designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.
The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurise the regime was “not consistent with” UN law, despite American claims that it was.
The decision to provoke the Iraqis emerged in leaked minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair and his most senior advisers — the so-called Downing Street memo published by The Sunday Times shortly before the general election.
Democratic congressmen claimed last week the evidence it contains is grounds for impeaching President George Bush.
Those at the meeting on July 23, 2002, included Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6.
The minutes quote Hoon as saying that the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.
Ministry of Defence figures for bombs dropped by the RAF on southern Iraq, obtained by the Liberal Democrats through Commons written answers, show the RAF was as active in the bombing as the Americans and that the “spikes” began in May 2002.
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However, the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July meeting, made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.
The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.
The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to “degrade” Iraqi air defences, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorised military action.
The war finally started in March 2003.
This weekend the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Goodhart, vice-president of the International Commission of Jurists and a world authority on international law, said the intensified raids were illegal if they were meant to pressurise the regime.
He said UN Resolution 688, used by the allies to justify allied patrols over the no-fly zones, was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which deals with all matters authorising military force.
“Putting pressure on Iraq is not something that would be a lawful activity,” said Goodhart, who is also the Liberal Democrat shadow Lord Chancellor.
The Foreign Office advice noted that the Americans had “on occasion” claimed that the allied aircraft were there to enforce compliance with resolutions 688 and 687, which ordered Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction.
“This view is not consistent with resolution 687, which does not deal with the repression of the Iraqi civilian population, or with resolution 688, which was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and does not contain any provision for enforcement,” it said.
Elizabeth Wilmshurst, one of the Foreign Office lawyers who wrote the report, resigned in March 2003 in protest at the decision to go to war without a UN resolution specifically authorising military force.
Further intensification of the bombing, known in the Pentagon as the Blue Plan, began at the end of August, 2002, following a meeting of the US National Security Council at the White House that month.
General Tommy Franks, the allied commander, recalled in his autobiography, American Soldier, that during this meeting he rejected a call from Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to cut the bombing patrols because he wanted to use them to make Iraq’s defences “as weak as possible”.
The allied commander specifically used the term “spikes of activity” in his book. The upgrade to a full air war was also illegal, said Goodhart. “If, as Franks seems to suggest, the purpose was to soften up Iraq for a future invasion or even to intimidate Iraq, the coalition forces were acting without lawful authority,” he said.
Although the legality of the war has been more of an issue in Britain than in America, the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally, since Congress did not authorise military action until October 11 2002.
The air war had already begun six weeks earlier and the spikes of activity had been underway for five months.
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June 19, 2005
Foreign and Commonwealth Office legal advice
Michael Smith
This is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office legal advice appended as Annex A to the Cabinet Office briefing paper on Iraq of July 21, 2002. This advice was originally written in March 2002.
The following is a transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the source.
CONFIDENTIAL
IRAQ: LEGAL BACKGROUND
(i) Use of Force: (a) Security Council Resolutions (b) Self-defence ( c) Humanitarian Intervention (ii) No Fly Zones (iii) Security Council Resolutions relevant to the sanctions regime (iv) Security Council Resolutions relevant to UNMOVIC (I)Use of Force: (a) Security Council Resolutions relevant to the Authorisation of the Use of Force
1. Following its invasion and annexation of Kuwait, the Security Council authorised the use of force against Iraq in resolution 678(1990); this resolution authorised coalition forces to use all necessary means to force Iraq to withdraw, and to restore international peace and security in the area.
This resolution gave a legal basis for Operation Desert Storm, which was brought to an end by the cease-fire set out by the Council in resolution 687 (1991).
The conditions for the cease-fire in that resolution (and subsequent resolutions) imposed obligations on Iraq with regard to the elimination of WMD and monitoring of its obligations.
Resolution 687 (1991) suspended but did not terminate the authority to use force in resolution 678 (1990).
2. In the UK’s view a violation of Iraq’s obligations which undermines the basis of the cease-fire in resolution 687 (1991) can revive the authorisation to use force in resolution 678 (1990).
As the cease-fire was proclaimed by the Council in resolution 687 (1991), it is for the Council to assess whether any such breach of those obligations has occurred.
The US have a rather different view: they maintain that the assessment of breach is for individual member states. We are not aware of any other state which supports this view.
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3. The authorisation to use force contained in resolution 678(1990) has been revived in this way on certain occasions.
For example, when Iraq refused to cooperate with the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1997/8, a series of SCRs condemned the decision as unacceptable.
In resolution 1205 (1998) the Council condemned Iraq’s decision to end all co-operations with UNSCOM as a flagrant violation of Iraq’s obligations under resolution 687 (1991), and restated that the effective operation of UNSCOM was essential for the implementation of that Resolution.
In our view these resolutions had the effect of causing the authorisation to use force in resolution 678 (1991) to revive, which provided a legal basis for Operation Desert Fox.
In a letter to the President of the Security Council in 1998 we stated that the objective of that operation was to seek compliance by Iraq with the obligations laid down by the Council, that the operation was undertaken only when it became apparent that there was no other way of achieving compliance by Iraq, and that the action was limited to what was necessary to secure this objective.
4. The more difficult issue is whether we are still able to rely on the same legal base for the use of force more than three years after the adoption of resolution 1205 (1998).
Military action in 1998 (and on previous occasions) followed on from specific decisions of the Council; there has now not been any significant decision by the Council since 1998.
Our interpretation of resolution 1205 was controversial anyway; many of our partners did not think the legal basis was sufficient as the authority to use force was not explicit.
Reliance on it now would be unlikely to receive any support.
Use of Force: (b) Self-Defence
5. The conditions that have to be met for the exercise of the right of self-defence are well-known:
i) There must be an armed attack upon a state or such and attack must be imminent;
ii) The use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable;
iii) The acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack.
iv) The right of self-defence may only be exercised until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to ensure international peace and security and anything done in exercise of the right of self-defence must be immediately reported to the council.
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6. For the exercise of the right to self-defence there must be more than “a threat”.
There has to be an armed attack actual or imminent.
The development or possession of nuclear weapons does not in itself amount to an armed attack; what would be needed would be clear evidence of an imminent attack.
During the Cold War, there was certainly a threat in the sense that various states had nuclear weapons which they might, at short notice unleash upon each other.
But that did not mean the mere possession of nuclear weapons, or indeed their possession in time of high tension or attempt to obtain them, was sufficient to justify pre-emptive action.
And when Israel attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, on 7 June 1981 it was “strongly condemned” by the Security Council (acting unanimously) as a “military attack in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.”
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Use of Force: (c) Humanitarian Intervention
7. In the UK view, the use of force may be justified if the action is taken to prevent an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe.
The limits to this highly contentious doctrine are not clearly defined, but we would maintain that the catastrophe must be clear and well-documented, that there must be no other means short of the use of force which could prevent it, and that the measures taken must be proportionate.
This doctrine partly underlies the very limited action taken by allied aircraft to patrol the No Fly zones in Iraq (following action by Saddam to repress the Kurds and the Shia in the early 90s), which involves occasional and limited use of force by those aircraft in self-defence.
The application of this doctrine depends on the circumstances at any given time, but it is clearly exceptional.
(ii) No Fly Zones (NFZs)
8. The NFZs over Northern and Southern Iraq are not established by UN Security Council Resolutions.
They were established in 1991 and 1992 on the basis that they were necessary and proportionate steps taken to prevent a humanitarian crisis.
Prior to the establishment of the Northern NFZ the Security Council had adopted resolution 688 (1991) on 5 April 1991 in which the Council stated that it was gravely concerned by the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq, including most recently in Kurdish populated areas, which had led to a massive refugee flow, and that it was deeply disturbed by the magnitude of the human suffering involved.
The resolution condemned that repression of the Iraqi civilian population and demanded that Iraq immediately end the repression.
In our view, the purpose of the NFZs is to monitor Iraqi compliance with the provisions of resolution 688.
UK and US aircraft patrolling the NFZs are entitled to use force in self-defence where such a use of force is a necessary and proportionate response to actual or imminent attack from Iraqi ground systems.
9. The US have on occasion claimed that the purpose of the NFZs is to enforce Iraqi compliance with resolutions 687 or 688.
This view is not consistent with resolution 687, which does not deal with the repression of the Iraqi civilian population, or with resolution 688, which was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and does not contain any provision for enforcement.
Nor (as it is sometimes claimed) were the current NFZs provided for in the Safwan agreement, a provisional agreement between coalition and Iraqi military commanders of 3 March 1991, laying down military conditions for the cease-fire which did not contain any reference to the NFZs. |
(iii) Security Council Resolutions relevant to the sanctions regime
10. The sanctions regime against Iraq was established by resolution 661 (1990) of 6 August 1990, which, following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, decides that all states shall prevent the import into their territories of any commodities originating in Iraq, the sale or supply to Iraq of any commodities other than medical supplies, and, in humanitarian circumstances, food stuffs, and that Iraqi funds and financial resources should be frozen. Resolution 661 remains in force.
The major exception to the sanctions regime is the oil for food programme, which was established by resolution 988 (1995) and permits oil exports (in unlimited amounts following resolution 1284 (1999)) by Iraq on condition that the purchase price is paid into an escrow account established by the UN Secretary-General, and the funds in that account are used to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people through the export of medicine, health supplies, foodstuffs and materials and supplies for essential civilian needs.
The escrow account is also used to fund the UN Compensation Commission and to meet the operating costs of the UN, including those of UNMOVIC (see below). |
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11. The oil for food programme is renewed by the Security Council at (usually) 6 Monthly intervals, most recently by resolutions 1382 (2001) of 29 November 2001.
Under that resolution the Council also decided that it would adopt, by 13 May 2002, procedures which would improve the flow of goods to Iraq, other than arms and other potential dual use goods on a Good Review List.
The US are currently reviewing the final details of the list with the Russians.
12. In resolution 687 (1991) the Council decided that the prohibition against the import of goods from Iraq should have no further force when Iraq has completed all the actions contemplated in paragraphs 8-13 of that resolution concerning Iraq’s WMD Programme.
Iraq has still not complied with this condition.
Under paragraph 21 of resolution 687, the council decided to review the prohibition against the supply of commodities to Iraq every 60 days in the light of the policies and practices of the Iraqi government, including the implementation of all the relevant resolutions of the Council, for the purpose of determining whether to reduce or lift them.
These regular reviews are currently suspended as a result of Iraqi non-compliance with the Council’s demands.
13. The intention of the Council to act in accordance with resolution 687 on the termination of these prohibitions has been regularly reaffirmed, including in resolution 1284 (1999).
Paragraph 33 of that resolution also contains a complex formula for the suspension of economic sanctions against Iraq for renewable periods of 120 days, if UNMOVIC and the IAEA report cooperation in all respects by Iraq in fulfilling work programmes with those bodies for a period of 120 days after a reinforced system of monitoring and verification in Iraq becomes fully operational.
Iraq has never complied with these conditions.
(iv) Security Council Resolutions relating to UNMOVIC
14. UNMOVIC was established by resolution 1284 (1999) to replace the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established under resolution 687 (1991) (the ceasefire resolution).
UNMOVIC is to undertake the responsibilities of the former Special Commission under resolution 687 relating to the destruction of Iraqi CBW and ballistic missiles with a range of over 150 kilometres and the on-going monitoring and verification of Iraq’s compliance with these obligations.
Like the Special Commission, UNMOVIC is to be allowed unconditional access to all Iraqi facilities, equipment and records as well as to Iraqi officials.
Under paragraph 7 of resolution 1284 UNMOVIC and the IAEA were given the responsibility of drawing up a work programme which would include the implementation of a reinforced system of ongoing monitoring and verification (OMV) and key remaining disarmament tasks to be completed by Iraq, which constitute the governing standard of Iraqi compliance. There are currently no UNMOVIC personnel in Iraq, and the reinforced OMV system has not been implemented, because of Iraq’s refusal to cooperate.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd. |
June 20, 2005 A War Waged by Liars and MoronsWhat is Bush's Agenda in Iraq?By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS F or what purpose has President Bush sent 1,741 US soldiers to be killed in action in Iraq (as of June 19, 2005)? For what purpose have 15,000 — 38,000 US troops been wounded, many so seriously that they are maimed for life? Why has the US government thrown away $300 billion in an illegal and pointless war that cannot be won? These questions are beginning to penetrate the consciousness of Americans, a majority of whom no longer support Bush's war. Bush's Iraq war is the first war for which Americans have not known the reason. The reasons they were given by their president, vice president, secretary of defense, national security advisor, secretary of state, and the sycophantic media were nothing but a pack of lies. The top secret British government memos leaked to a reporter at the London Sunday Times make it completely clear that prior to the invasion President Bush knew that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The memos make it completely clear that Saddam Hussein had no responsibility whatsoever for the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The memos make completely clear that the British government regarded the invasion of Iraq as a war crime. The memos show the British government scrambling to find some way of creating "cover" in order to obfuscate the illegality of the invasion that Prime Minister Tony Blair had promised Bush to support. One of the cover plans was itself illegal. According to yet another leaked top secret British memo in the Sunday Times on June 19, Bush decided to sharply increase the US bombings of Iraq in the hopes it would goad Saddam Hussein into a response that could be used as a pretext for invading Iraq. According to the Sunday Times, the British Foreign Office advised the British Cabinet that legally "the allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime." The Bush administration falsely claimed that the bombing was legal in order to enforce compliance with UN resolutions 688 and 687. However, the British Foreign Office advised Bush's poodle, Tony Blair, that the American view "is not consistent with resolution 687, which does not deal with the repression of the Iraqi civilian population, or with resolution 688, which was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and does not contain any provision for enforcement." In his June 18 weekly radio address last Saturday, Bush again lied to the American people when he told them that the US was forced into invading Iraq because of the September 11 attack on the WTC. Bush, the greatest disgrace that America has ever had to suffer, actually repeated at this late date the monstrous lie for which he is infamous throughout the world:
"We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens."
Whoever the "people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens" might be, they were not Iraqis, at least not until Bush invaded their country, killed tens of thousands and maimed tens of thousands more, detained tens of thousands others, destroyed entire cities, destroyed the country's infrastructure, and created mass unemployment, poverty, pollution and disease.
The only reason Iraqis want to harm the US is because George W. Bush inflicted, and continues to inflict, tremendous harm on Iraqis.
If the Bush administration has its way, the Iraqi insurgents will be joined by the Iranians, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Jordanians and Palestinians. The "people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens" will increase exponentially.
In print and on TV, Bush's neocons have made clear their desire to see the US at war with the entire Muslim world: Today Iraq, tomorrow the Middle East. That the neocons believe the US can win such a war when the US cannot even occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport indicates a frightening insanity at the center of the Bush administration and a criminal disregard for the lives of Americans and Muslims.
The neocons assured Americans that the war in Iraq would be a cakewalk over in three weeks!
The neocons told us that only 70,000 troops were needed to bring Iraq to heel!
Neocons fired the top generals who had truthfully told Congress that several hundred thousand troops, at least, would be needed!
Neocons told Congress that Iraqi oil would pay for the invasion and that America did not have to worry about the cost! So far that is a $300 billion mistake.
And Bush has retained and promoted these morons!
No one has been held accountable for this enormous disaster.
How many more American troops are going to be killed and maimed for Bush's lies? How many more Iraqi civilians must be killed, maimed, and locked up?
Bush's Iraq policy is based on lies, and force based on lies cannot bring democracy to Iraq or to any other country.
Bush's lies are discrediting and destroying democracy in America. His "Patriot Act" alone has done more damage to Americans' freedom than Osama bin Laden.
Why did Bush invade Iraq?
Cynical Americans say the answer is oil. But $300 billion would have bought the oil without getting anyone killed, without destroying America's reputation in the world and without stirring up countless terrorist recruits for al Qaida.
Congress gave Bush the go-ahead for the invasion because Congress trusted Bush and believed his word that Iraq had fearsome weapons that would be unleashed on America unless we preempted Saddam Hussein's attack by striking first. Congress did not give Bush the go-ahead for initiating a war in order to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives "building democracy in Iraq."
Will President Bush ever tell us the real reason why he committed America's treasure, the lives of American soldiers and the reputation of our country to war in Iraq?
Does he even know?
Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. |
ESTIMATED NUCLEAR WARHEADS, STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests — 217 in the atmosphere.
The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests — 219 in the atmosphere.
France, 210 tests, 50 in the atmosphere.
The United Kingdom, 45 tests — 21 in the atmosphere.
China, 45 tests — 23 in the atmosphere.
India and Pakistan — 13 tests underground.
Israel — possible 1 test atmosphere South Africa 1979.
North Korea — 1 test underground, October 2006.
“The United states had drawn up a battle plan for the potential use of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the United States has been involved in planning potential nuclear use scenarios for Iran.”“The United States is now involved in a massive program to overhaul its nuclear arsenal. In fact they're working to replace every nuclear warhead and all of the existing delivery systems in the arsenal to ensure prompt precision global strike capabilities.”Jackie Cabasso — Western States Legal Foundation |
Western Elite militarismWestern Elite Terror StatesWestern Elite War Crimes
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'Oh! You don't believe the 9-11 official version,' they say.
'You mean where they want you to accept the buildings were not blown up from below.
'Plane fuel! Substance never burns higher then a gas stove! That it caused the inner core steel to melt!
'Steel melting!
'Concrete vaporizing!
'
'No! I don't believe that conspiracy theory.
'Cheney! Bush! Rudy Giuliani! HA! HA!
'Tower 7 that never had a plane hit — just came tumbling down!
'You believe that, eh!
'Ever think it had to be blown up because the plane scheduled to fly into it was off getting shot down.
'Thermite in Tower 7's walls, you see — incriminating evidence — impossible to get out without people watching!
Had to be blown up!
'Next you'll be saying Obama is not a Wall Street Illuminati banker stooge?
'Take your pick: The partner in a comedy team who feeds lines to the other comedians.
'Him who allows himself to be used.
'Oh! I can't really blame you, Television it turns minds to pulp.
'Turn off the television. It's the only way.'
'Turn off the television?'
'Get rid of it really. I mean what else is there to do!'
'Get rid of the television?'
'Don't forget all radio garbage is propaganda, even the songs.
'Then those five minute propaganda hits they send you every hour!
'The ones they refer to as News
'Get rid of all the propaganda from your brain, the only way to do it.'
'Stop being hooked on those Hollywood movies — even those that make you think they are making you think'
'All paid performers to make your brain dead.
'You turn the brainwashing off, you'll begin to become yourself.
'It really is the only way!'
'Oh!'
Kewe — TheWE.cc
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We are change 9/11 lies have sustained the ruling terrorism-threat paradigm The “why” is obvious: To justify an unjust war to serve corporate interests and greed |
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9.11 Truth New York City Decades long history of political disruption the US has been responsible for 9/11 is part of a long series of criminal, imperialist conquests Another major highlight was surprise appearance of Cynthia McKinney |
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Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth A solid convincing case which architects & engineers will readily see: that the 3 WTC high-rise buildings were destroyed by both classic and novel forms of controlled demolition These buildings were professionally demolished with explosives |
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Danish scientist Niels Harrit on nano-thermite in the WTC dust
— Click Here
Niels Harrit and 8 other scientists found nano-thermite in the dust from the World Trade Center.
Niels Harrit, you and eight other researchers conclude in this article that it was nano-thermite that caused these buildings to collapse. |
ITALIAN SAYS 9-11 SOLVED
It’s common knowledge, he reveals
CIA — Mossad behind terror attacks By the Staff of American Free Press
Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies.
In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera:
“All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe… know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”
Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992.
Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio.
This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s.
Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed 'false flag' operations — terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.
In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony:
“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game.
The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcher Webster Tarpley saying:
“The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel.
I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”
Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating.
It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV.
Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.
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The secret story of Mossad and the World Trade Center attack The Odigo Warning: Israeli employees get e-mail warnings of 9-11 SEC Secret Probe Of Stock Dealings Before 9/11 |
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Truth Action LA Branch We are in the midst of a mass awakening 9/11 is the foundational myth upon which the entire agenda has been triggered for our generation |
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Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice High Velocity Bursts of Debris From Point-Like Sources in the WTC Towers Why Did the World’s Most Advanced Electronics Warfare Plane Circle Over The White House on 9/11? |
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Your life, your children's lives — Will you live or die?Decided by small group of elite.Pure evil It doesn't get any clearer than this
Published on Friday, March 2, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
US to Develop New Hydrogen Bomb
by Ralph Vartabedian
The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation's first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.
The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.
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Hiroshima, Nagasaki — George Weller report |
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Why are the West's elites trying to start a nuclear war?
Because you pay for it |
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BBC — Thursday, 6 September 2007
UK jets 'chase Russian bombers'
The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say.
Four RAF F3 Tornado aircraft were scrambled in response to the Russian action, the UK's defence ministry said.
The Russian planes - said to be long-range bombers - had earlier been followed by Norwegian F16 jets.
Russia recently revived a Cold War-era practice of flying bombers on long-range patrols.
A Norwegian officer, Lt Col John Inge Oegland, told the BBC the Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bombers flew in international airspace from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic, before turning back.
Two Norwegian F-16s shadowed them on Thursday morning and another two went up later, he said.
There have been several similar incidents in recent months, Lt-Col Oegland added.
"Norway is following the increased Russian activity in the far north with interest," he told the BBC News website.
He said the Russian flights were not causing alarm in Norway. "Our systems are adequate," he said, when asked whether Norway was bolstering its security in the area. |
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Over time I was increasingly shocked by the speed and ease with which many intelligent and seemingly competent members of the CFR [ Council on Foreign Relations ] appeared to eagerly justify policies and actions that supported growing corruption.
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The regularity with which many CFR members would protect insiders from accountability regarding another appalling fraud surprised even me.
Many of them seemed delighted with the advantages of being an insider while being entirely indifferent to the extraordinary cost to all citizens of having our lives, health and resources drained to increase insider wealth in a manner that violated the most basic principles of fiduciary obligation and respect for the law.
In short, the CFR was operating in a win-lose economic paradigm that centralized economic and political power.
I was trying to find a way for us to shift to a win-win economic paradigm that was — by its nature — decentralizing.
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The reader can appreciate why Wall Street would welcome someone as accommodating as Gorelick at Fannie Mae.
This was a period when the profits rolled in from engineering the most spectacular growth in mortgage debt in U.S. history.
As one real estate broker said, “They have turned our homes into ATM machines.”
Fannie Mae has been a leading player in centralizing control of the mortgage markets into Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
And that means as people were rounded up and shipped to prison as part of Operation Safe Home, Fannie was right behind to finance the gentrification of neighborhoods.
And that is before we ask questions about the extent to which the estimated annual financial flows of $500 billion–$1 trillion money laundering through the U.S. financial system or money missing from the US government are reinvested into Fannie Mae securities.
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Small boy killed as part of the mass killings by U.S. occupation forces April, 2004
Small child killed as part of the mass killings by U.S. occupation forces April, 2004
Baby killed as part of the mass killings by U.S. occupation forces April, 2004
Baby killed as part of the mass killings by Iraq invasion coalition occupation forces April, 2004
Unspeakable grief — as part of the mass killings by Iraq invasion and coalition occupation forces April, 2004
The loved ones who have gone
Part of the mass killings by Iraq invasion coalition occupation forces April, 2004
Iraq today — Unspeakable grief and horror
Unspeakable grief — as part of the mass killings by Iraq invasion coalition occupation forces April, 2004
Iraq today — Unspeakable grief and horror
Unspeakable grief — as part of the mass killings by Iraq invasion coalition occupation forces April, 2004
Among its highlights, the DSM confirms that the war had been decided upon well before Congressional or UN Security Council action, and before weapons inspectors were inserted and then removed because of the 'urgency' of Iraq's threat
(of course, the real urgency and real threat was that the absence of WMD would kill Bush's pretext for war).
