The Virtual Stoa

Download it here.

This page links to the six earlier reports published by the same office.

The interview with Patrick Cockburn in the current New Left Review is rivetingly interesting.

On the eve of the elections, I thought I’d read the reports from the February 2004 and November 2005 National Survey of Iraq polls side by side, to see what the changes have been over time on the questions that were asked both times around, as I’ve found a number of presentations of the numbers on different blogs and in various media reports a bit annoying.

There’s a little bit of a shift in the “how are things going in your life” figures — more people are plumping for “very good” as opposed to “quite good” and more are choosing “quite bad” rather than “very bad”, but the overall numbers in the two main camps - good and bad - remain the about the same, with about 70% of people saying “good” and a little under 30% saying “bad”. But there’s certainly a small movement towards the people who are content with their lot over the last two years.

On the other hand, ask the same people how their lives compare with the way they were before the war, and another small shift is discernible, but this time towards people who think things are going less well for them. Numbers reporting things as being “much better” and “somewhat better” are down by 1.3% and 3.7% at 20.6% and 30.9% respectively; numbers saying things are “somewhat worse” or “much worse” are up by 6.4% and 4.3%, and now stand at 19.1% and 10.2%.

And people are slightly less optimistic about their prospects over the next 12 months than they were in February 2004, though the optimistis still heavily outnumber the pessimists. 34.9% think things will be “much better” (down 1.8%); 29.3% think they will be “somewhat better” (down 5%); 7.3% think things will be “somewhat worse” (up 4.1%); and 5.2% think things will be “much worse” (up 1.8%).

Support for a unitary Iraq remains high, but is falling. 79% of respondents opted for a “unified Iraq with central government in Baghdad” in February 2004; that’s now down to 70%, with support for a federal government up from 14% to 17.6% and support for partition rising from 3.8% to 9.1%.

In February 2004, 15.1% of those polled thought the coalition forces should “leave now”; that’s now up to 25.5%, which seems a pretty big shift. In the earlier poll 18.3% thought they should stay “until security is restored”; that’s now up to 30.9% — though I think the data here isn’t comparable, as respondents faced a different set of choices each time the poll was conducted.

The occupying forces aren’t especially popular. In February 2004 13.2% of Iraqis “strongly supported” the presence of coalition forces, now only 12.8% do, which is a trivial shift, as is the shift from 19.6% to 20.8% among those who “somewhat oppose” the presence of the troops. Less trivial, though, are the other two shifts in opinion: those who “somewhat support” their presence have fallen from 26.3% to 19.4%; those who “strongly oppose” the presence of occupying forces has risen from 31.3% to a substantial 43.7%.

The question about whether the occupying forces have done a good job or not wasn’t asked last time around, which was a shame, although I’d hazard a guess that there hasn’t been much change here: the answers to a different question from February 2004, about how much confidence Iraqis had in the occupying forces has a very similar profile. Thus in 2004 7.9% reported “a great deal of confidence”, 17.4% reported “quite a lot”, 23.5% reported “not very much” and 42.8% reported “none at all”. And these look pretty similar to the answers this time around to the “have done a good job” question, where 9.6% said “a very good job”, 26.6% said “quite a good job”, 18.8 said “quite a bad job” and 39.8% said “a very bad job”. But these weren’t the same questions, so comparisons are hazardous.

UPDATE [15.12.2004]: I forgot to include the stats on the “was the coalition right to invade in 2003″ question, though I think you know how this one goes by now. Here there’s a shift away from the thought that it was the right thing to do at all levels, which takes the belief that the invasion was wrong above the 50% level: 18.6% think it was “absolutely right” (down 1%); 27.8% think it “somewhat right” (down 1%); 17.2% think it “somewhat wrong” (up 4.3%); 33.1% think it “absolutely wrong” (up 6.9%), with the 12.7% of people who found it “difficult to say” in 2004 now making up a mere 3.5% of the population.

Curious about the vintage of David Cameron’s recent hawkish rhetoric when it comes to the struggle formerly known as the GWoT, I played with Google for a few minutes.

Writing in tehgrauniad on 18 February 2003 about the forthcoming vote in the House of Commons, Cameron remarked that his party’s then leader, Iain Duncan Smith had been “statesmanlike, rather than opportunistic, and given staunch support to the prime minister”. But he went on to say that while “most Tories back his view”, he described four groups who didn’t, and he aligned himself squarely with the last of these, whom he called “the confused and uncertain”.

The confused and uncertain weren’t peaceniks, Cameron stressed, but they were only “prepared to vote for war in the right circumstances”. Four circumstances were specifically mentioned in what followed. First, “there may be links between President Saddam and terrorist organisations, including al-Qaida”, although apparently the affair of the dodgy dossier was persuading some of the C and the U that there might not be. On the other hand, second, the C and the U had no doubt that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical warheads, and a growing arsenal of missiles with which to deliver them.” And in the third and fourth places, he thought that “many of us will not support preemptive war unless Blair can produce either compelling evidence of the direct threat to the UK, or a UN resolution giving it specific backing” but that “The signs are that he hasn’t got the first and won’t get the second”.

Roughly speaking, then, we’ve got a man who didn’t agree with everything that Iain Duncan Smith was saying (otherwise he would surely have aligned himself with his leader in this article), and who presumably (I’m guessing a bit here) largely voted for the war because he believed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Cameron’s more recent rhetoric on the SFKatGWoT is now utterly different.

So the question is, what changed? This seems to make Cameron one of the very small number of people who has got much more hawkish on SFKatGWoT programme-related activities over the last 48 months, moving from being “confused and uncertain” to, well, sounding a lot like Tony Blair. I can guess at any number of explanations, but if anyone thinks they know what the answer might be, do please write something in the Comments.

I met the Guardian’s Rory Carroll on a trip to Italy around three years ago, at the end of his stint as the paper’s Rome correspondent. We were sitting on a roof-terrace of a residential block in the centro storico, where a mutual acquaintance was staying, and I assume we were having something to drink, though I don’t remember what it was. What I do remember was that he was delightful, smart, interesting, and very funny, and I felt sick in my stomach when I read yesterday afternoon that he’d been kidnapped in Sadr City. Best of luck to all those involved in trying to secure his release.

UPDATE [11pm, 20.10.2005]: Good news, over here.

Ed Harriman’s piece in the new LRB on how the occupying authorities in Iraq are behaving like the prudent stewards of the country’s resources that we all expected them to be.

Is anyone sensible prepared to defend Ann Clwyd’s insistence that coalition forces haven’t been using napalm, or something functionally indistinguishable, in Iraq, both during the military campaign in the Spring of 2003 and, more recently, in Fallujah?

Chris Young, over at Explananda, who has been keeping his eye on napalm-themed issues for a while now, writes that “Clwyd must know that the U.S. used a modern form of napalm in Iraq; incompetence simply can’t suffice here as an explanation. It’s just a lie - and a depressing one too, considering what Clwyd’s job is supposed to be”, and that just about sums up my reaction, too. The only alternative explanation seems to be that she hasn’t paid any attention at all to what critics of the US invasion have been saying for over two years, and that she is the last person on the planet gullible enough to believe things that government ministers tell them, just because it’s a government minister talking.

As Chris goes on to comment, “I’ve never believed that offering a humanitarian justification for the war in Iraq requires anyone to lie about U.S. conduct. So why does Clwyd act as if it does?”

[For napalm-related concerns, try here, here, here, here, here, here (sort of), here, here and here.]

This, just in, from Amnesty International:

Israel/Occupied Territories: Israeli authorities must put an immediate end to settler violenceAmnesty International calls on the Israeli authorities to investigate recent incidents of poisoning of Palestinian fields and the increasingly frequent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian villagers in the West Bank. Such acts must not be allowed to continue.

In recent weeks, toxic chemicals have repeatedly been spread on fields located near the villages of Tuwani, Umm Faggara and Kharruba in the southern Hebron region.

Scores of sheep as well as gazelles and other animals have been contaminated by the toxins and several have died. Palestinian farmers have been forced to quarantine their flocks and stop using the milk, cheese and meat from them, effectively depriving them of their livelihood. Since the first poison was discovered near Tuwani on 22 March 2005, more fields have been targeted in the same region.

In the days prior to the first field poisoning incident in Tuwani, a security guard from the nearby Israeli settlement Ma’on had reportedly told villagers that he wanted Palestinian farmers to stop grazing their flocks near the settlement and that, if they did not agree to this, he and the settlers had ways to make them stop.

Analyses carried out by the Center for Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at Bir Zeit University and by the Israeli Nature Protection Authority have confirmed that two types of toxic chemicals have been spread in large quantities in the area. The toxic chemicals are 2-Fluoracetamide which is banned in several countries including Israel and severely restricted in international trade, and Brodifacoum, an anticoagulant used as rodenticide.

On 12 April 2005 one of these toxins was also found in the Northern West Bank village of Yasouf, in a field located near the entrance to the Israeli settlement Tapuah, and near the place where the Israeli army had just re-opened the road connecting Yasouf to the main road. The road leading to Yasouf had been kept closed to Palestinians for years, forcing people to take a long detour to access the village.

The areas where the toxic chemicals have been found are located in Area C, which is under full control of the Israeli authorities; Palestinian Authority security forces are forbidden by Israel from operating in these areas. To date, the Israeli authorities have not cleaned the toxic chemicals from the affected areas, leaving the task to Palestinian farmers and international and Israeli peace activists. They also have not taken the necessary measures to investigate the matter with a view to bringing those responsible to justice.

Recently Israeli settlers have stepped up attacks and threats against Palestinian farmers and villagers in these and other West Bank areas, preventing Palestinians from accessing their land. In recent months, repeated physical assaults by Israeli settlers from Ma’on and the nearby settlement outpost of Havat Ma’on on Palestinian farmers and on international peace activists and human rights workers, including Amnesty International staff, have not been investigated by the Israeli police. Those responsible for these attacks enjoy impunity.

For more on related matters, follow this link.

I’m very pleased to read over at the Normblog that “[A] baby born in [a] Baghdad maternity hospital yesterday has been named Intikhabat - the Arabic word for “Elections”…” That seems to be a fine name, if not quite in the same scale of excellence as Tractorina, for enthusiastic Soviet babies.

My niece was born on the day of the Good Friday agreement in 1998. There was talk of calling her “Trimble”, though sadly the suggestion didn’t make it as far as the birth certificate.

Harry, criticising a not-very-good piece in today’s Guardian by Terry Eagleton (on which see also here), has this to say:

I’m all in favour of trying to understand what is behind the actions of suicide killers but that must involve an examination of the ideology of the martyrs.

First, a cheap point: it’s good to know that one can now ask about “understanding” what lies behind the unreasonable behaviour of political and/or religious extremists without being accused of apologising for that behaviour. At least, I don’t think that Harry’s apologising for suicide bombers. (But then, I didn’t think that a lot of the people who were attacked after 11 September for asking to take the causes of unreasonable, criminal, murderous behaviour seriously, etc., were apologising for terrorist atrocity, either. So maybe that’s just me.)Second, the remarks that prompted the post. I’m not sure that I really agree that it’s terribly important to understand what motivates suicide bombers, especially if that means doing a detailed examination of crazy opinions about the theology of martyrdom, which are, like most crazy theological opinions, crazy, and, I suspect, not especially interesting or illuminating. Or, to put things another way, why should we do them the favour of taking them at their word?

(If crazy theological opinions are not especially interesting or illuminating, though, it might be more interesting to ask about the circumstances or environments that makes people more likely to subscribe to crazy, destructive beliefs of these kinds. But then we really are on the terrain of “root causes” which will get someone accused of apologising for atrocity pretty soon, which won’t be pretty. In any case, I don’t want to go there right now.)

In the comments to Harry’s post, Matthew quotes Johann Hari: “The biggest falsehood is that suicide bombing is an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. Two-thirds of the suicide killings committed in the past two decades were not committed by Muslims.”

I’m not sure that the “two-thirds” figure is quite right, though maybe it is. (Robert Pape’s data — APSR, 2003, p.348 — suggests that in the period 1980-2001 there were 68 suicide attacks organised by the Tamil Tigers, which was far more than any other group managed. But I think to get to the two-thirds figure you have to count some bombings organised by Muslim groups which Pape nevertheless classifies as “having a secular orientation”. So Muslims, perhaps, but not “Islamists”. Whatever.)

The particular point, that suicide bombing is not an exclusively Muslim phenomenon, is sound, though I’m not sure whether anyone sensible has ever denied it (for the obvious reason that it’s obviously not true). Indeed, it’s not even exclusively a religious phenomenon: though the Tamil Tigers recruit from among Hindu Tamils, they are secular nationalists, and I don’t think the PKK is a terribly religious bunch of guys, either (though I don’t know much about them).

(Note that there is an infelicity in Hari’s writing: if “suicide killings” include the people the suicide kills, then of course more than a third of the victims were victims of Islamic suicide attacks: the 3,000+ who died in the World Trade Center outnumber those killed in all the other suicide attacks of the previous twenty years. But I don’t think Hari means to include them in his claim.)

Post-2001, though, I’d guess — because I don’t have good data to hand — that the majority of suicide attacks are being carried out by Islamist groups of one kind or another, and certainly that is dressed up in an ideology of martyrdom, etc. (Question: are there secular nationalist suicide bombers in Iraq, or are the attacks there organised exclusively by the religious wing of the armed resistance? Not something I’ve seen discussed, though I haven’t been looking hard.)

But we can still ask what, if anything, is the relationship between Islamist ideology and the use of suicide attacks, and the extent to which theological opinions actually explain anything interesting. And, in general, it strikes me as most likely that Pape is right, that suicide attacks are on the increase because the people who organise them think that suicide attacks are more likely to help them achieve their aims, as compared with other things that they might be doing with their scarce resources. (Though see Chris Young for a good discussion of the point about aims with respect to Hamas.) And those who organise such attacks have various ways of persuading other people to lay down their lives for the cause, which may of course include criminally exploiting the people Gene calls “deluded and desperate” — though studies suggest they are often pretty well educated and from comparatively affluent backgrounds — through appeals to (possibly shared) crazy religious ideology.

It seems to me that in these kinds of cases the ideology follows the strategy, rather than determining it, whatever people may say about themselves on video just before they blow themselves up in Israel/Palestine. Which means that we might not learn very much about the phenomenon of suicide bombing by talking or writing or thinking much about whatever religious claims are made on its behalf by religious extremists and apologists for murder.

It’s a far more interesting (and worrying) phenomenon than that.

Or so it seems to me.

UPDATE [27.1.2005]: Tim disagrees with the last bit, at least.

fallujapictures.blogspot.com.

Seeing that the Iraqi Federation of Workers’ Trade Unions is all the rage these days, I’ll just link to this snippet from the IFTU sort-of blog last week marking the recent meeting of the comrades in the Oxford Labour Party, which was addressed by an IFTU representative. I wasn’t able to be there, but it’s good to hear that it seems to have gone down well on both sides.

It seems to be mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa week across a chunk of the World of Blogs, as a couple of excellent liberal bloggers out there have decided to make this the time to discuss their transition from pro- to anti- on the matter of the war in Iraq in more detail than they have hitherto.

It started when Belle Waring posted this piece at Crooked Timber, which then led to this one back at John and Belle’s, which in turn managed to bring Nasi Lemak back from the ranks of the blogdead for further comment.

(Repentant hawks also include Gwyddion the Magician, or whatever he’s called, who has also clambered out of the blogcoffin just recently, and Matthew Yglesias, who offered a brief endorsement of Belle’s piece.)

Most interesting snippets, at least to me:

(1) Belle: “I should have let partisan opposition to Republicans guide my thinking more than I did. My mom, for example, said that even if I was right and the invasion was a good idea, that these bastards would screw it up. I guess I was lost in some post 9/11, spanning the political divide bullshit haze”. A commentator then glosses this nicely in the discussion that follows: “My desire not to let my dislike of Bush cloud my judgment on this war ended up, ironically, clouding my judgment in favor of the war.”

(2) Nasi Lemak: “I think this mistake was actually driven by my being a political scientist. I didn’t have to be an especially strong rational choice proponent to believe that elected politicians tend to try to avoid disaster, and that electorates tend to try to punish politicians who end up leading them into trouble. I thought these two things to be probably truths both as regards the US and UK governments”, which is followed by an excellent discussion of how both of these assumptions seem to have collapsed over the last 18 months.

No discussion of this kind of thing is complete without reference to at least three D-Squared posts, so I’ll put them here, here, here and here, all of which are ageing well.

Over at Au Currant, Jackie D approvingly quotes Salam Pax quoting his friend G, who talks about himself in the 3rd person:

[T]ell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam.

And over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram is asking and answering a similar question:

At the same time, liberal hawks are asking rhetorically why there were no demonstrations against Saddam Hussein, or against other tyrannies.(I think that last question is pretty easy to answer: people usually demonstrate because they are angry at their own government (or its associates) rather than at someone else�s. Even anger at yesterday�s bombings in Turkey wouldn�t translate into demonstrations because there would be no point in marching against Al Quaida.)

And, to take the third text for today, an early commenter, John S, wrote this in reply [scroll down]:

Oh come off it Chris!
I went on loads of well-attended anti-apartheid marches in London in the 1980s. They were clearly demonstrations against the South African government. If you’re outraged you will demonstrate. Clearly Saddam’s activities didn’t outrage Britons enough.

Two extended comments directed at no-one in particular follow:Comment One.

As far as I can tell (from a fairly quick glance at the 1988 volume of Hansard — sadly the online Hansard only goes back to November 1988), the two MPs who made a decent amount of noise about Halabja in the House of Commons in 1988 were Jeremy Corbyn and Ann Clwyd, as they hassled David Mellor, then the junior minister responsible for maintaining smooth relations with the Baathists. Fifteen years later, of course, Corbyn was ardently against the war, and Clwyd a key supporter. That suggests, in its obviously crude way, that there’s not a clear correlation between campaigning about Iraqi atrocities in the 1980s and either supporting or opposing the war today.

(My guess is that this absence of a correlation carries through to wider public protest: I don’t know who stood outside the Iraqi Embassy in protest, but my guess is that it was a mixture of Kurds and Trots, and that some of the former and none of the latter — except, perhaps, for those who became ex-Trots in the interim — supported the war. The only person I know personally — to drop into anecdotal mode — who ever helped to organise memorials for the victims of Halabja before the Americans began to talk about invading Iraq and lots of people rediscovered their outrage at Baathist atrocities is a Trotskyist friend and antiwar activist, who was involved with the commemorations in Liverpool and Manchester a few years ago.)

But if I’m right about the lack of a clear correlation between those who protested against Saddam’s atrocities at the time and their opinions about the legitimacy of the war in 2003, then that raises a question about whether it’s terribly sensible for liberal hawks in the US and the UK now to ask questions about who did what to protest against Saddam over the years — especially since I don’t think anyone has any record of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Blair, Straw, Hoon, and so on, doing much to either protest or memorialise Halabja and the other crimes of the regime before the invasion of Kuwait transformed elite attitudes to Iraq in 1990.

Comment Two.

Surely the key point about “outrage” and demonstrations is that big demonstrations are not (or, rather, almost never) spontaneous public displays of outrage at all, but the product of great investment of time and energy on the parts of event organisers.

Why were anti-apartheid demonstrations in the UK so big and so frequent? Lots of reasons: many ANC activists and exiles had spent time in the UK, the Anglican church (think Tutu and Huddleston) played a prominent role in the struggle, South Africa House provided a very visible central focus for protest in London, the “rebel tours” and sporting connections between England and South Africa kept the issue in the newspapers, as did periodic Commonwealth summits, egregious Tory wankers like John Carlisle would remind ordinary citizens that the enemy lived at home as well as in Pretoria, lots of people in the UK, whatever their citizenship, had personal ties to people in South Africa owing to a shared imperial past, another focal point was provided by the captivity of Nelson Mandela, and, also importantly, the protestors thought they had a realistic chance of achieving something through their protests, and as it turned out they were right to think so. (There are no doubt other reasons, I’m sure: these are just off the top of my head.)

Saddam Hussein’s atrocities didn’t spark mass mobilisations in large part because public levels of awareness (again, for all kinds of reasons) were much lower, and because there weren’t these various networks, political and cultural resources and pre-existing campaigns, for anti-Saddam campaigners to draw upon in order to mobilise mass protest. Nor would it have been clear what, if anything, mass protest at the Iraqi Embassy in 1988 might have achieved.

But to say these things isn’t to say that people in the UK thought that gassing Kurds was just fine whereas apartheid wasn’t — just to say that there’s a much more complicated passage from the fact of moral opposition or outrage to widespread public protest than some people seem to think.

UPDATES [23.11.2003]: This post is being discussed over at Harry’s Place, and on the Normblog. [24.11.2003] Marc Mulholland has joined in, too.

From the October edition of Harper’s magazine: A History of the Iraq War, Told Entirely in Lies, by Sam Smith.

Over at the normblog, Norman Geras writes (among many others) these words:

It may be worth pointing out that I don’t only mean, here, criticism from those who opposed the war. I mean also from those of us who supported it. For any deliberate misleading of the public that there was (if there was), so far from strengthening what was already a good case for war, would have detracted from it. It would have detracted from it via the implication that there weren’t sound enough reasons for a regime-change intervention, when there were. There were on human rights grounds, because wherever the proverbial pale might be thought to be located in this matter, the Baathist regime had long been beyond it. And there were sound reasons, as well, because of what was taken as established knowledge about that regime’s record on WMD (of both possession and use of these) � a point not too well remembered by the war’s critics in the last couple of months � and of what it had yet to account for to the world community. By attempting wilfully to deceive the public, if it should turn out that this is what either or both of them did, George Bush and Tony Blair would have done a disservice to the case for war by the implicit suggestion that, in their own minds, the case wasn’t good enough already - which it was. Deliberate public deception by democratic politicians is in any event a vice not to be taken lightly.

And in one of his ever-interesting Daily Moiders, Marc Mulholland argues along these lines:

I paid a fair amount of attention to the run up to the war. Nevertheless, I have no recollection that WMD being deployable in 45 minutes was ever a real issue. Certainly no pro-war people I know paid much attention, nor did anti-war people waste much effort in trying to cast doubt on it. … The open casus bellum was that Saddam was defying, even if only in detail, UN demands for disarming. This implied another casus bellum, suspicion of Saddam’s motives and aims. The unofficial ambition of US / UK was to detroy a repugnant regime. The hope was that they could create a reasonably pliant regime in the region that, nevertheless, would act as a democratic beacon undermining the corrupt old mainstays of western influence, particularly Saudi Arabia, not to mention Iran & Syria. It is a reversal of the old tradition of bringing down radical democratic (or at least populist / nationalist) regimes by sponsoring a coup.

The 45 minute issue is a bizarre diversion from all of this..

I’m putting these two extracts together because they seem to me to miss more or less the same point, which seems to me to be an important one. On Planet Geras, there were some good reasons to go to war, but Mr Blair perversely chose to focus instead on some bad reasons, and, by trying to make those bad reasons appear better than they in fact were, may have misled the public. On Planet Mulholland, by contrast, there were both open and hidden reasons for war, but neither set of reasons has much to do with the so-called “45-minute” claim which has been gripping the British media in general and the Independent newspaper in particular for the last few months.But in both cases we need to remember why Mr Blair was trumpeting these bad reasons for war so often and why these bad reasons were so important to him that (at the very least) he and his minions encouraged the dissemination of various misleading and false claims to the public, the media and the Labour backbenchers whose votes were crucial in the parliamentary division of 19 March about the actually-existing threat which Iraq posed to the UK.

First, Mr Blair wasn’t prepared to be seen to tear up existing international law altogether in the run-up to the war by demanding “regime change”, which would directly threaten both of the fundamental pillars of the international legal regime: state sovereignty and non-intervention; indeed, the Attorney General produced a solemn (but not yet published) memorandum explaining why he reckoned, implausibly, that the Government’s behaviour was fully in accordance with international law.

Second, the claim that the US and the UK were acting to uphold the will of the UN was quadruply and terminally undermined by (i) the text of the relevant resolutions, which did not use the standard codewords (”all necessary means”) to authorise war, (ii) the failure to get the all-important (to Mr Blair) “second resolution” through the Security Council; (iii) the obvious opposition of most UN member-states to the war; and (iv) the fact that the UN’s own weapons inspectors in general and Hans Blix in particular made it reasonably clear that they were coping pretty well and that they didn’t really welcome further military intervention in Iraqi affairs.

The reason Mr Blair fell back on telling porkies about the kind of threat that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed to the UK is that (for whatever reasons: take your pick from the above list, or from any others that take your fancy) he had decided he wanted to go to war, and he didn’t think he could get enough public and political support to sustain him through the conflict if he was patently undermining both international law and international opinion.

So Norman Geras is right: he did go out on a limb to emphasise some appalling reasons for war; but this wasn’t just a silly error of reasoning on his part: he exploited those appalling reasons because he judged (almost certainly correctly) that the better reasons weren’t going to be politically effective in getting him the war he wanted to fight. And Marc Mulholland is also right: no thoughtful observer of the politics of the build-up to the war should have taken the so-called 45 minute claim seriously, and no-one was especially interested in it, but it’s important to remember why it, and the various other claims like it in the silly dossier on the Iraqi threat, were stitched up into an important figleaf for Mr Blair and why (horribly to mix a metaphor) it’s not at all bizarre that the media should now want to shine a spotlight on that figleaf in the way that they are doing.

It seems to me that the kindest thing that one could say about Mr Blair is that he’s an incompetent Machiavellian. If you think (and, to clarify, I do not now and did not think then) that the case for military intervention was so compelling that any political leader should have been perfectly prepared to commit, all things considered, relatively minor acts of public dishonesty so to intervene, then Mr Blair’s only crime is to have been found out.

But since incompetent Machiavellians are probably the last people by whom we should wish to be governed, it’s not a terribly strong line of defence after all.

UPDATE [31.8.2003]: Norman Geras replies.

Channel Four News’s Gaby Rado has died in Iraq. He seems to have fallen off the roof of his hotel in Suleimaniya.

The Nigerian email scam has now found itself in an Iraqi incarnation…

At 1:17 PM -0500 3/29/03, Farouk Al-Bashar wrote:
Re: Urgent Assistance Needed

By way of introduction I am Eng. Farouk Al-Bashar, I represent my family as the oldest son of the Al-Bashar family, who are the descendants of Ibrahim Al-Bashar Ali from one of the oil rich areas in Iraq. Over the years my family has acquired huge sums of money from royalties for the exploration of oil in our region but over the past 15 years, Saddam Hussein and his gangs of bandits have taken our oils without payments and we can not complain as those who did are all dead. In the wake of the Gulf War of 1990, our family withdrew most moneys that remain in coded bank accounts that Saddam did not find and we hide it in a secret chamber underground, where it remained safe until after the war. At the end of Gulf war, we moved the funds into a private vault of a security company in Baghdad, where it was until we collected it a few days ago on the fear of the eminent war with America…

The eminent war with America is pretty fearful. Excellent, though, that current affairs have caught up with the 419 scam, although this isn’t as inspired as the Afghanistan version of this particular fraud which presented the plight of a group of British servicemen whose code of “military ethics” forbade them from exporting suitcases full of cash they had seized, and perhaps you could help…

This predates the war (I first saw it on 9 March) and has been reprinted in many other places, but it still makes me laugh and it’s worth throwing into recirculation here, just in case it finds any new and appreciative readers…

VIETNAM 2 PREFLIGHT CHECK

1. Cabal of oldsters who won’t listen to outside advice? Check.
2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.
3. Imposing country boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.
4. Unshakeable faith in our superior technology? Check.
5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.
9. Fear we’ll look bad if we back down now? Check.
10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.
11. Land war in Asia? Check.
12. Right unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.
13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.
14. Soldiers about to be dosed with *our own* chemicals? Check.
15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.
16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.
17. B-52 bombers? Check.
18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.
19. In-fighting among the branches of the military? Check.
20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.
21. Local experts ignored? Check.
22. Local politicians ignored? Check.
23. Locals used to conflicts lasting longer than the USA has been a country? Check.
24. Against advice, Prez won’t raise taxes to pay for war? Check.
25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.
26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don’t go our way? Check.
27. Unpopular war? Check.

VIETNAM 2 YOU ARE CLEARED TO TAXI

I think France has moved beyond “secretly” hoping that the US will screw up in a big way, and Russia too, but in general this analysis — unlike so many others — has survived the first week of the invasion.

Naunihal emails to remind me about a 1991 article from the Guardian by David Omissi - then a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, now senior lecturer in imperial history at the University of Hull - which describes the British Government’s use of poison gas on the peoples of what is now Iraq in the interwar period. It describes how Sir Aylmer Haldane used gas shells on Arabs in central Iraq in 1920 during a campaign which killed 9,000, and how, over a decade later, Winston Churchill himself sought to drop mustard gas bombs on Kurdish populations in the north-east despite warnings of the damage these would do to noncombatants. “In the event”, the article notes, “the air force did not use gas bombs - for technical rather than humanitarian reasons”.

Take the Iraq War Quiz!

1. The anti-war movement supports our troops by urging that they be brought home immediately so they neither kill nor get killed in a unjust war. How has the Bush administration shown its support for our troops?a. The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted to cut $25 billion in veterans benefits over the next 10 years.

b. The Bush administration proposed cutting $172 million from impact aid programs which provide school funding for children of military personnel.

c. The administration ordered the Dept. of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.

d. All of the above.

And so on, for ten damning questions-and-well-documented-answers.

Dear Friends,

Please consider adding your name to the following statement. If, after reading it, you like what it has to say, please take a few seconds to visit this page and add your name to the statement. The statement was released on March 27, 2003, and already more than 2697 have signed on!

“I stand for peace and justice.

I stand for democracy and autonomy. I don�t think the U.S. or any other country should ignore the popular will and violate and weaken international law, seeking to bully and bribe votes in the Security Council.

I stand for internationalism. I oppose any nation spreading an ever expanding network of military bases around the world and producing an arsenal unparalleled in the world.

I stand for equity. I don�t think the U.S. or any other country should seek empire. I don�t think the U.S. ought to control Middle Eastern oil on behalf of U.S. corporations and as a wedge to gain political control over other countries.

I stand for freedom. I oppose brutal regimes in Iraq and elsewhere but I also oppose the new doctrine of �preventive war,� which guarantees permanent and very dangerous conflict, and is the reason why the U.S. is now regarded as the major threat to peace in much of the world. I stand for a democratic foreign policy that supports popular opposition to imperialism, dictatorship, and political fundamentalism in all its forms.

I stand for solidarity. I stand for and with all the poor and the excluded. Despite massive disinformation millions oppose unjust, illegal, immoral war, and I want to add my voice to theirs. I stand with moral leaders all over the world, with world labor, and with the huge majority of the populations of countries throughout the world.

I stand for diversity. I stand for an end to racism directed against immigrants and people of color. I stand for an end to repression at home and abroad.

I stand for peace. I stand against this war and against the conditions, mentalities, and institutions that breed and nurture war and injustice.

I stand for sustainability. I stand against the destruction of forests, soil, water, environmental resources, and biodiversity on which all life depends.

I stand for justice. I stand against economic, political, and cultural institutions that promote a rat race mentality, huge economic and power inequalities, corporate domination even unto sweatshop and slave labor, racism, and gender and sexual hierarchies.

I stand for a policy that redirects the money used for war and military spending to provide healthcare, education, housing, and jobs.

I stand for a world whose political, economic, and social institutions foster solidarity, promote equity, maximize participation, celebrate diversity, and encourage full democracy.

I stand for peace and justice and, more, I pledge to work for peace and justice.”

The co-authored essay which produced this statement is here, with a list of the initial signatories.

1.Last year’s classic song “If You Cannot Find Osama, Bomb Iraq” has now been turned into a flash animation. (Via Nick Barlow via Barney Gumble.)

2. The Onion’s war edition is out, with Bush Bravely Leads 3d Infantry Into Battle, Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy (”Baghdad resident Taha Sabri, killed Monday in a U.S. air strike on his city, would have loved the eventual liberation of Iraq and establishment of democracy, had he lived to see it, his grieving widow said…), and a handy Point/Counterpoint: This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism — No It Won’t.

3. The best recent entertaining-if-true-but-it-probably-isn’t story comes in the reports that Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary may be in Amman en route to Baghdad to be a human shield. (UPDATE: Or is it the other Cheney daughter, Elizabeth — the straight daughter who works for the Administration — who is in Amman in order to begin ceasefire negotiations?)

4. In the beyond parody category, we should place Andrew Sullivan’s confession that “I cannot read the New York Times right now”, together the decision to award Dick Cheney’s Halliburton a big juicy contract to fight oilwell fires in Iraq without even putting it out to tender…

A friend reports this fine remark on the Today programme this morning to me, from Air Marshall Brian Burridge, the head of UK forces in Iraq:

“Our mission is to win hearts and minds, but we’re doing it with force”.