More deception

Sometimes I could almost pity Tony Blair. It can't be easy, leading the country day after day, coping with successive crises, dealing with tragedies such as the attacks on London this month, all the while with the millstone of Iraq hanging round his neck.

He has been forced to justify and defend the US led conquest with such a web of lies that he now seems to be trapped, struck fast and unable to escape. It's sad. But anyway, fuck him. He shouldn't be in charge anymore when there is so much evidence that he breached ministerial conduct rules.

Once again today he has been caught peddling misleading information relating to the judgment of Britain's security services on Iraq.

After the Madrid bombings the Spanish government were quick to accuse ETA, presumably to divert attention from Al Qaeda - the implication being that if it was Al Qaeda then the unpopular war in Iraq must have been a factor.

That particular route wasn't open to Blair after 7/7, so he and his government moved straight into denial mode - No it couldn't have been to do with Iraq, how absurd to think such a thing! The war in Iraq did not make attacks on the UK more likely.

But according to the secret June report leaked to the NYT, this was not the opinion of the security services - the very people who ought to know best:

"Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK,"

I'm not saying that Blair was responsible for the attacks - that was all down to the terrorists - just that, as usual, he's not telling the truth about Iraq.

Election time

Well this is supposed to be a political blog so I had better say something about the election.

I’d say that a Conservative government under Howard would be about the worst thing that could possibly happen. Leaving immigration and the fear card to one side, I think that the Tories would attempt to drag the country back to the bad old days of cuts and underinvestment – their target being to reduce tax as a proportion of GDP down to US levels.

Having said that, I won't be voting Labour, not this time. I have the 'luxury' of living in a fairly safe Tory constituency (Rushcliffe) so I’ll probably vote Green. Would I vote Labour if I lived in a marginal? I just can't say. I want a Labour government but I'd settle for a hung parliament.

Democracy and the Middle East

More forthright stuff from Seumas Milne in the Guardian

What the US campaign is clearly not about is the promotion of democracy in either Lebanon or Syria, where the most plausible alternative to the Assad regime are radical Islamists. In a pronouncement which defies satire, Bush insisted on Tuesday that Syria must withdraw from Lebanon before elections due in May "for those elections to be free and fair". Why the same point does not apply to elections held in occupied Iraq - where the US has 140,000 troops patrolling the streets, compared with 14,000 Syrian soldiers in the Lebanon mountains - or in occupied Palestine, for that matter, is unexplained. And why a UN resolution calling for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon has to be complied with immediately, while those demanding an Israeli pullout from Palestinian and Syrian territory can be safely ignored for 38 years, is apparently unworthy of comment.

...

What has actually taken place since 9/11 and the Iraq war is a relentless expansion of US control of the Middle East, of which the threats to Syria are a part. The Americans now have a military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar - and in not one of those countries did an elected government invite them in. Of course Arabs want an end to tyrannical regimes, most of which have been supported over the years by the US, Britain and France: that is the source of much anti-western Muslim anger. The dictators remain in place by US licence, which can be revoked at any time - and managed elections are being used as another mechanism for maintaining pro-western regimes rather than spreading democracy.

War on Terror - Update

The BBC documentary Power of Nightmares is being shown again, beginning tonight at 23.20 on BBC2, with part 2 tomorrow and part 3 on Thursday. I mentioned the series earlier today by chance and have only just discovered it is being re-shown.

I strongly recommend it.

THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES
Three part series
Tuesday, 18 January, 2005
2320 GMT on BBC Two

I: Baby It's Cold Outside
II: The Phantom Victory
III: The Shadows In The Cave

War on Terror

The "War on Terror" is getting some discussion in US blogs at the moment. Maybe people are waking up to the idea that it's all about control.

Here's a couple, following on from the Chris Bowers piece I mentioned earlier:

Moral Questions (discussed in this Kos diary)
Frameshop (Kos diary)

The BBC broadcast a documentary last autumn called The Power of Nightmares. This highly acclaimed 3-part series tells the the story of two groups, the radical Islamists and the neo-conservatives, whose paths came together in Afghanistan and who both came away believing they had slain the mighty communist empire. It's concise and informative and full of interviews with people who were involved. Only trouble is, it's 3 hours long!

Peter Kaminski has links to video feeds, reviews and transcripts.

Freedom of speech?

George Monbiot:

The role of the media corporations in the United States is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won’t be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not.

So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become president must first learn to live in fairyland.

Of course, this is all well known to US democrats - they call it the 'Republican Noise Machine' - which is why the activism website Media Matters for America was set up.

The transatlantic gap

David Clark, a former Labour government adviser, has an good piece in today's Guardian calling on British politicians to wake up and smell the coffee:

...in terms of values, Britain is a mainstream European country. The Pew survey, to take one example, shows that 62% of British people believe that government has a responsibility to ensure that no one is in need, compared with 57% in Germany and 62% in France. The figure for America is 34%. Similar trends can be discerned on military intervention, the UN, religion and morality.

...

We now have perfect symmetry between right- and leftwing visions of the special relationship: the former posits a Britain that doesn't exist, the latter an America that doesn't exist. The question is how much longer our national policy can be allowed to rest on fantasy. As they say in America, it's time wake up and smell the coffee.

City of Ghosts

The Guardian has some first independent reports from within Fallujah in the aftermath of the assault, plus a clip from a film being shown on tonight's Channel 4 News.

Last November, US military forces, backed by British soldiers from the Black Watch, launched their biggest ever assault on the city of Falluja, Operation Phantom Fury.

Over the last two weeks, Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi doctor turned film-maker for Guardianfilms, has succeeded in making it into the city and the surrounding refugee camps. He discovered people had been shot in their beds, rabid dogs were feeding on corpses, and there was little to no water, electricity or sewage. A city of over 300,000 people had been destroyed and its inhabitants were homeless.

With just two weeks until the Iraqi elections, not a single voter in Falluja has received a ballot paper. Far from stabilising the region in preparation for the election, it seems the US military's decision to use the Iraqi National Guard against this Sunni city has fanned the flames of civil war in the entire country.

December 25 2004
By 10am we were inside the city. It was completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn't see a single building that was functioning.

The Americans had put a white tape across the roads to stop people wandering into areas that they still weren't allowed to enter. I remembered the market from before the war, when you couldn't walk through it because of the crowds. Now all the shops were marked with a cross, meaning that they had been searched and secured by the US military. But the bodies, some of them civilians and some of them insurgents, were still rotting inside.

There were dead dogs everywhere in this area, lying in the middle of the streets. Reports of rabies in Falluja had reached Baghdad, but I needed to find a doctor.

Fallujans are suspicious of outsiders, so I found it surprising when Nihida Kadhim, a housewife, beckoned me into her home. She had just arrived back in the city to check out her house; the government had told the people three days earlier that they should start going home. She called me into her living room. On her mirror she pointed to a message that had been written in her lipstick. She couldn't read English. It said: "Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it!"

Victory is near!

I occasionally read things by Americans who see the cycle of violence in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost, just like Vietnam.

Nonsense! I think the war has been a great success, in terms of achieving all its aims - just look at what has been accomplished:

1) Saddam was removed
2) Bush was re-elected
3) The War on Terror has been advanced (in that its main objective is to be perpetual war)
4) A puppet government has been installed and bunch of binding agreements signed
5) Haliburton and the rest of the military-industrial complex made a lot of money
6) Permanent military bases have been built all over the region
7) Iraq is now under legal obligation to keep supplying the US with oil pretty much forever
8) The Iraqi economy got opened up, privatised and sold off

Yes, the situation on the ground is chaotic and soldiers have been dying (along with 100,000 or so civilians) but everything else is just fine, according to the standards that the Bush administration set themselves.

Sometime this year many of the troops will come home, the rest will be confined to bases and Iraq will drop out of the news – victory will be complete. Iraq may not end up peaceful, free or particularly democratic but then that will be an Iraqi problem.

Cynical but true.

Why Bush won - the "War On Terror"

Chris Bowers of MyDD has a good post about how the Democratic party handed Bush the election by swallowing the "War On Terror" idea, hook, line and sinker.

Nice one.