The two heads of the “coalition” of forces occupying Iraq are both in BIG political trouble.
Blair was already foundering– especially after Labour’s disastrous showing in Thursday’s local elections. Just yesterday, he axed Jack Straw and a bunch of other ministers (including former SecDef John Reid). And the Sunday Telegraph had gotten hold of a letter, reportedly supported by 50 Labour backbench MPs, in which they were demanding a speedy timetable for Tony to get out of No. 10, Downing Street.
(And soon after that, I would hope, out of Iraq as well.)
But all of that political unrest came before the downing of the British chopper in a heavily populated portion of Basra, in southern Iraq, Saturday.
In that piece AP’s Robert Reid writes from Baghdad that the chopper,
- apparently was hit by a missile Saturday and crashed in Basra, triggering a confrontation in which jubilant Iraqis pelted British troops with stones, hurled firebombs and shouted slogans in support of a radical Shiite Muslim cleric.
So much for the Brits allegedly knowing how to run an occupation any “better” than the Americans, as they had previously claimed.
Robert Reid continued,
- British soldiers with armored vehicles rushed to the site and were met by a hail of stones from a crowd of at least 250 people, many of them teenagers, who jumped for joy and raised their fists as thick smoke rose from the wreckage.
As many as three armored vehicles were set on fire, apparently with gasoline bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, but the troops inside escaped unhurt, witnesses said.
The crowd chanted “we are all soldiers of al-Sayed,” a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of foreign troops being in Iraq.
Calm returned by nightfall as Iraqi authorities imposed a curfew and hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers set up checkpoints and patrolled the streets, residents said. Sporadic rocket fire could be heard throughout Basra, Iraq’s second largest city…
In a piece in Sunday’s Independent about the burning of Straw, Francis Elliott wrote,
- Jack Straw’s fate was sealed in a phone call from the White House to Tony Blair last month, according to the former foreign secretary’s friends.
They say President George Bush was furious that Mr Straw said it was “nuts” to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option reported to be under active consideration in Washington.
Downing Street had already warned Mr Straw repeatedly to tone down his complete rejection of the military route as “inconceivable”, insisting it was important to keep all options on the table.
Actually, it seems Straw had at least two serious strikes against him. One, he had seriously annoyed Tony’s close pal Pres. Bush. Two, he was thought to be ways too friendly with Blair’s nemesis in the Labour Party, Gordon Brown– the guy who’s just waiting in the wings until Tony makes his long-promised “exit” from the premiership.
Here in the US, meanwhile, we have the whole ongoing implosion of the Bush presidency… what with the Goss-Negroponte dust-up and the Foggo scandal, which between them are leaving not just the presidency but also the country’s longer term intelligence capabilities in chaos.
The WaPo’s Linzer and Pincus wrote today that,
- senior administration officials said Bush had lost confidence in Goss, 67, almost from the beginning and decided months ago to replace him. In what was described as a difficult meeting in April with Negroponte, Goss was told to prepare to leave by May, according to several officials with knowledge of the conversation…
And Dana Priest wrote:
- Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq’s weapons capability.
But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.
Not surprisingly, the Prez’s poll numbers are yet further down. Even Fox News’s poll can only get him 38 percent of support these days…
Also heading downward: the US-led “coalition”‘s performance in Afghanistan. Underlining that fact, Bush had his own downed helicopted problem today: ten US soldiers were killed when their Chinook came down in the east of Afghanistan.
This crazy idea that militarism can solve our problems and make the world safer is so incredibly harmful– to everyone concerned!!
Are we now, I wonder, getting to the point of understanding that our parents and grandparents had reached in the summer of 1945, when they penned these words…
- “We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…”
Those words– which are the very first words in the UN Charter– were written in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, remember… That is, in the aftermath of a war that nearly everyone nowadays (and most of the victors back then) has thought of as having been a “good war.”
Well, however “good” or necessary it was, the people who had lived through it well understood that it, like every war, was a scourge.
And if even World War 2 was a “scourge”, then what about George W. Bush’s war to invade Iraq??
Now, the two key authors of the war are both in big political trouble. Now is surely therefore the time for the rest of humankind to get together and figure out how to use the United Nations and all its mechanisms for nonviolent problem-solving to rebuild the secure, life-affirming, right-respecting order that those two deeply misguided men and their accomplices have so notably failed to provide.
The problem is, every single month these two rule, brings something ugly. Recent Cheney’s speech on Russia was bad 🙁
Helena
May I add a correction?
John Reid was in fact promoted to be Home Secretary from being Defence Secretary.
Charles Clarke the Home Secretary was the big casualty, and got zapped for mislaying 1000 “foreign” criminals that someone forgot to deport at the end of their sentences.
It is curious to see the prominence accorded to Jack Straw being demoted to Leader of the House in the US papers compared to the UK papers who all concentrate on the sacking of Clarke a close ally of the Dear Leader.
Was Mr`Straw really such an obstacle to the attack on Iran?
His successor is unlikely to be an obstacle to anything.
Helena,
May be both having problems now, but I think this changes it’s the starting point for the next war “Iran War”.
This new setting of administration in US, and new ministers in UK as part of “ Go to War Government ”.
Are we now, I wonder, getting to the point of understanding that our parents and grandparents had reached in the summer of 1945, when they penned these words…
Helena,
Therein lies the problem. It certainly wasn’t *my* parents or grandparents who penned those words. It was the men who sent my grandparents to war to die while they and the rest of the wealthy were safe at home.
Here it is happening again. The people being killed everyday in Iraq, whether foreign soldiers or Iraqi civilians or resistance fighters, are all dying for the interests of the wealthy.
GW, Tony Blair, Iyad Allawi, Chalabi, Al-Hakim, Jaafari, even statesmen such as Adnan Pachachi belong to a similar economic class.
60 years after Hiroshima, nearly 100 years since the invention of the machine gun, the wealthy are still convincing the weak to fight.
Brian,
The wealthy are safe planning their two month summer vacation away from home:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060505/gulf_us_arab_tourists.html?.v=4
Gulf Arabs and foreign expatriates tend to flee the searing Gulf summers, staying away as long as two months. This summer, with the region awash in record oil revenues, travel experts said vacations would be more lucrative than ever.
A family of six Gulf Arabs visiting Canada typically spends as much as a 40-person tour group from Germany, Engesser said.
“They don’t travel budget class,”said Wilson, the university official.
Politicians associated with Bush are not doing well. We have witnessed the fall of Bush’s allies in Spain and Italy.
I wonder about how a seemingly intelligent person like Blair could go along with Bush’s half-baked schemes. Of course, Blair seems to have a craving for bombing Iraq; he went along with Clinton’s agressions. Ultimately I suppose Britain’s policies will not be about personalities. Still BUsh seems totally incompetent. Has anyone ever asked Blair about the U.S. National Security Strategy to rule the world?
The UN is a complicated issue. I think it is naive to expect the UN to solve the problems in international relations; the UN in fact is implicated in U.S. crimes against Iraq. The institution is bankrupt. I think problems of world governance are no less complicated then problems of national governance. History describes to us the tortuous process people have experienced to develop systems of national governance. In the U.S. the system was designed to have checks and balances, transparency, and accountability for policy makers from those effected (voters). Is this present in the U.N. system?
“…the people who had lived through it well understood that it, like every war, was a scourge.”
IT seems to me one of the horrific aspects of the sanctions on Iraq (or in general with the CIA dirty wars against developing countries) is that because Americans were not directly inconvenienced by these wars they were comfortable with a genocidal status quo. I blame the U.S. press to some extent, although they may simply be reflecting U.S. attitiudes.
This crazy idea that militarism can solve our problems and make the world safer is so incredibly harmful– to everyone concerned!!
This is so, so true. The US strategy of global domination via the military as embodied in the National Security Strategy is the worst thing to come out of the Bush administration. Yet there has been hardly any mention, let alone criticism, of this policy by either the Democrats or the press. The level is public discourse is like that of the Iraq invasion in March 2003.
One problem, of course, is that many Democrats (example: the Clintons) seem to agree with much of that strategy, whether they say so aloud or not. Though the policy is absolutely guaranteed to fail, few criticize it in public. Henry Waxman of California is one of the exceptions.
“This new setting of administration in US, and new ministers in UK as part of ‘ Go to War Government ‘.”
Salah, I think this is exactly what Bush and Blair have in mind. Will they get away with it? Who knows?
“I wonder about how a seemingly intelligent person like Blair could go along with Bush’s half-baked schemes. ”
edq, I used to wonder the same thing, but I’ve changed my view of Blair. I am now convinced that he is every bit as messianic and gung-ho about this military adventurism as Bush is.
I think the UN is the wrong place to look for a solution. The problem is the breakdown of political checks and balances in the US and the UK. Actually, the underlying problem is that the US is already on the down slope of the return-on-investment curve faced by all would-be world empires. It is a time of desperate acts. There is absolutely nothing the UN can do about these things.
there was an article in the boston globe ideas section about a month ago that referred to the “professional electoral party”. It was about the guy in thailand who soon after the article ran stepped down. Berlesconi and blair were mentioned and bush was implied. they areonly vaguely members of their ostensible parties. George bush is hardly the first person you think of when you think republican, particularly on spending and immigration.
These new types of candidates rely heavily on focus groups, money, and incredibly well run campaigns. they ineveitably run against “establishment” candidates totally devoid of charisma.
I think the world is tired of these types. I think what Ireland is doing is the way of the future: low taxes, less government, less politics. though I think they need to get out of the doomed EU.
“I think what Ireland is doing is the way of the future: low taxes, less government, less politics.”
I think this formula often seems to be working during economic boom times, like Ireland is currently experiencing. Wait till you experience the hangover, then let us know how things look.
I agree with edq’s last paragraph. Americans have an amazing ability to ignore what we do to others. Sometimes even uglier sentiments come out. After 9/11, even many so-called liberals and leftists thought that any discussion of American crimes in the wake of 9/11 was equivalent to making excuses for mass murder. To even bring up such things was to be accused of saying “So you think we had it coming?” It was unintentionally revealing. The truth is a lot of Americans do think that civilians who suffer in other countries from our policies do have it coming and so they naturally think any critic of American crimes must think we favor atrocities aimed at us. I heard one liberal friend defend the sanctions on Iraq in those terms, though he also said the deaths were all Saddam’s fault. It was important to him to either blame Saddam or blame the Iraqis for not overthrowing Saddam, but the one thing he would not do is blame us.
Blair has said a troop statement is forthcoming.
Spiegel. Claus Christian Malzahn. The Most Powerless Man in the World
I find it hard to believe that Straw could have been brought down on Bush’s orders at this stage, given Bush’s unpopularity in the UK. Rather, isn’t he the one most closely associated with the Iraq War frauds, the one most closely tied in the public mind to the US?
bob h, if Blair gave a toss about what people in the UK thought, he would not have joined Bush’s crusade in the first place (and would not be busily trying to privatise our health and education services).
It seems entirely likely that he would jettison Straw at Bush’s request.
Incidentally, although I welcome Straw’s comments on Iran, I can see why they would be awkward for the US. If you want to scare someone into doing what you say, you don’t want to have your ultimate sanction exposed as a bluff.
I do find it hard to believe that Bush would be allowed to take military action against Iran even if he wanted to – US troops would immediately find themselves fighting the Shia in Iraq as well as the Sunni, for one thing. Not that anything can be entirely ruled out with the current administration…
On Straw’s dismissal, this article argues that he was just too independent, and doesn’t think too much of Straw’s offence in calling the idea of a war against Iran ‘nuts’.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2171293,00.html
I don’t know whether she’s right, but certainly the successor lacks Straw’s stature, so she’s bound to be tied in to Blair’s apron strings.
Things are certainly rocky for Blair right now. The cabinet reshuffle was badly done. Whether he will survive or not, we don’t yet know. My instinct is to think that he is an astute politician, and he will probably get over it this time.
However I do find Blair is an increasingly egotistical politician. I don’t believe any of this stuff about him leaving. He may say, and it would make logical sense, that he plans to leave soon, having had 10 years or whatever. However I am certain that his massive ego is going to get in the way, and he will have to be thrown out.
This last cabinet reshuffle has tightened the reins of power in his own hands. He has been putting non-entities into the major ministries, which means it is him who makes the decisions.
All of that has only an indirect impact on policy towards the Middle East, but if it is he who decides about a war on Iran (I mean from the British point of view) rather than Straw, then the chances of an attack are much greater.
“Politicians associated with Bush are not doing well.”
What about Howard in Australia, Merkel in Germany, Koizumi in Japan? Sakorzy in France has a strong relationship with the Administration; Villepin, on the other hand, does not…who’s doing better in the polls for next year’s presidential election? On the other hand, how are the politicians (like Chirac and Schroder) that opposed Bush doing?
What they are doing in the post-Soviet space..
2006-05-09 The new cold war and post-Soviet “de-colonization”
2006-05-09 On Ahmadinejad’s letter
Israeli army Geyoura Iland “Arabic Text”
Israeli army Geyoura Iland , reported by Rutors, if Iran got Nuke, they will not give this weopens to Islamic Extrnes neither Torrests!!!!
WHy and How he Knows? Hallow any one can explians this changes from Isralis?