Category: Blair’s Britain (vintage)

Influential Brit-tank urges US-Iran talks: the text

The Foreign Policy Centre, which is a relatively young but well connected British think-tank, earlier this week issued a significant report titled Time to Talk: The case for Diplomatic Solutions on Iran.
That link there goes to an easy-to-download and -read HTML version of the Executive Summary and Recommendations sections of the report.
I made that HTML version myself, as a public service, by cut-n-pasting from the PDF version of the report that’s posted on the FPC website— because I think the report is important but I am totally fed-up with trying to download, read, and use materials that are posted on the web only in the form of clunky great PDF files. And I imagine many other people might be, too.
A plea to the friends at the FPC: When you have important and serious contributions to add to the global discourse on crucial issues, please do so in a way that is web-friendly and thus aids the timely dissemination of your ideas to the global public, and not just in a form that is optimized for people who can come along in person to pick up your dead-tree version, along with all the over-stylized graphics and totally dysfunctional broad white spaces associated therewith!
Do you think anyone at FPC ever actually tries to use the PDF versions they put up on the web??
I am in Egypt for most of this month. Like the vast majority of the world’s other people, I am now nearly wholly reliant on the web for my connection to the global discourse. I see no way that I could, in anything like timely fashion, get ahold of the dead-tree version of the FPC report… So I am totally reliant on what FPC has put up on the web; and this is, as I said, extremely hard-to-use and inadequate.
FPC should take a page out of the “communications strategy” book used by, for example, Human Rights Watch. When they have a report to issue they will typically produce a “Media Release” that contains the main points of the report, plus a couple of canned quotes attributed to (or perhaps even uttered by?) some person connected with the report. They send that Release out to their media contacts and also post its whole text in HTML on their website, along with a link to the full text of the report that is in PDF or sometimes in HTML as well.
By contrast, when looking for material about the “Time to Talk” report on the FPC website today (Wednesday) I found only a very dated notice telling me that the report “will be launched… at 10.30am on Monday 5 February 2007”, along with a few additional pieces of teaser information about it… And then, links– presumably added subsequent to the launch?– to: the PDF version of the whole text in English, a Farsi-language version of the Executive Summary, and a BBC report on the launch.
Kudos to them for producing– and in timely fashion even if only as a clunky PDF file– the Farsi-language materials.
But another gripe I had with what they offered was that the report’s Executive Summary did not even contain the Recommendations! Why on earth not? Instead, as it stood there in the first 2-3 pages of the dead-tree (and PDF) versions, the Summary ended by arguing that “Diplomacy is the only viable option”, without telling you what the content of that diplomacy should be… For that, you need to scroll down the white wastelands of the PDF file till you get to the “Recommendations” included at the end of the main text.
But they should, surely, be right there in the Exec Summary?
They’re pretty good– and they do constitute, after all, the main argument of this report. They are addressed primarily to a British, or British-governmental, audience.
Here’s what they say:

    Recommendations
    Even according to the worst-case scenario, there is time for further diplomacy. This time should be used to build confidence between the negotiating partners, helping to break cycles of mutual hostility, and to develop Iranian interests in established and potential political and economic relationships with the international community. The possible consequences of military action could be so serious that governments have a responsibility to ensure that all diplomatic options have been exhausted. At present, this is not the case.
    The UK has a role to play in catalysing this process, mediating between EU member states and the US. Through genuine commitment to the diplomatic process, the UK can indicate that it is willing to treat Iran fairly in negotiations, which would strengthen the hand of moderates within Iran and send an important signal to the Iranian people.
    The diplomatic track is clearly fraught with difficulties. But as long as fundamental obstacles remain in place – such as preconditions concerning the suspension of Iran’s enrichment activities – the potential of diplomacy cannot fully be tapped. Diplomatic strategies are most likely to progress if the UK government and other key parties agree:
    ➔ To either remove preconditions for negotiations or find a compromise that allows both the US and Iran to move forward without having to concede on their respective red lines;
    ➔ To seek direct negotiations between Iran and the US;
    ➔ To prioritise proposals and demands by assessing the security risks associated with the different technologies being developed by Iran (i.e. enrichment and reprocessing) and to agree to this assessment within the UN Security Council – Iran’s plans to use reprocessing technology should be addressed promptly;
    ➔ To develop the proposals offered by the P5+1 on 6 June 2006 in return for tighter inspections and a commitment from Iran to abandon all ambitions towards reprocessing (as offered by the Iranians in 2005);
    ➔ To explicitly address mutual security guarantees for the US, Israel and Iran.
    The UK has an important role to play in fostering a climate of pragmatism. It is recommended that the UK government continue to give full backing to the diplomatic process whilst directly addressing the need for full and direct negotiations between Iran and the US administration. The time available should be used to build confidence on both sides, and the UK has a crucial role to play in supporting that process. Only through direct US-Iranian engagement can an agreement be found and the potentially devastating consequences of military action be avoided.

That last paragraph is crucial.
Will Tony Blair respond positively to FPC’s urgings, I wonder? In the “About us” page on their website they say: “The Foreign Policy Centre is a leading European think tank launched under the patronage of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to develop a vision of a fair and rule-based world order… ” I am not entirely sure what “patronage” involves in this context. It should, surely, at the very least imply that he gives serious consideration to the arguments they make?
But anyway, the general arguments there are relevant for a readership far beyond the wave-tossed borders of the British Isles– including, a readership in the halls of power in the United States. Particularly the arguments the report makes for an intensification of the diplomacy and the opening of direct negotiations between Iran and the USA.
Anyway, do feel free to download and broadly distribute the HTML file I’ve produced there.

Blair’s general woes

Last week, the British Army’s chief of staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, caused an uproar when he told interviewer Sarah Sands that, “we should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems…”
Mark Townsend and my old buddy Ned Temko had some great background on the whole Dannatt affair– including the hissy-fit of outrage that came from the US Embassy when news of the interview leaked out– in this piece, which ran in The Observer, last Sunday.
They noted this about reaction to Dannatt’s remarks from people in the British military:

    There was, however, a tangible lift in the body language of the British soldiers swapping banter in the mess tents of Basra and Lashkar Gar, Afghanistan. Those enduring the searing heat and danger of the desert battlefields celebrated a boss who talked the way they thought…
    A poll on an army website asking users whether Dannatt’s comments were right or wrong offers corroboration. By midday yesterday, 97 per cent believed their general was right or practically right with his assessment. No one deemed him wrong. The tone of the entries ranged widely, but the message was unmistakable.
    ‘Thank God – some genuine leadership based on reality,’ said one about their leader.

Since then, Blair’s woes with his mouthy generals have been multiplying.
On Tuesday, Brig. Ed Butler, the outgoing commander of the British forces in Afghanistan told reporters that, “The decision to divert forces to invade Iraq cost the West years of progress in Afghanistan.”
The author of that story, Peter Graff, notes that Britain still has more than 7,000 troops in Iraq, at the same time that it’s providing the overall NATO headquarters in Afghanistan as well as a task force in Helmand province. He continues:

    British commanders acknowledge that running both long-term campaigns has left them with virtually no spare capacity, and they have begged other NATO countries urgently to send more troops and aircraft to Afghanistan, so far with little response.
    Butler said the shortage of aircraft for resupplying his troops meant paratroops at remote forward bases were at times down to “belt rations” — eating only what they could carry.
    “It was very close,” he said.

Butler noted that for now, the latest Taliban offensive in helmand province had been beaten back. But he added: “If we take our eye off the ball and we don’t continue to invest in it then there’s a danger they could come back in bigger numbers next year.”
A lot more anger toward Blair was expressed by Col. (retd.) Tim Collins, who had headed the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Collins says:

    The timescale for any British withdrawal from Iraq will be a complex matter and one wholly dependent on our American and Iraqi allies.
    Observers and commentators have given warning of the danger of failing to robustly pursue the mission in Iraq or face the possibility of actually compounding the problem.
    Three years into the occupation, with no real improvement, it is time to admit failure. That is what the Chief of the General Staff, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, was doing last week. Indeed the British failure in Iraq may be characterised by history as “ill conceived and without enough effort”.

He notes that the British troops are “now almost confined to barracks.” (I believe that the same is true of the massive numbers of US troops in Iraq, too.)
He concludes thus:

    The British Army has not lost its spine; far from it. But the continued deployment to Iraq, long past any earlier UK estimates, coupled by the muddled state of domestic government in the UK – cuts to military strength whilst liabilities are dramatically increased – has struck at the roots of our military.
    Coupled with the further adventure in Afghanistan, our military has run out of resources. We must win in Afghanistan; our national security and control of the opium on to our streets demands this.
    Iraq was a “nice to do”. The end has come not because of any deeply contemplated policy decision, but because Tony Blair and his mates have driven our military like joyriders in a stolen car. Gen Dannatt has informed them that it has just run out of petrol. Let’s hope they don’t torch it to cover their tracks.

Ouch.
We should note the strategic-level judgment that Collins was expressing there: essentially, that not losing in Afghanistan is more important to (British) national security than not losing in Iraq. It strikes me this is the nub of the issue being debated within the British Ministry of Defence these days.
I wonder if this debate has even been seriously raised yet within policymaking circles in Washington? The resource constraints within the military– mainly, the manpower constraint– seem to have reached a critical point in Britain earlier than they have reached it in the US. But perhaps it is just that the British generals are braver about speaking out in public– where they deem it absolutely necessary– than the many, many highly overpaid flag officers within the US military…
But this issue of “Afghanistan vs. Iraq” is one that will surely require some very focused attention in Washington in the weeks ahead.
On the issue of generals speaking out in democracies, the WaPo’s Eugene Robinson recently roundly criticized Dannatt for having done so. Recalling his time as a correspondent in Brazil in the late 1980s, he argued that generals really should not intervene in politics.
He wrote:

    Dannatt, being correct in his analysis of the situation and properly worried about the state of his army, had two choices: He could have argued his case to Blair privately, or he could have resigned and spoken out publicly. Probably he has already done the former. Had he done the latter, I’d be singing his praises.
    But I don’t like active-duty generals dabbling in politics, even if I agree with them. Dannatt should run for Parliament if he wants to set foreign policy. If I were Blair, I’d advance Dannatt’s political career by relieving him of his current duties.

I am not sure about Robinson’s argument here. I think, firstly, that there’s a large difference between an army chief of staff speaking out in public with a professional assessment of the state of his forces and the strategic challenges ahead, and a chief of staff who stages a coup to seize political power. The Brazil analogy really doesn’t seem to hold much water.
Secondly, I expect that Dannatt was prepared for the prospect that Blair might seek his speedy firing after the publication of the remarks. But he went ahead and uttered therm anyway. Realistically, though, I would say that Dannatt probably assessed his chances of getting fired as low. In essence, that’s because Tony Blair’s political stock– in the country and even within his own party– is so low, and over precisely this isssue of Iraq, too, that he would merely end up making a fool of himself had he tried to fire the general.
But maybe Dannatt’s action was also directed toward encouraging his US counterparts to have a bit more spine in their dealings with their political “masters”? That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, one final note here. Lewis Page has a strong piece that defends Dannatt’s decision to speak out, on the Propsect mag website. He writes:

    By his oath of attestation, Dannatt is loyal to the Queen, not to Tony Blair or the Labour party. As a practical matter, unwritten like so much of the British constitution, this means that his true superiors are the British public. He has done nothing wrong by giving a professional opinion to his real bosses.
    Sadly, Dannatt’s outspokenness is unlikely to repeated by his successors. Although he will not be openly disciplined for speaking up on this one occasion—because Tony Blair doesn’t want to spend his last months in office conducting a messy purge—once the succession, presumably to Gordon Brown, has taken place, it will probably be business as usual for the civilian-military relationship.
    That will be a bad thing, far more of a danger to the British constitution than any fantastical military rebellion. Openness in government and freedom of speech are even more fundamental than military subordination to civil power, and these vital principles have been under sustained attack for some time now. The elected representatives of the British people voted freely to send our troops into Iraq, after all. They did so principally because all professional advice against the invasion was ruthlessly suppressed. The principle of constitutional loyalty was used to crush all authoritative dissent. An intelligence officer, John Morrison, who dared to speak out in 2004 was summarily fired. It has been made plain to military people that they will suffer the same fate if they ever contradict the party line.
    But the generals at the very top aren’t really afraid of being dismissed, or even passed over…

Good arguments there.

Good questions about Blair’s claimed terror plot

Craig Murray is the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who lost his job over his refusal to go along with Blair/Bush plan to hide Uzbekistan’s ghastly torture record. He writes in this post on his blog that,

    Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this what Murray says there about the “terror plot” that was announced with such fanfare by Tony Blair (and indeed, also by George W. Bush) last week:

    None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.
    In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
    What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
    Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way…
    We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for “Another 9/11”. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
    We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that “Some people don’t get” the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
    For those who don’t know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party’s “Enforcer”, (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students’ Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
    We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the “Loner” profile you would expect – a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity – that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
    In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few – just over two per cent of arrests – who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
    Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

(Hat-tip to Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution for the Murray link.)
So yes, Murray has persuaded me to be very skeptical. When I was writing this JWN post last Saturday about the Blair government’s “revelations”, I did consider for a while whether to refer to the plot as an “alleged plot”, or not, and finally decided not to.
I guess sometimes I’m just too naive. I would have found it hard to believe that the British police and other government agencies could be so politicized and so craven as to undertake this big, much-publicized “reveal and takedown” operation on the basis of such very, very shaky “information.” And as Murray notes, the timing of it all certainly did look extremely political.
Actually, the idea that the British government agencies might have participated in an intensely politicized exercise in this way makes me even more scared than I was last week about the (alleged, and definitely still not proven) plot itself.
Here’s what Murray wrote, very sensibly, on Aug. 10 itself:

    We wait for the court system to show whether this was a real attempted attack and, if so, it was genuinely operational rather than political to move against it today. But the police’ and security services’ record of lies does not inspire confidence.

Right. Testing and openly establishing the facts of the matter is one of the key functions of a well-run court system. Wouldn’t it be great if the 500 men who’ve now languished in Gitmo for more than four years, and the other hundreds languishing in other US-run “black hole” prisons around the world, could also rely on a court hearing that would show us all– the public in whose name they have been captured and detained this long– whether there was any evidence against them, and if so, what?

Blair and Bush both in big trouble

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.

Craig Murray

I just want to bookmark the website of Craig Murray, the morally gutsy former British Anmbassador in Uzbekistan who quit in 2004 in disgust over the Blair government’s continued support for President Islam Karimov’s extremely rights-abusing practices.
Since resigning, Craig has worked as a tireless activist to expose Karimov’s use of torture and other abusive practices– and also, the US and UK government’s complicity in this.
On December 29, he posted a number of documents on his site that chart his and the FCO’s knowledge of the reliance of the UK and US governments on “information” obtained from suspects by Karimov’s thugs, using torture.
Craig Murray’s courage and clearheaded moral thinking are an example to all.
Given the very much larger number of US diplomats and other government employees who know this kind of information about Karimov– and much more, too, about him and about other thuggish “allies” in the “GWOT– I am really sad that none of them has yet seen fit to follow her or his conscience to the extent that Craig has. (Though I recognize that some US government employees have resigned and “gone public” over other, non-torture aspects of the “GWOT”.)
I know a lot’s been written about Craig Murray elsewhere– including in the MSM. But I needed to put a link in here, certainly.

Meyer’s memoirs

I wish I’d been in London to grab the first copies of the Guardian’s version of Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoirs. Sure, I know I could have gotten them on-line just as fast– or faster. But still, there’s something delicious about ink on paper.
Here is the Guardian’s portal to the serialization.
I think it’s unprecedented for a recently retired British ambassador to publish such a frank memoir about his recent service. I seem to recall that the Blair government tried to prevent publication of the whole book (which isn’t out yet, I don’t think.) But here, anyway, are the first parts of the serialization.
The main highlight so far is the considered judgment of this seasoned diplomat that Blair had potential leverage with Bush that he could have used to win a better war plan– but that Blair failed to use it.
This, from one of yesterday’s excerpts:

    By the early autumn of 2002, despite Blair’s earlier expressions of unconditional support, Britain should have made its participation in any war dependent on a fully worked-out plan, agreed by both sides, for the rehabilitation of Iraq after Saddam’s demise.
    This would have been the appropriate quid pro quo for Blair’s display of “cojones”. We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise, but the ace up our sleeves was that America did not want to go it alone. Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, and unavoidably, at precisely this moment, political energy in London had become consumed by a titanic struggle to keep public opinion, parliament and the Labour party onside for war. There was little energy left in No 10 to think about the aftermath. Since Downing Street drove Iraq policy, efforts made by the Foreign Office to engage with the Americans on the subject came to nothing.

He then suggests clearly that the “diplomatic” advice Blair was getting from the Foreign Office was crowded out in Balir’s mind by the more “seductive” kinds of info he was getting from his military and intel people…

    The more interesting question is whether No 10, relying heavily – maybe too heavily – on the views of these military and intelligence advisers, as a consequence underestimated its political leverage and ability to affect the course of events. I believe the US and the UK would have stood a better chance of going to war in good order had they planned the campaign not for the spring of 2003, but the autumn – the next spell of cool weather in Iraq.
    Besides giving more time to prepare for the aftermath of war, a more deliberate timetable might have made it possible to reach agreement on a second UN resolution. Once that happened, Saddam would have known the game was up. It might have sufficiently ratcheted up the pressure to lead to a coup against him or his flight into exile.
    I never interpreted the French refusal to accept the draft of a second resolution as a refusal for ever and a day. In diplomacy, you never say never. Talking to me in private, French officials accuse America and Britain of deliberately exaggerating France’s position to justify going to war without further UN cover. We will know the full truth only when the archives are opened.
    Crucially, a slower timetable for war would have avoided that frantic search for a “smoking gun” between December 2002 and the outbreak of war. By going down that road, the Americans and British shifted the burden of proof from Saddam to themselves. We had to show that he was guilty. This turned out to be a strategic error, which to this day, in the absence of WMD, continues cruelly to torment Blair and Bush.
    It was precisely these pressures which led to the mistakes and misjudgments of the two British dossiers on Saddam’s WMD.
    Enormous controversy surrounds the intelligence on which Blair and Bush relied. I saw a great deal of intelligence material in 2002, and I was myself persuaded that Iraq had WMD.
    There is nothing of which I am aware that Blair said publicly about the intelligence for which he did not have cover either from the joint intelligence committee (JIC) or from its chairman, John Scarlett. If either succumbed to political pressure, that is another story.
    Had I been in Alastair Campbell’s place, I too would have wanted as categorical a public depiction of Saddam’s threat as possible. Equally I would have expected the JIC to be rigorous in telling me how far I could go.
    Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to the idea that Blair was merely the president’s poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power.But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their disadvantages.
    They place your destiny in the hands of the ally. They fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia and Kurd. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Margaret Thatcher, but, so it seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair.

Well, lots more to read and reflect on there. But I need to run.

Newsflash! US/UK troops unloved in Iraq!

The Daily Telegraph has been shown the results of a poll that the British Ministry of Defence recently (and secretly) commissioned in Iraq, which showed that:

    • Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified – rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;
    • 82 per cent are “strongly opposed” to the presence of coalition troops;
    • less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;
    • 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;
    • 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;
    • 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces…

The poll was conducted nationwide in August, by an Iraqi university research team that was kept unaware of the identity of the body that commissioned it. (I’m wondering about ethical concerns here? Might the university people who organized it now have been put in some jeopardy by the revelation that they were working for the British MOD?)
The D. Tel. article, by Sean Rayment, also notes:

    The results come as it was disclosed yesterday that Lt Col Nick Henderson, the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards in Basra, in charge of security for the region, has resigned from the Army. He recently voiced concerns over a lack of armoured vehicles for his men, another of whom was killed in a bomb attack in Basra last week.
    The secret poll appears to contradict claims made by Gen Sir Mike Jackson, the Chief of the General Staff, who only days ago congratulated British soldiers for “supporting the Iraqi people in building a new and better Iraq”.

Indeed it does.
Rayment wrote:

    Andrew Robathan, a former member of the SAS and the Tory shadow defence minister, said last night that the poll clearly showed a complete failure of Government policy.
    He said: “This clearly states that the Government’s hearts-and-minds policy has been disastrous. The coalition is now part of the problem and not the solution.
    “I am not advocating a pull-out but if British soldiers are putting their lives on the line for a cause which is not supported by the Iraqi people then we have to ask the question, ‘what are we doing there?’ ”

So they don’t really have a robust opposition party in the UK, either, at this point.
Still, at least Robathan seems prepared to raise much tougher questions of the party in power in Westminster than the leaders of the Democratic Party are yet prepared to raise in Washington…

Maggie

Well, happy 80th birthday, Lady Thatcher.
How about this intriguing Thatcherian utterance, described by Tina Brown in today’s WaPo:

    The former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Lord Palumbo, who lunched with Mrs. T six months ago, told me recently what she said when he asked her if, given the intelligence at the time, she would have made the decision to invade Iraq. “I was a scientist before I was a politician, Peter,” she told him carefully. “And as a scientist I know you need facts, evidence and proof — and then you check, recheck and check again. The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof. As a politician the most serious decision you can take is to commit your armed services to war from which they may not return.”

This, of course, was the same Lady (then Mrs.) T who famously, back in August 1990, urged W’s father “not to go wobbly, George” in terms of his confrontation with Saddam.
That was then, and now is now. I wonder what snippets of conversation the once-Iron Maiden exchanged at the gala birthday party hosted for her in London today, with favored guest Tony Blair?

Thoughts of London

AP is now reporting (based on US sources) that the death toll in the London bomb blasts is “at least 40”, and the number of injured more than 300.
This seems like a ghastly, Qaeda-orchestrated replay of the March 2004 Madrid bombings. I imagine that all of London is as hurt and shattered as the Madrilenos were at that time. I just spoke with my sister Diana, who lives in far-west London. She and her family are ok, but she sounded very, very sobered by what was unfolding.
I have numerous other friends and family in London to worry about, too. My niece Rachel is an emergency-room doc at the Royal London Hospital near Liverpool St. Station, which has been taking in many of the casualties. All power to her life-saving elbow in these hours.
So Qaeda (or whichever other actually terrorist group) has been busy organizing all this– not entirely unpredictable by the British authorities, on the day the G-8 summit opens in the UK?– while the British and US governments have been expending truly massive amounts of blood, treasure, and national-level attention on pursuing their wholly unjustified war in Iraq?
Talk about a wholly unnecessary and diversionary expenditure of national energies.
If they had not launched the war against Iraq, but had instead invested one-fourth as much time and finances in a smart policy aimed at (1) doing the solid police work of tracking down and incapacitating the Qaeda leadership, and (2) denying that leadership an operating base by engaging politically with the legitimate demands of potential Qaeda condoners… If the Bush and Blair administrations had done that, Qaeda could have been wiped off the map as an operating force, quite possibly as long ago as late 2002, or 2003.
Instead of which…
I guess it’s not really a time for recriminations now. But we should not forget that back in 2002– or even late 2001– a deliberate choice was made in Washington to invade Iraq, regardless of whether there was any solid link between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda, or not.
I am also thinking, ghastly as things undoubtedly are for Londoners right now, at least they have functioning hospitals and a functioning emergency-response system that can reduce the human damage caused by these bomb blasts to an absolute minimum. Meanwhile, every week in Iraqi cities there are multiple bomb-blasts and other assaults that are comparably damaging– but then, because of the breakdown of the hospital system and of public order there, people who would have been saved in London’s hospitals end up dying because of a lack of adequate support and relief services there… Basic services that were present in Baghdad to a significant degree prior to the US invasion, but have been seriously degraded since then.
Well, we can talk about all this over the days ahead. For now, I send my empathy and human support to all the Londoners affected by these blasts.

Britons regaining senses??

This, from Reuters:

    Most Britons want Prime Minister Tony Blair to set a date for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, according to a poll for the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday.
    Seven out of 10 of those polled by ICM said Blair should set a deadline for a pullout of the 8,500 British soldiers in Iraq.
    By contrast, an ICM-Guardian poll in May found 45 percent of voters believed British troops should remain in Iraq “for as long as necessary.”

In March 2003, I wrote this JWN post: The Brits should know better. All I can say is it took them a long time to come to their senses…
Still, Sept. 21 is the International Day of Peace. Happy Peace Day everyone!! Shalom, salam, paix, mir, paz, amahoro! This current phase of US craziness will, I am sure, come to an end some day!