But can you raise an entire country to the ground purely on that basis – in the 21st century?

Raze, not raise.

This is the second time in a few days that this typo has happened! Doesn’t LC have sub-editors??

“But can you raise an entire country to the ground purely on that basis – in the 21st century?”

Claude, I agree with your assessment of TB but there is an implication in your statement that we should be having a better class of conflict in the modern age?

This is fundamentally wrong headed – today’s conflicts will continue to be as puerile as they have always been.

The only difference will be the potential for ever greater levels of devastation as technology advances.

Tony Blair has managed to radicalise most of Britain, imagine all those Radio 4 listeners seething as we hear more and more from the slippery eel.
In one way Blair has won because he knows he will never be held to account. But in another way he has lost because this issue just wont go away, the good British public are haunting him,and rightly so.
http://bit.ly/5CizMf

Try Jackie Ashley in The Guardian:

The more I’ve watched the Chilcot inquiry, the clearer the answer has become. All those ferocious arguments of seven and eight years ago have swum back into focus: the friendships destroyed; the disillusioned party workers who walked away; the broken trust running like a crevasse through the Labour party. The Iraq war destroyed many people’s trust in politics. It destroyed many lives, and that’s the most important thing. But among the collateral damage has been New Labour itself. It died in Iraq.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/31/new-labour-iraq-destroyed-progressive

That is why Labour needs to disown Blair for its own salvation.

Labour also needs to ask itself how it ever came to elevate a man like Blair to leadership of the Party in the first place.

Some of us were not fooled. Just to recap, between the 1997 and 2005 elections, Blair lost 4 million votes and half the membership of the Labour Party.

When I find Liberals having a problem with the Iraq war it does freak me out.

Are we saying that it is okay for a government to kill its own citizens with nerve agents (which by the way are weapons of mass destruction)? If the Iraq war was illegal so was the war in Kosovo. Because niether had explicit Security council authorisation.

Or is it only okay to intervene when white europeans are murdering muslims but not when a genocidal Muslim leader is killing his own citizens, threatening his neighbours and used weapons of mass destruction in a war against Iran with a million killed.

Tony Blair would be regarded well in history because he had the convictions and he did what was right and it was legal because the parliament backed him and more importantly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights backed him.

Many idiots, suich as Monbiot (who should be hauled to a stupid court) talk about how the sanctions were working. Well, the sanctions did not hurt Saddam and his regime but half a million Iraqi children. That’s acceptable to Liberals then I am ashamed to call myself a liberal.

Secondly, I guess as the United Nations did not authorise military action in East Pakistan (now Bangaldesh) the Government of India is wrong to have tried to stop the rape and the process of annihilating all Bengali intellectuals.

The biggest mistakes in the Iraq war happened after the actual conflict – and you can blame Blair for that. But not for going into war. Finally, in two elections in Iraq over 75% people voted under death threats and they have a young democracy – that by itself is an amazing ahievement whether we like it or not. So I guess the Iraqis like self government – oh something liberals should be proud of. But I guess the bigger agenda is to have self loathing and hatred towards Blair.

And all those who go on about how could the Labour party elect a leader like Blair – well they wanted power. Without power, you cannot do much – and today the society arguments that Tories make, the focus on universal education and attacks on Tory councils who fail local schools is because of the narrative that a Blair led Government set out. The left has won the debate and put the issues of entitlement and aspiration for all in the mainstream – do you lot get that? of course not.

Not too many things in politics in unnuanced – the days where absolute right and absolute wrong are few and far between but hey armchair liberals are not too concerned about that. They are too immersed in their own group think and patting each others back without any reality check.

And the commentary in CIF, and various online sources, when people are made aware of (and political parties use that) turn people away from the left. Because the narratives are coming from latte drinking idiots with very little clue about the real world.

Go on hate Blair but whether you like it or not he would be remembered as an effective and influential prime minister. Now bring on the brick bats.

Some of us were not fooled. Just to recap, between the 1997 and 2005 elections, Blair lost 4 million votes and half the membership of the Labour Party.

Oh, and won three elections.

@6

Oh, and won three elections.

Did you see the other side??

@5: “Are we saying that it is okay for a government to kill its own citizens with nerve agents (which by the way are weapons of mass destruction)?”

No we are not saying that.

Saddam Hussein was a self-serving despot and an aggressor (Iran, Kuwait). But regime change is against international law without UN sanction – and for good reason: the Nazis claimed that the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 was to safeguard the civil rights of German speakers in Danzig. As Blair said in Chicago in April 1999:

“If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar.”

There was no prior UN sanction for the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003. Blair was advised by the senior law officers in the Foreign Office that the proposed invasion was illegal.

Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2003. The claim in the government’s dossier of 24 September 2002 that Weapons of Mass destruction could be used by Iraq armed forces within 45 minutes of a command by Saddam Hussein was based on one unproven source, according the the Butler inquiry. Dr Brian Jones, head of the branch in the Defence Intelligence Service, routinely tasked with assessing incoming intelligence on WMD, disowned the claims in that Dossier.

It was foreseeable that the invasion would destabilise the Middle East – the Iraq government has estimated that some 100,000 civilians have met violent deaths as the result of the invasion.

The Bush-Blair alliance made no plans for Iraq post-invasion.

British troops were sent out to Iraq without essential equipment because of inadequate planning.

Claude,

I’ve no desire to defend Tony Blair, but I think this line of argument is rather weak:

Yet, even if you agreed with this line of thought, it would only make sense if they’d held accountable each and every regime that was suspected of engaging in WMDs. You do it only with one and it’s like trying to contain a bursting dam with a brolly.

It would make perfect sense to assess regimes suspected of engaging in WMDs according to the risk of them using them against us, then look at the feasibility of doing anything about it, and hence end up treating some regimes very differently to others.

oops … ought I do this now?

@6: “Oh, and won three elections.”

More of the electorate didn’t vote in the 2005 election than the number who voted for Labour candidates. The turnout was the second lowest since 1918.

The Tories were in a complete mess after the (predictable) debacle of the IDS leadership and because of Michael Howard, their leader for the 2005 election, who thought that hiring an Australian spinmaster with an expertise in dog whistles was the way to beat Blair and New Labour.

Clare Short has aptly summed up Blair: More a fool than a liar.

Labour really does need to account for how the Party came to elevate a person like Blair to the leadership.

“Saddam Hussein was a self-serving despot and an aggressor (Iran, Kuwait). But regime change is against international law without UN sanction – and for good reason: the Nazis claimed that the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 was to safeguard the civil rights of German speakers in Danzig. As Blair said in Chicago in April 1999:”

So going into kosovo was wrong too. Do you agree with that? It was not taken to UN Security Council as Russia would have vetoed it. And most likely China.

Then for India to step into the Bangaldesh Liberation War was wrong too? As US would have vetoed the UN Security Council Resolution.

So if this was wrong then all those were wrong too – so I guess we have to revoke Bangladesh independence isn’t it.

The French and Russians, during the debate in 2002 were not driven by altruism as many have suggested, but it was based upon the payments for weapons they have sold (by violating UN resolutions) to that mad man.

As I said international law is not concrete and it ios often defined by “victors law” as was the case in Nuremburg as well as tokyo tribunals. Even more recent history if you look at the the Tribunal set for Serbia — said it had no authority to act against NATO troops who might have violated human rights.

And, on another point, as i have mentioned in my previous post – very few things in law and politics are unnuanced – absolute right and wrong are not easy to come by.

However I agree with you on these points:
“The Bush-Blair alliance made no plans for Iraq post-invasion.

British troops were sent out to Iraq without essential equipment because of inadequate planning.”

Actually Britain was against removing the civil service and the military which was overruled by US who actually had control of overall Iraq.

So can we get over this Blair hatred now? or are there some more dubious logic coming our way on how Blair is a war criminal.?

“Clare Short has aptly summed up Blair: More a fool than a liar.”

The self serving Minister who defied the PM and ordered her advisors not to cooperate with the Government.

Isn’t the Pot calling the kettle black?

God is that the basis of arm chair liberal argument – Clair Short said so. Then I have nothing to say as it is one of the most bizzare arguments one would come accross.

Again, I guess Bangladesh should be told hey there are no legal rights for you to be independent – as it was not authorised by the UN.

Come on legal super brains or are we following the stupid school of thought led by Monbiot, Freedland and Gilligan.

Are we saying that it is okay for a government to kill its own citizens with nerve agents (which by the way are weapons of mass destruction)?

No, we’re saying that it’s not right to invade that government’s country if you’ve lied your way into it, with little knowledge of whether the invasion’s costs will outweigh its benefits, and, seemingly, little interest.

So I guess the Iraqis like self government – oh something liberals should be proud of. But I guess the bigger agenda is to have self loathing and hatred towards Blair.

No, it’s recognising that a deceitful war which has probably killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and shattered the nation’s infrastructure is something that demands accountability.

Ben

I realise you’re all f*k*ng experts, but here’s a different take on the situation.

The Iraqi people now have the right to build their own freedom and are deeply grateful to British prime ministers Sir John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for their assistance.

At the time, I and other leaders of the Iraqi opposition asked Mr Blair’s government to help the Iraqi people get rid of the dictatorship. And we praise the bravery and sacrifice of British troops.

Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq , The Observer Sunday 31 January 2010

Read the rest of it and then continue whining from your safe, comfortable desks in the UK.

@12: “So going into kosovo was wrong too. Do you agree with that? It was not taken to UN Security Council as Russia would have vetoed it. And most likely China.”

None of that line of argument establishes that the invasion of Iraq was therefore legal according to international law and Blair was clearly advised, and not just by the FO advisers but also by eminent lawyers and scholars, that the proposed invasion was illegal.

And Blair plainly used deceit to bamboozle Parliament and the electorate into believing Britain’s security was under threat from Iraq’s WMD. But not all were fooled – older and wiser Conservative ex-ministers, such as Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, Kenneth Clarke and Edward Leigh, did not support the proposed invasion.

In addition, Blair botched the planning of the invasion in March 2003 by sending British troops out there lacking essential equipment and because there was no planning about what to do in Iraq post-invasion.

There are further outstanding issues about Blair’s premiership – such as the budget deficits going back to 2000, the consumer debt mountain, the house-price bubble and the increasing shortage of affordable housing as well as the lamentable fact that less than half 16 year-olds can achieve the benchmak qualification of 5 GCSE subjects A*-C grades, including maths and English. Without Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war, our public finances would be in better shape and there would be more funding available to resource our troops in Afghanistan.

“But you ask any prime minister, president, führer or member of a junta and they’d probably say, through history, that they too believed in what they thought was right. And that is just shit”

Are you serious? Of course, Blair did what he thought was right, as we all should. Should he have done something that the thought was wrong?

Whether such actions are in any objective way right or wrong is another matter.

Sorry, criticising anyone for trying to do what they genuinely believe is right is, to use your elegant phrase, shit.

Citing one man is an easy tactic, sl, but if I were to point to, say, the story of a 12 year-old who was gunned down by US troops, and write “read the rest of it and then continue whining from your safe, comfortable desk in the UK“, you might justly think that I was being unfair. Of course, a lot of people came through the war unscathed; nobody’s denying that.

Getting back to the OPs title, I’m amazed that Blair has been able to get away with his continued assertions that what he believed is all that matters – for this is what his argument amounts to.

Regarding the intelligence report submitted to the Commons – his defence of the foreword was that he believed that the intelligence was authoritative and detailed, irrespective of the actual evidence (sporadic and patchy) or content of the report. Who would be able to get away with this in any other situation?

I have to say, all this chat about “armchair liberals” is endlessly fascinating, coming as it no doubt does from such rough-handed men of action. I imagine these long screeds filled with half-arsed excuse-making, dubious legal argument and hissy Guardianista-baiting snark are compiled in between security patrols from an FOB in Helmand.

Poor Tony Blair, after all. It seems that a Prime Minister can’t even send the country staggering blindfolded into a murderous and idiotic war of choice, then try to bullshit his way out of the bodycount without a lot of brie-eating liberal woofters suggesting that he should face some consequences. For shame, Saddam-lovers.

Citing one man is an easy tactic

He’s the president of Iraq ffs. I assume he wrote this article being fully aware of the conditions there before and after the invasion.

And your expert knowledge is based upon….

Prove to me it was illegal and if so how. Don’t quote Ken clarke or Rifkind please.

How come then the Kosovo invasion was legal? Why is the situation different?

Another thing a Prime Minister or President is elected and accountable to make decisions – a lot of mandarins in Treasury and the Cabinet office did not want the Bank of England to have independence. And rightly the then Chancellor and PM rejected their advice.

Advisors advice and Ministers decide. So the argument that is being made is stupid.

And, lets look at Iraqi opinion – yes they are worried about their security. In Anbar, it was the community that drove out al qaeda with the help of international forces – but you do not care about facts or about the notion that Saddam Hussein violated all international laws but you would have preferred to have him in power so he could gas people again.

What about this argument – lets say I accept that Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destructions in its possession at the time of invasion. But they did have the technology and the infrastructure to do so anyways – So people are willing to accept the word of a genocidal maniac that he would not build it again. Who had more blood on his hand than anyother leader in the modern world.

And I guess the President of Iraq is a fool (who by the way is a kurd) and Kurds know all too well the impact of weapons of mass destruction – because thousands and thousands of Kurds died when they were sleeping thanks to Saddam’s nerve agents.

And the Iraqi sovereign State executed Chemical Ali few days ago for exactly that.

So the basis of your argument is indefensible as it violatyes logic and the basic premises of Human Rights. Read the fucking Universal Declaration of Human Rights and there are certain rights that no government can take away and when they do so it is the responsbility and obligation of the international community to act.

When they don’t they are criminals because they failed to act – that’s also opinion of many legal scholars. So, by trying to use legal argument in a very nuanced area of politics and international relations is stupid.

Get over it folks.

He’s the president of Iraq ffs.

So? The citizens elected him, but they don’t all help to draft his statements.

And your expert knowledge is based upon….

Thinking that it’d really fuck someone off if they or their relative were killed, wounded, displaced or deprived of resources. Then seeing how many people will have been fucked off in such a manner (rather a lot of ‘em, I’m afraid).

“half-arsed excuse-making, dubious legal argument and hissy Guardianista-baiting snark”

When you fail to argue a case thats exactly what happens – go on. No wonder the loony left has hurt the social justice and governance by left parties not only here but also in the US.

Good for you.

When they don’t they are criminals because they failed to act – that’s also opinion of many legal scholars.

So, we’re criminals for not invading North Korea? (And Tony Blair must be really in the shit after coddling Fahd and Karimov.) Don’t be silly.

Thinking that it’d really fuck someone off if they or their relative were killed

Well I guess that after all you do agree with Talabani then; he’s a Kurd and I don’t know but I’m guessing he knew one or two people that Saddam gassed. The difference is he puts the blame where it belongs, and, as I said, he knows what he’s talking about.

Shamit
Why is loathing Tony Blair the same as self loathing?

Shamit, I understand that you are really, really cross at all of us for being so beastly to Tony, but try to make sense.

You say that “half-arsed excuse-making, dubious legal argument and hissy Guardianista-baiting snark” are “exactly what happens” when we “fail to argue a case.”

So you’re saying that our failure to argue a case (which I’m not sure is even true) has forced you and yours to unleash a dribbly tide of “half-arsed excuse-making, dubious legal argument and hissy Guardianista-baiting snark.”

Doesn’t sound like a very good tactic to me. Are you OK?

When you fail to argue a case thats exactly what happens – go on.

http://bit.ly/ajYHt9

and

http://bit.ly/9WjVo9

So? The citizens elected him, but they don’t all help to draft his statements.

Actually, this was too flippant. Yes, Talabani’s a representative, but a) that’s his opinion, not an analysis, and b) the fact that he is a representative doesn’t mean that his views are representative (would you take Gordon Brown’s opinions to apply to the entirety of Britain?).

@Shamit:

Just one question:

Should we (I’m not sure who “we” are, some sort of arbitary coalition I guess) invade and overthrow the governments in Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, Russia, Somalia, Egypt, Iran et al ad nauseum? Because all of those listed (and a hell of a lot more) have committed gross human rights abuses.

Shall we get rid of every bad government by bombing the shit out of them? Who gives a flying one about civilian casualities, it’s all for their, erm, human rights anyway…

Sheesh.

Well I guess that after all you do agree with Talabani then; he’s a Kurd and I don’t know but I’m guessing he knew one or two people that Saddam gassed.

(And, by the way, where have I said that Saddam was not a despicable man who tyrannised his country? Sometimes in life there are two very bad alternatives, but one can always be better than the other.)

Sometimes in life there are two very bad alternatives, but one can always be better than the other

Agreed, and TB took the less bad alternative.

” When they don’t they are criminals because they failed to act – that’s also opinion of many legal scholars.

So, we’re criminals for not invading North Korea? (And Tony Blair must be really in the shit after coddling Fahd and Karimov.) Don’t be silly.”

ben

I was just highlighting legal opinion and actually that is the law according to the venerable UN.

And your argument

“No, it’s recognising that a deceitful war which has probably killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and shattered the nation’s infrastructure is something that demands accountability.”

isn’t that the same for Kosovo as well? There was a march against Kosovo war too.

So we should have let Milosevic go on doing what he was doing – or how did that become legal? What is the absolute right and wrong?

As I said its difficult to judge – the whole world heaped condemnation especially the African States including Mandela for US not acting in Rwanda and we were criticised for going into Sierra Leone. But people in Sierra Leone now have a democracy that works because of British intervention – again so who is right and who is wrong?

What about this argument that Blair knew that Britain by itself could not sort out Saddam and hence he joined the Americans to take out a genuine monster and threat to world security. And I guess he did not want to see Iraqi Children suffering.

About your point on one person does not make a population – I agree. But, when over 70% of Iraqis go and vote (under death threat) in not one but two elections then you have to accept that the intervention has been supported by the majority of the Iraqi people. But you would not buy that and niether would Rodent etc etc because that just does not fit with the Guardian view point.

Didn’t Jackie Ashley talk about how great of a PM brown would be and the labour party should remove Blair? guess what she was bloody wrong.

So I rest my case and I have got to get back to my day job.

@34

I guess he did not want to see Iraqi Children suffering.

Oops.

Christ this argument is forever dysfunctional…

sl, shamit and others … look, you don’t have to deny that removing Saddam was a “good thing”, nor do you have to deny that he could reasonably have been thought of as a security threat to the West at the time, nor do you have to deny that the citizens of Iraq themselves want democracy and oppose the “resistance”, nor do you have to deny that many Iraqis today might still be thankful for the invasion despite the bloody 7 years … you can accept all that *, you can accept that the legality of the invasion didn’t differ markedly from many other international events of various sorts, and still think that in the event the way the invasion was conducted, how it was sold to voters, was sufficiently bad for the war’s architects to deserve hauling over the coals and maybe prosecution.

We don’t have to have this endless back and forth of arguments that don’t really address each other. I’m much more sympathetic to the invasion that, say, FR … I’m more willing to grant positives, but really it is very very hard to read any of the numerous historical accounts of the invasion and how the politicians handled it (there are lots of very good books — just pick one and follow the links on “customers who also bought …”) and not conclude criminal incompetence is the best you can say about them. Even the broadly sympathetic (say George Packer’s “Assassins Gate”) will leave you slack jawed and appalled.

* OK, some people don’t accept all or some of that, but haven’t we all had enough of those debates?

Shamit,

I was just highlighting legal opinion and actually that is the law according to the venerable UN.

Do you have a link? If there is such a law then a) all countries are criminal and b) the R2P crowd are really going to be kicking themselves.

…isn’t that the same for Kosovo as well? There was a march against Kosovo war too.

Where have I said that I support Kosovo? I don’t know much about it – and, thus, don’t really have an informed opinion – but if the costs of the invasion outweighed its positive effects then yes, it shouldn’t have taken place.

But, when over 70% of Iraqis go and vote (under death threat) in not one but two elections then you have to accept that the intervention has been supported by the majority of the Iraqi people.

That’s an odd little logical hop. In fact, all it proves is that 70% of the public wanted to pursue some kind of democratic route after the invasion had taken place.

But you would not buy that and niether would Rodent etc etc because that just does not fit with the Guardian view point.

Yes, and besides, I’ve got to go and make some tofu, burn down a private school and smuggle in a few illegal immigrants. Look, Shamit, I used to be a “decent” and read everything from Prospect to the American Conservative; stop it with the stereotypes.

Ben

@ Luis: I can heartily recommend Fiasco by Thomas Ricks and Imperial Life In The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, to start with.

For those contending that the consequences of the invasion were essentially unforseeable and that our then-leaders should thus be cut some slack, I’d like to recommend any book about almost any war ever in human history.

but haven’t we all had enough of those debates

Yes, but…

“the Guardian…lattes…the Guardian…lattes…the Guardian…lattes…the Guardian…”

Jesus, this line of attack is feeble.

@22: “Prove to me it was illegal and if so how.”

Try this letter to the Guardian on 7 March 2003:

“We are teachers of international law. On the basis of the information publicly available, there is no justification under international law for the use of military force against Iraq. . . ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/mar/07/highereducation.iraq

See also the book by Professor Philippe Sands QC: Lawless World – Making and Breaking Global Rules (Penguin Books, 2006)

If Britain’s invasion of Iraq was lawful according to Blair’s doctrine of “liberal interventionism” then so was the the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939 supposedly to safeguard the German speaking residents of Danzig.

And so was the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, of Czecho-Slovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan in 1979.

Blair evidently thought it important to secure approval from the UN Security Council in 2003 for the proposed Iraq invasion or he wouldn’t have pressed the Bush Administration so hard to try that route. When UN approval wasn’t forthcoming, he should have withdrawn Britain’s support for the invasion on the basis of what he had said in that keynote speech in Chicago in 1999:

“If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar.”

The difference between Iraq and Kosovo is that in Kosovo but there was undoubtedly an urgent and ongoing humanitarian crisis on the ground which many of us considered a compelling reason for action. The UK government claimed that the action was legal on the grounds that such interventions are permitted in order to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. This is not specificaly stated in the UN charter and this is an area which is still subject to much discussion.

As I said its difficult to judge – the whole world heaped condemnation especially the African States including Mandela for US not acting in Rwanda and we were criticised for going into Sierra Leone. But people in Sierra Leone now have a democracy that works because of British intervention – again so who is right and who is wrong?

I’m not sure what your point is here. Arguing that the invasion of Iraq is wrong is not the same as arguing that all military intervention anywhere is wrong. You have to make a judgement based on the circumstances in the particular country.

@41

They go on to say:

Of course, even with that authorisation, serious questions would remain. A lawful war is not necessarily a just, prudent or humanitarian war.

Why did they add this?
It’s not a legal point, yet they want us to believe their argument is strengthened by their background in the law.

In addition, this does not mean that an unlawful war cannot be ” just, prudent or humanitarian”. Kosovo, Sierra Leone?

No wonder the loony left has hurt the social justice and governance by left parties not only here but also in the US.

It doesn’t help when other lefties keep perpetuating right-wing language like ‘loony left’ – the anti-war left is the MAJORITY. It is the one proven right that the war was based on lies and would never make Iraq safer. And that it would kill more people.

If the only thing you can do is repond by calling them the ‘loony left’ then you’re better off writing for the Telegraph

I joined the LP in the early seventies, there was a loony left then and there’s one now, denying it ain’t going to make it so.

Blair won three elections by marginalising it, or didn’t you notice.

Shamit is right to attack the latte drinking commentariat.

Cappuccino is, of course, the superior beverage.

there was a loony left then and there’s one now…

I’m loving the idea that those who object to ultraviolent, no-plan invasions and occupations of countries that are no threat to us at all, in one of the world’s most explosive and reactionary regions, are now loonies.

I’ve spent much of the last ten years telling people that the invasion would be a total disaster leading to a massive and horrific bloodbath, at best. You know what? At least the people who told me I was an evil, America-hating, Saddam-blowing lunatic before the disaster and the bloodbath had the excuse of stupidity and naiveity. I tend to assume that people who say similar things after the fact are just, you know, twats.

I didn’t say that the anti-war lefties are loonies, just that there is a loony left.

But of course, if you’re going to go off half cocked because you can’t read and understand what people are writing then you may well qualify.

@48; Twats?

Tell that to the Kurds, the Shi’ites and even the Iranians – I’m sure they’ll set you straight.

Tell that to the Kurds, the Shi’ites and even the Iranians – I’m sure they’ll set you straight.

mmmm… yeah I’m looking to Iraq and all I can see are people holding garlands of flowers greeting American and UK soldiers.
Have you asked them lately on what they thought of the invasion?

I didn’t say that the anti-war lefties are loonies, just that there is a loony left.

There are some crackpots in every political grouping. But firstly they neither dominate the left nor the Labour party. Secondly, the context it was popularised in was explicitly about undermining and challenging the left more broadly. thirdly, in this case it is being used in the context of the war. If the anti-war left is the loony left than that is most of the Labour base. Other than Nick Cohen and a few lame bloggers – hardly anyone thinks the war was a good idea.

Rather than trying to save face – the ones who supported the war initially should just admit they got it wrong. Then we can move on.

@51: “Have you asked them lately on what they thought of the invasion?”

Have you?

Sunny

“It doesn’t help when other lefties keep perpetuating right-wing language like ‘loony left’ –”

Point taken.

But it goes both ways mate – what would you call those lefties who are continuously attacking one of the most successful Leftie PM by calling him a war criminal and worse. This happens day in and day out.

The left is based upon the core convictions of social justice, equality and freedom to aspire and grow with society. However the manifestations of the Left principles do vary and vary widely. Hence the Left has always been able to have a bigger tent than the Right – at least in western democracies.

The Centre Left wants to govern and seeks power and want to present Left as a viable stable government material. The Centre Left, be it Clinton, Blair or Obama, wants to govern and understands the importance of convincing the independent voters who now make up the largest chunk in most democracies. And without power Left can poke at the system but not achieve anything. I rather have a Centre Left Government in power that can help improve lives.

Monbiot’s ranting and raving and this obsession with holding Blair to account for his alleged malfeasence in office is not doing the left any good electorally.

The debate is becoming about the past when it should be about the future. Finally, the Parliament is Sovereign and the Parliament backed him and even the opposition Leader Charles Kennedy who continuously opposed the War said he believed the then Prime Minister did not mislead the Parliament or the country. That should be enough to move on.

Iraq war was a legal war but the wrong war at the wrong time – but if Iraq was illegal so was Kosovo, so was the Bangladesh Liberation War. It was the wrong decision therefore to intervene in 2003 however a wrong decision (in my opinion) does not make the decision illegal.

But I take your point and I understand the irritation but I feel the same way when I go to the Guardian site and read Freedland, Monbiot etc etc.

Have you asked them lately on what they thought of the invasion?

See #15

But firstly they neither dominate the left nor the Labour party

I didn’t say that they do dominate the LP, but they certainly did. They were, as I said, marginalised, my fear is that is that they should ever return.

Have you asked them lately on what they thought of the invasion?

Not recently, but I spoke to a group of Iraqi lawyers who were visiting Edinburgh in 2006 and while they were unsurprisingly clear that they were glad Saddam was gone, they were equally blunt that Iraq was a disaster and a horrific bloodbath, for the simple reason that it undeniably was.

Tell that to the Kurds, the Shi’ites and even the Iranians – I’m sure they’ll set you straight.

I don’t doubt it. The Kurds see their great oppressor executed, and get control of their autonomous zone and all its resources; the Shi’ites get the same, plus majority control of the Iraqi state, its functioning infrastructure and military forces, plus megabillions of dollars of American aid.

The Iranians though get to see their greatest enemy removed at the massively damaging expense of their second-greatest, the USA. Whatever happens from now on, Iraq is a smashed political construct that can’t defend itself and seems to be utterly dependent upon massive American aid and military support. In short, Iraq will probably fly to pieces the instant the Yanks leave, an absolutely disastrous outcome for the US.

The Americans are now trapped in a violent and fractious desert trap of their own making, unable to withdraw and committed to ploughing extortionately vast amounts of treasure that they could be using to pressure the Iranians etc. into a hungry black hole.

If this sounds familiar to anyone, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Republic of South Vietnam, Now With Additional Bloodcurdling Sectarian Horror And Nightmarish Consequences!

So in summary, here’s the tally on the war: Good for well-placed Kurds and Shi’ites, who get a massive power and wealth transfer; Good for the Iranians, who have seen all of their local and international enemies weakened and now find repression even easier, with the Great Satan as a nearby excuse; Good for Russia and China, who are more than happy to watch the US urinate its power into the dirt.

Now here’s the bit that hurts… It’s all bad for the minority Sunnis, who get tossed out of power and then get their asses kicked in a horrific civil war (but are now picking up megabillions of US taxpayer money too); Bad for the US, who are now clearly a wounded superpower in rocket-propelled decline; Bad for the UK, which is now skint and internationally regarded as a mere American sex doll; Bad for both our armed forces, who have died in their thousands and been horribly mutilated in their tens of thousands; Bad for all of Iran’s neighbours, including Saudi and even Israel; and most of all, bad for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, who have died in numbers so large that we can’t even begin to count them from being shot, bombed, beheaded and drilled with power tools, and bad for the millions of refugees who have been driven out of their homes by the aforementioned horrific civil war.

I could go on – this is just an executive summary, but my point is that you are correct. To many Shi’ites, Kurds and Iranians, this is All Good. For ourselves and most of the planet’s population, it looks like a horrendous disaster and an appalling bloodbath. Because it is.

This stuff’s easier to spot if you lay off the Hooray! Boo! Hooray! stuff, by the way. It’s a war, not a fucking football match, and it’s easier to spot the kind of uncomfortable details I lay out above if you keep up with it via newspapers, TV and books rather than blogs run by partisan tools.

If Britain’s invasion of Iraq was lawful according to Blair’s doctrine of “liberal interventionism” then so was the the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939 supposedly to safeguard the German speaking residents of Danzig.

Hitler didn’t claim humanitarian intervention as a cassus belli for invading Poland – he claimed self defence in retaliation for the (staged) Gleiwitz incident. The advantage of being able and willing to blatantly lie is you get to pick the most uncontroversial justification, instead of having to use one that is novel and unpopular.

So if you want to apply a law purely based on what people claim, not on underlying facts, then you have to outlaw military self-defence, and lock up Churchill and Roosevelt (while Hitler and Stalin presumably just have the poor guy you sent to deliver the summons taken out and shot).

Arguing that the invasion of Iraq is wrong is not the same as arguing that all military intervention anywhere is wrong.

No, but arguing that the invasion of Iraq was _illegal_ is precisely to argue that any military intervention anywhere in the world is so.

For each of the ever-changing argument _for_ the Iraq war, there are three _against_ it, and some of them have a lot of weight. Applying appropriate political judgement for deception and incompetence is entirely right.

But to say the war is illegal is to hold the ludicrous and vile idea that the removal from power of a man who won and maintained that power purely by massacring his own citizens is, in principle and independently of circumstance, wrong. You can’t consistently claim the war was illegal without supporting the system which counted Saddam as legitimate ruler of Iraq.

Saddam had no justified moral right to veto the deployment of foreign troops in support of the future elected government of Iraq.

But to say the war is illegal is to hold the ludicrous and vile idea that the removal from power of a man who won and maintained that power purely by massacring his own citizens is, in principle and independently of circumstance, wrong.

Non sequitur.

You can’t consistently claim the war was illegal without supporting the system which counted Saddam as legitimate ruler of Iraq.

Arf! See, this is why you shouldn’t engage in legalistic arguments about insane military projects – some joker will inevitably want you to chase him up his own arse after his own mad logic. Here’s two basic principles from twentieth century law – why it’s illegal to receive stolen goods, and why wars of aggression are illegal…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receipt_of_stolen_property

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression

…Why don’t these principles apply to insane, mad, bugfuck mental military escapades like Iraq? Because Saddam was Evil! Evil, I tells ya!

This is why Chilcot is a total waste of time – the infinite malleability of law. These lunatic endeavours should be opposed on the grounds that they’re deranged and certain to end in catastrophe, not that they contravene article dipshit, section fucko of the Treaty Of Arse.

Not an illegal war?

1. The Downing Street memo, a record of a meeting in July 2002, reveals that Sir Richard Dearlove, director of the UK’s foreign intelligence service MI6, told Blair that in Washington: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

2. The foreign secretary (Jack Straw) then told Blair that “the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”. He suggested that “we should work up a plan” to produce “legal justification for the use of force”.

3. The attorney general told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN SC (security council) authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.” Bush and Blair later failed to obtain security council authorisation.

As for Blair now claiming ‘ that 9/11 was what really did it’ – Al Quaeda were not in Iraq before the invasion, they are now…..

I quit.

@ 60

Celtic result with Robbie Keane making his debut gone down badly? Not one Scot in that team *TSK*

Monkey Town does pay attention after all, but I still quit.

“Have you asked them lately on what they thought of the invasion?”

“Tell that to the Kurds, the Shi’ites and even the Iranians – I’m sure they’ll set you straight.”

Those Decents & neo-cons that say this while not mentioning the carnage surrounding the invasion seem to be using an old argument. How does it go? Oh yes, ” You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs!”

Usually attributed to Lenin…..

@63: “Usually attributed to Lenin…..”

No surprise there. Several leading apparatchiks of the GW Bush regime in America – like Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz – signed up for the: Project for the New American Century, the Principles of which are on display here along with their sponsoring signatures:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

The provenance of Neoconservatism is amazingly illuminating: “The forerunners of neoconservatism were most often socialists or sometimes liberals who strongly supported the Allied cause in World War II, and who were influenced by the Great Depression-era ideas of the New Deal, trade unionism, and Trotskyism . . ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism#Leo_Strauss_and_Trotskyism

And as we know from his 22-page letter in 1982, “the 29-year-old Mr Blair tells then Labour leader Michael Foot how reading Marx had ‘irreversibly altered’ his outlook.

“He also praises Tony Benn, agreeing with the left-winger’s analysis that Labour’s right-wing was bankrupt.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5081798.stm

Shamit @53:

continuously attacking one of the most successful Leftie PM

Ohlord.

Tony Blair was in no meaningful sense a leftist PM, though he got into power using the Labour Party as a vehicle. He was a centrist at best, a pragmastist most of the time, and an empty shirt at worst. He eviscerated the Labour party’s traditional focus on, well, actual working people and moved its issues base entirely onto the turf of the suburban middle classes, and yes, the strategy of abandoning any meaningful principles did win him three elections.

People are attacking a PM who is viewed by a huge majority of the political wing he (in theory!) represented as the man who promised much and delivered only cock-ups, betrayals and glamourised platitudes. While also lying out his ass.

The really sad part is that the first signs of Blair’s talent for spinning tales were there before he was elected PM in 1997:

“The first sound of bats flapping in his belfry was heard even before the election, in December 1996, when he told Des O’Connor that as a 14-year-old he had run away to Newcastle airport and boarded a plane for the Bahamas: ‘I snuck onto the plane, and we were literally about to take off when the stewardess came up to me…’ Quite how he managed this without a boarding card or passport was not explained. It certainly came as a surprise to his father (‘The Bahamas? Who said that? Tony? Never’), and an even greater surprise to staff at the airport, who pointed out that there has never been a flight from Newcastle to the Bahamas.

“A couple of years later, he told an interviewer that his ‘teenage hero’ was the footballer Jackie Milburn, whom he would watch from the seats behind the goal at St James’s Park. In fact, Milburn played his last game for Newcastle United when Blair was just four years old, and there were no seats behind the goal at the time.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,230340,00.html

“The Prime Minister was at it again last week [in November 1999] when he told listeners of the rock station Heart FM that his favourite tune was ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ by U2; when he appeared on ‘Desert Island Discs’, it was Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ and Francisco Tarrega’s ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra’.”
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmhansrd/vo991117/debtext/91117-02.htm

@67 I remember when the Jackie Milburn lie emerged. Stunning.

Most ordinary folk have no insight into the special psyches of people who spin tales for financial gain or as part of a political strategy.

Bernard Madoff is one recent example of a hugely successful fraudster and there’s no denying that Victor Lustig had real talent for spinning credible tales:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig

Lustig’s most successful con was to “sell” the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1925 for scrap metal:
http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2009/05/05/famous-scams-the-man-who-sold-the-eiffel-tower.aspx

Hitler had the fundamental insight for the successful political con. As he wrote in Mein Kampf:

“All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true in itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper stata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. ”
http://www.historiography-project.com/misc/biglie.html

Justifications for the war above:

1. Saddam Hussein killed many Iraqis, and this was how he maintained his power.
2. Kosovo and Bangladesh interventions also did not have UN Security Council resolutions.
3. Any war is legal if UK parliament votes for it.
4. War is legal to implement the UN Declaration on Human Rights
5. Popular elections have been held in Iraq since the occupation.
6. International Law is always victors’ justice
7. Leaders of the Iraqi opposition desperately wanted Western intervention to remove Saddam Hussein.
8. Even though he did not have weapons of mass destruction at the time, Saddam Hussein could have ordered them to be developed at any time.
9. If the war was illegal, so is every other war ever, because justifications for war are always contentious.

We can argue about each element, but I’d sum it up as arguing “Saddam Hussein was a very bad guy, we should remove bad guys whatever the law says, and people will be grateful.” This is a tempting argument, and what makes us agree or disagree with it is likely to be other elements of the context in which it is used.

For me, the point about Bangladesh and Rwanda is particularly well made: where there is a danger of genocide, there should be a responsibility to protect. The reason this doesn’t apply here (for me) is only that such actions by Saddam Hussein were more than a decade before this intervention. The time for justifiable intervention was when Halabjah was happening (and therefore, incidentally, Iran alone was practicing those humanitarian principles).

I’d summarise my anti view as: “If you let anyone define anyone else as the bad guy, you justify every war ever, so you need to have principles to avoid selective interventions which end up as might is right or imperialism with another name”

The unstated premise which I think makes both the vision of “war of all against all” seem unrealistic for war supporters, and which makes this war’s selectivity (ie why Iraq, not North Korea, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, China, Zimbabwe etc) so outrageous for war opponents is this: US hegemony.

US hegemony and balances of power, rather than UN resolutions, means that the scope for such interventions by States is limited, so the danger of “war of all against all” is an abstract idea not based on the real world. It is also what makes it very interesting to understand why so much energy has been put into this specific intervention. Other countries fit into the criteria which have been claimed for Iraq just as easily, including the “bad guy” one, so legitimising this selection just because the US has the will to undertake it is in effect legitimising selective interventions wherever and whenever the global hegemon chooses. In effect, it legitimises imperial intervention.

So why bother with international law, if the real world is all about interests and victor’s justice? I think it is being constructed with great difficulty for good reasons – for our protection. The eventual ideal (and shifts in power balances may make this realistic and also even more important) is for justice to be relatively independent of the interests of regional and global hegemons, so that your rights do not depend on whether they happen to coincide with the biggest bully on the block at a particular time.

If the Iraq war coincided with efforts to strengthen international law, it would have had more credibility with those idealistic lefties. And there was some neoconservative and Blairite talk about the responsibility to protect – but it was never spelled out in terms of how it would actually be implemented in a principled way. Who would be next and how it would be decided – because the only way to do this would be done in a principled way would be …. through the UN or something similar (and more democratic).

Just like Amnesty International reports are dusted off for particular occasions by the war-leaders who previously tried to ignore them, so demands for global justice seem to get lip-service while it suits a particular intervention.

Since their commitment to human rights is never sustained with as much energy as the prosecution of war, I think it is safe to see the supposed justifications of war as a smokescreen for other interests.

“Saddam Hussein killed many Iraqis, and this was how he maintained his power.”

Just for starters, Iraq was and continues to be a pressure cooker of religious tensions. Saddam Hussein came to power – which he did with American support – precisely because he was able to contain those tensions by using brutal methods. Here’s a great pic of Rumsfeld, as a special envoy of President Reagan, meeting with President Saddam Hussein on 20 December 1983:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

At the time of the invasion in March 2003, Iraq had the second or third largest identified oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. As we have come to know, the Bush administration started to plan for the Iraq war on coming into office in January 2001, months before 9/11. Why so?

Comparisons with Sarajevo clearly didn’t convince the senior legal advisers in the Foreign Office or the eminent teachers of international law (see link @41). Nor the inquiry in the Netherlands which recently reported:

“An inquiry into the Netherlands’ support for the invasion of Iraq says it was not justified by UN resolutions. The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not ‘constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003′.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8453305.stm

The comparisons with Sarajevo have been dragged in to cover up the false claims made the in government’s dossier on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, published on 24 September 2002, which were published to justify the war because Britain’s security was supposedly under threat. The claims made in that dossier were disowned by Dr Brian Jones, the head of the branch in the Defence Intelligence Service tasked to assess incoming intelligence on WMD.

At the time of Sarajevo, an increasing scale of ethnic cleansing was underway there, whereas by 2002 Saddam Hussein had reined back repression because Iraq was subject to UN sanctions as well as, importantly, a UN inspection regime which had to be halted because of the invasion.

It was foreseeable that removing Saddam Hussein’s regime would unleash religious and ethnic rivalries.

The Iraqi government has estimated that some 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed as the result of the hostilities started by the invasion.

Whether lawful or not, the start of the Iraq war was stupid in the particular context as well as barbarous.

As Blair said in his keynote speech in Chicago in 1999:

“If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar.”

Nazi Germany had invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 with the claim to be safeguarding the civil rights of German speaking residents in Danzig. By the end of WW2, 40 to 50 millions had been killed.

Can anyone here suggest a credible explanation for the missing $8.8 billion in Iraq in this news report of 19 August 2004 on MSNBC?

“WASHINGTON – At least $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds that was given to Iraqi ministries by the former U.S.-led authority there cannot be accounted for, according to a draft U.S. audit set for release soon.

“The audit by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s own inspector general blasts the CPA for “not providing adequate stewardship” of at least $8.8 billion from the Development Fund for Iraq that was given to Iraqi ministries.

“The audit was first reported on a Web site earlier this month by David Hackworth, a journalist and retired colonel. A U.S. official confirmed that the contents of the leaked audit cited by Hackworth were accurate. . .

“One of the main benefactors of the Iraq funds was the Texas-based firm Halliburton, which was paid more than $1 billion out of those funds to bring in fuel for Iraqi civilians.

“The monitoring board said despite repeated requests it had not been given access to U.S. audits of contracts held by Halliburton, which was once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, and other firms that used the development funds.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5763483/