Because they’re idiots and war is tough and manly?

Because they’re still good old New Labour and their instinct is always, always, always to triangulate rightwards in the name of peace, justice and the British way of life?

Because by the time Labour gets back into power the US will have yet another far-right President who wants to bomb the middle east back to the stone age?

[1] you forgot sexy?

Because they assume their intentions will translate into their desired outcomes. New Labour often thought it’s desired methods would acheive its desired aims even where evidence pointed against it.

Because they assume their actions “war to remove Iran’s weapons” will actually be a war to remove Iran’s weapons, rather than a war with some unspecified consequences, as yet unknown, but likely horrific.

who is advocating invading Iran? Is this Wes fellow? (believing that Iran has a WMD program does not equate to that) If it’s just a handful of idiots on Twitter, I don’t think that quite justifies asking “why Labour supporters are still advocating …” because you can find a handful of idiots in every (large) group of people.

Wes Streeting I believe is the old president/head/chief of the National Union of Students, labelled a bit of a rightist in the circles I move in, and thoroughly denounced as a reactionary by the guys over at Though Cowards Flinch for crticising uni lecturers who went out on strike a couple of years ago. He’s fairly important amongst young labourites.

In fairness, there are probably a few fringe nutters calling for wars in every organisation and I think most of the criticisms above could be levelled against them all, not just Labour.

No worry by the time Labour gets back in I’ll be long dead, so will most animals, the sun will be to big, water will have gone.

Oona’s events officer has also complained that anti-Iraq war people are like petulant toddlers. See http://selectionspotlight.blogspot.com/

[9] Does Oona advocate synchronised withdrawal from Iraq with invasion of Iran?

Surely such a strategy would cut down on MoD costs, etc?

They think it’s sensible. Like David Miliband. And the word “progressive“.

Nice smear of David Milliband by associating him with some random idiots on twitter. Well done.

It might help if the article offered some quotes rather than just attacking David Miliband by association with people who so far as I can see having just searched various twitter conversations, didn’t actually propose invasion and just said Iran is a dangerous country that has nuclear weapons. (undoubtedly true in the first instance, possibly true in the second)

No, I mean that they – ie. Wes Streeting and folks like him – support DMili because he’s the “sensible” option. Note the “I <3 DM" (or is it voted DM?) in their profiles.

Because Labour’s remaining supporters are the sort of scumbags who thought that attacking Iraq was a good idea?

Hello peeps.

First of all, I didn’t choose the title.

Anyway:

There is absolutely no one who is saying that Iran has nuclear weapons right now – it’s not even a “possibly”.
Exaggerating evidence of Iran’s nuclear capability is key towards pushing policy in the direction of military action. It’s a way of undermining the current US administration’s strategy which is to delay Iran from getting a nuke for as long as possible, and although they wont admit it, shift into containment when they do get the nuke.

Wes is not a random idiot. He is the former president of the NUS, and became press secretary of LGBT Labour and a councillor within Ilford within a few months of his presidency ending. He substituted for Oona King at the Camden mayoral hustings and is also campaigning for David Miliband. He is clearly enjoying strong institutional support from within that side of the party, where I suspect there is a consensus on Iran that is best represented by Blair’s statements in the Andrew Marr interview last week.

“Because Labour’s remaining supporters are the sort of scumbags who thought that attacking Iraq was a good idea?”

No.

So some people on the internet said something stupid. How shocking.

This post reminds me of those 24 hour news rolling reports where a bunch of journalists hang around a doorstep in expectation of an announcement. And twelve hours later, a spokesperson pops out to say something entirely different.

I am very worried about how politicians and military people address Iran’s overt desire to construct nuclear weapons. But until Labour politicians make speeches about them, I’m not going to speculate about what their ideas. They will be something entirely different to a 140 character limited Twitter snipe.

“…we should understand that the Iranian state is a rational actor…”

Talk me through that with reference to the leadership’s radical belief in the 12th Imam:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,490410,00.html

As far as I can see, Streeting only said that “the speeches of Ahmedinejad, the work of academics, intelligence” shows Iran to be ‘a threat’, not that they prove that Iran has WMDs. Iran could be a threat in respects other than WMDs – for instance, by stirring unrest in the region, training terrorists, disseminating weapons, taking British soldiers hostage. If you think Streeting’s comment relates specifically to WMDs, you owe it to him, I think, to give more of a sense of the conversation from which you have pulled the tweet. Otherwise, you could be accused of unfairly attributing to him views he did not defend.

The same goes with your suggestion that he talked up the prospect of military action against Iran. Again, supply a tweet to that effect. Looking at his page, I can only find his claim to have been *against* the military invasion of Iraq, which doesn’t suggest to me that he is going to be gung-ho for war this time.

More info, please.

Thanks Orator, for a link to a Glenn Beck – the commanding heights of rationality.

Thanks Orator, for a link to a Glenn Beck – the commanding heights of rationality.

The utter uselessness of the Left is encapsulated in the view that while Iran may be bad, Glen Beck is worse.

@21 – Soho Politico

The reconstructed dialogue as follows:

@tommilleruk:
@steve_race @jonesythered @tomcopley @wesstreeting More to the point, there is equally little evidence of Iran having WMD as there was Iraq

@tomcopley:
@wesstreeting Tell me Wes. What do you know of Iran’s actual military capabilities? @jonesythered @steve_race

@wesstreeting:
@tommilleruk @tomcopley @steve_race @jonesythered You mean aside from the speeches of Ahmedinejad, the work of academics, intelligence?

On military action, he first suggested military action over a year ago, but the archives indexed by Google and Microsoft don’t go back far enough yet. Though more specifically, I had more in mind Tony Blair’s comments last week.

@24 Naadir Jeewa

The reconstructed dialogue merely demonstrates that Twitter is an inappropriate environment to discuss complex concerns.

There is, urm, more meat, err, in the Tony Blair interview. But on such topics, I have to listen or read Tony Blair on three or four separate occasions to work out what (if anything) he means.

@Naadir Jeewa

Even if your sequencing is correct, Streeting did not say there what you originally attributed to him. He does not say that ‘“the speeches of Ahmedinejad, the work of academics, intelligence” proves the existence of Iranian WMD capability’. He says only that what he knows on the subject, he got from these sources. Still less does he say these sources make the case for war against Iran. It is difficult to see, reading your reconstruction of the conversation, how your interpretation of Streeting’s claims could be justified.

And in any case, I do not think you have reconstructed the dialogue accurately. First because you have Wes S replying in the first instance to @tommilleruk, and not to @tomcopley, who is the person you represent as having asked him the question. And second, because the time stamp on @tomcopley’s question is *later* than Wes S’s reply. @tomcopley’s question was posted at 4.34pm
. But Streeting’s tweet was posted at 4.25. In other words, Streeting could not have been replying to @tomcopley.

Here is how I reconstruct the conversation, and I think it is more plausible:

…

@wesstreeting:
@tomcopley @steve_race @jonesythered My point was about being in total denial about the facts. Iran is a real threat. (4.05)

@tommilleruk:
@wesstreeting @tomcopley @steve_race @jonesythered What evidence exists of Iran being a ‘real threat’ to anyone but its own people? (4.23)

@wesstreeting:
@tommilleruk @tomcopley @steve_race @jonesythered You mean aside from the speeches of Ahmedinejad, the work of academics, intelligence? (4.25)

@tommilleruk:
@wesstreeting @tomcopley @steve_race @jonesythered Being a ranting funamentalist does not make someone a threat. Just makes them an idiot. (4.29)

If you wanted to critique Tony Blair’s argument, you should have done that instead.

@25 – Charlieman:

Here’s Blair at the Iraq inquiry -

FUD:

It is why I think, if we want to deal with Iran today — and you have got very similar issues to the ones we are discussing here, which is why learning the lessons of this is so important — again, in my view, we are far better placed to deal with Iran if the Israel/Palestine issue is moving forward.
My fear was — and I would say I hold this fear stronger today than I did back then as a result of what Iran particularly today is doing. My fear is that states that are highly repressive or failed, the danger of a WMD link is that they become porous, they construct all sorts of different alliances with people and, yes, it is true we did not have evidence that Saddam was, for example, behind the September 11 attacks, and part of the difference between ourselves and the Americans was we were always saying we don’t accept that.

This is particularly egregious:

What nobody foresaw was that Iran would actually end up supporting AQ. The conventional wisdom was these two are completely different types of people because Iran is Shia, the Al-Qaeda people are Sunni and therefore, you know, the two would never mix. What happened in the end was that they did because they both had a common interest in destabilising the country, and for Iran I think the reason they were interested in destabilising Iraq was because they worried about having a functioning majority Shia country with a democracy on their doorstep, and for Al-Qaeda they knew perfectly well their whole mission was to try and say the West was oppressing Islam.

As I said in the post, Iran’s behaviour during the surge shows that this is patently false.

Orator/GF – Think the trouble isn’t that Glenn Beck’s “worse” than Da Main Man Ahmad, but that he puts forward bugger all evidence.

People who advocate war with Iran don’t understand what war is. Shame on them.

Chaise Guevara, let me trump your argument by saying ‘Yes.’

Face it, Labour supporters are Blair’s bastard children. Warmongering is in their DNA.

The utter uselessness of the Left is encapsulated in the view that while Iran may be bad, Glen Beck is worse.

I see our trolls even have problems comprehending English these days. The point is that Glenn Beck is no rational source for deciding a course of action, not that he is better or worse.

It’s the same tactic republicans in my country are using. To paint the opposition as appeasers and weak on foreign policy. This helps them attract the most hawkish crowd and lobbyists who have interest in the war agenda, which means more campaign money.

Just spotted this and feel badly misrepresented here.

First of all, I did not and do not advocate invading Iran.

Secondly, I did not suggest that Iran has WMD. I do believe Iran poses a threat to the region and to the international community, however.

The debate the left should be having is not about whether or not the Iranian regime is a threat to its people, the region and to the international community, but how to deal with it. This does not – and should not – automatically imply a military solution.

Thanks to Soho Politico for pointing out the conversation chain. 140 characters is probably not the best way to have a decent coversation about the finer points of international relations and security. I am surprised at the way the author has used it (badly) as a source and that it passed editorial.

Finally, my politics are centre-left. I suppose that makes me ‘rightist’ to those whose politics are to the left of mine, but can’t credibly be described as of the right! Less polemic, more analysis please.

Wes

“The debate the left should be having is not about whether or not the Iranian regime is a threat to its people, the region and to the international community, but how to deal with it.”

The Iranian regime is certainly (and indeed more than) a threat to its people. But as Naadir has shown rather compellingly, the notion that it is a threat to the region and the broader international community – to anything like the extent that Western states claim – is highly contestible. Simply asserting that the matter is beyond dispute is a wholly inadequate response.

“my politics are centre-left. I suppose that makes me ‘rightist’ to those whose politics are to the left of mine, but can’t credibly be described as of the right!”

I seem to recall, Wes, you arguing that Tzipi Livni should not be subject to the reach of international law, despite the fact that she was foreign minister in an Israeli government whose military committed extensive, serious and well-documented war crimes against unarmed civilians in Gaza.

Genuine liberals support the rule of international law, as agreed in multilateral fora. They do not believe that raw power should render one immune from the requirement to abide by international law, or from the legal consequences of failing to do so.

Whatever other laudable and liberal views you may hold, that is one rather prominent example of your adopting a position that fits rather snugly and unambiguously on the right hand side of the spectrum.

My comments concerning Tzipi Livni was that it seemed bizarre that she should face an arrest warrant for Operation Cast Lead when she was one of the dissenting voices in the Israeli Cabinet and that it does little to aid the moves for peace.

I support the rule of international law. I’m not aware that any warrant has been issued by the Hague for her arrest? In this case, moves for her arrest were on the basis of British law that would have allowed an arrest, prima facie – i.e. without the burden of evidence. This was a (clever) stunt by campaigners, not a serious attempt at prosecution.

On the threat posed by Iran, I don’t think the left is taking it seriously because we’re haunted by the ghosts of Iraq. Any attempts to point out the threat posed by Iran result in accusations of warmongering. A debate about how to handle Iran shouldn’t be limited to military options. It’s the debate we need to have.

Wes’s statement on Livni that I was referring to can be found here
http://bit.ly/bAgaz3

To quote from the Haaretz article:
“Streeting arrived in Israel last week, the same day a London judge issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni for her involvement in Operation Cast Lead. “It’s just hugely embarrassing,” he said about the incident. “I guess to Israelis it must just seem so really ignorant. Of all the people whom you could try to pin war crime charges on, Tzipi Livni is a really strange choice of character,” he added. “If Britain wants a role in the peace process it needs to engage with the broad range of perspectives,” he said, calling for the legal “loophole” that enabled the arrest warrant be closed.”

Recall that the “strange choice” of Livni as a subject of a potential prosecution was based, not on “character” or “ignorance” but on the evidence – copiously well-documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a UN investigation led by a respected international judge – of extensive and serious war crimes committed by Livni’s government against innocent men, women and children.

The UN investigation described the attack on Gaza as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”, for which some Israelis should face “individual criminal responsibility”.
http://bit.ly/UZ9DC

I posted my last comment before seeing Wes’s latest.

On the Gaza attack, and the British arrest warrant, Livni has said:
“Israel must do what is right for Israel, regardless of judgements, statements and arrest warrants. It’s the leadership’s duty, and I would repeat each and every decision”.
http://bbc.in/5RLqx0

I hope that’s clear. Livni rejects international law utterly, and has no regrets regarding the savage, terrorist assault her military undertook against the civilians of Gaza. Wes chooses to defend her. And describes himself as being on the centre-left.

On the Iranian threat, it suffices to refer to the points made in the article, which Wes still hasn’t engaged with.

Right, Sunny, so Glenn Beck isn’t rational but an Iran led by adherents of the 12th Imam is?