I still to this day don’t now what the war was about. Even Bush people admitted that weapons of mass destruction excuse was a load of bullshit. Oil? Making Bush junior look like a man? Avenging his father?

Who knows? Blowing up brown people still seems favourite to me. Interesting to see Cameron after his little war in Lybia, apparently for democracy and the people or something laying out the red carpet to the king of Bahrain.

Sally @ 1

After 9/11, The cultrally backward people of the US of A required that tens of thousands of innocent Muslims be killed in revenge attacks. Bush sent out his advisors to find a way of appeasing them and Iraq was chosen for the battleground. Hundreds of thousand died at the hands of the most vile culture ever seen on the planet since the Second World war.

Good piece.

The Iraqis could well have toppled Saddam in 1991 if the US hadn’t tacitly allowed him to crush a popular rebellion shortly after the first Gulf War.

The Iraqis could well have toppled Saddam in the 1990s if US and UK backed sanctions hadn’t bolstered the dictator by forcing the people to rely on the regime for their very survival. Remember that those sanctions killed up to a million Iraqis, half of them children under the age of five, according to UNICEF.

And of course, the US and Britain supported Saddam while he committed all his worst atrocities in the 1980s, only turning against him when he started threatening their other pet tyrants.

It says something about the standard of political debate in this country that anyone can seriously claim the war was about liberation without being met with gales of laughter.

The reason the Arab Spring revolutions happened was precisely because the dominoes began to fall after Iraq was liberated from Saddamite rule. The impetus would not have been there without it.

4. Hannibal

Do you have any evidence to support your claim, bearing in mind that there’s a 8-year gap between Saddam Hussain being overthrown and the Arab Spring?

Couple of points to note.

there seems to be an assumption in the article that the Iraq war involved a “price” in lives lost – ie a net increase in the slaughter of civilians when compared to the pre-iraq war “peace”.

Even discounting military and foreign casualties in the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait – this just isn’t true.

BodyCount offers a good record of the deaths since the Iraq war – and a figure of around 115,000 is their upper estimate (so far). That is over about 8 years (getting on for nine now I guess) and equates to an upper estimate of about 15,000 people per year.

Yet even taking the conservative estimates of Saddam’s various attrocities including Anfal, the rounding up of shias and kurds after Kuwait, the ongoing executions, the priodic “cleansing” of the prisons – and the general “dissapearances” between 79 and 2003 – you have a rate of (coincidentally) 15,000 per year (again, not including casualties of the Iran Iraq or the Kuwait wars).

The other point is just this.

It is implausible to consider the Arab Spring without recognising the role the Iraq war played in fostering it. Without the Iraq war, Al Jazeera would not have become a widespread independent force in the Arab world. It was only able to do so by being the “pro-arab” voice for the Iraq War – and so gained the backing of the regions dictators who saw it as an ally. When that ally turned out to be indpendent, it was too late to remove it from arab homes. And so free press facilitated an arab social change for the first time.

–

None of this makes the Iraq war a good thing – it wasn’t. But it is probably about time us lefties started looking at it in a more comprehensive way so as to understand the region better – rather than through anti-iraq blinkers. Otherwise we let the right learn and warp the lessons to be learned.

“BodyCount offers a good record of the deaths since the Iraq war ”

Lancet report offers a better one. Unless you think that every death gets reported in the media.

MIT has a good resource on the human cost of the Iraq war, and the debates surrounding how that can best be measured
http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/index.html

There’s an ongoing and important discussion on that topic. People familiar with that discussion will know that the comment @6 above doesn’t have any credibility.

Western style democracy, and certainly liberalism cannot be imposed holding a gun to somebody’s head – one assumes the reason that such developments did not develop internally (before the war) is because most Iraqis, for reasons outsiders may not fully understand, prefer something else?

Without the Iraq war, Al Jazeera would not have become a widespread independent force in the Arab world. It was only able to do so by being the “pro-arab” voice for the Iraq War – and so gained the backing of the regions dictators who saw it as an ally.

And without Vietnam we’d never have had Apocalypse Now. So suck it up, bitches.

More seriously, I don’t know if the Iraq war was a contributor to the factors behind the “Arab Spring”. I’m not really interested, either. The important point is that “we” shouldn’t base massive policies, on which millions of lives will hang, on tenuous predictions about the influences that they may or may not have in the years, decades, centuries and millenia that follow. If there’s one fifty years of “intervention” into the Middle East have proved it’s that “we’re” really shit at thinking through the consequences of our actions. In the 1970s/80s, for example, some bright spark thought it would be a neat idea to throw money and weapons at Islamic nutbags fighting the Commies in Afghanistan. Twenty odd years later – 9/11. Whoops. If this sounds a bit “wiser than thou” it’s not supposed to be – I’m a dumbass when it comes to working out what will and won’t be smart ideas. The point is that we all have too much dumbassness about us to make such momentous decisions based on such sketchy predictions for the future.

Even discounting military and foreign casualties in the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait – this just isn’t true.

Even assuming that the IBC is a reliable measure of these things – and I can’t say what is and isn’t, knowing little of statistics – it’s a very limited way to judge the conflict. You also have to consider millions of refugees; hundreds of thousands of wounded people; the fact that entire communities of people – think of the Iraqi Christians – have been effectively devastated.

And, besides, your own crude measurements are irrational. Saddam’s “various atrocities” – the most prolific episodes of his long career of mass murder; Operation Anfal, say – were things of the past. If you were going to try and calculate the “worth” of the conflict – though I’m not sure why you’d want to – you’d have to consider the ongoing killings and, if it’s possible, the ones liable to take place in the coming years. That’d be a bugger to achieve, of course, which is one among many reasons why my first point – that momentous acts shouldn’t hang on such vague calculations – seems compelling to me.

Planeshift

Lancet’s studies are good and involve the best practice available – but there is an extrapolation involved that doesn’t entirely stake up. While their methodiology is statistically sound – it is the extrapolation by comparison to figures for 2002 that are weak.

2002 is of course a one-off unique year. It is thus entirely plausible that it was a statistical anomaly that the regime in that year happened not to engage in any big purges or prison clenses. Likewise of course, survey data under dictatorship conditions is very often treated with healthy skepticism. (Those living under dictatorship understandably become either reticent to talk about experiences at all – or develop an inclination to say whatever they deem most likely to please the percieved authority figure. (in this case a person asking questions about deaths)

Had Lancet compared 2006 survey to the survey conducted in the year of the Kuwait invasion – the purges alone would have made the figures seem like the iraq war had people rising from the dead. It would be no more or less anomalous though, than to choose 2002 – a year in which Iraq was gearing up for war and attempting to appear peaceful and stable to court international will.

The Lancet studies were thus a good indicator of overal death rates post-invasion – they were not, however, much use for establishing a trend or whether iraqi civilians were more likely to survive a year without some one killing them under the saddam regime or the coalition.

(I should stress – none of this is a defence of starting a war without UN sanction and based on fraudulent evidence) – I just find statistical comparison fascinating.

And talking about the military this is a good article from Private Eye about the last tory govts great rip off for the tax payer………

“THE housing market slump has killed off any hope the Ministry of Defence might have had of making a decent return from selling its huge military housing estate to Japanese bank Nomura for a cut-price £1.6bn at the fag end of the last Tory government.

Under the 1996 deal the MoD was entitled to a share of profits whenever the company set up to own them, Annington Homes, successfully offloaded them. But in the last financial year the arrangement, which came to an end this month, yielded precisely zilch for taxpayers since only 275 houses were sold, and those at depressed prices.
While taxpayers take a hit, however, others are riding out the housing slump quite nicely.

The chief executive of Annington Homes, James Hopkins, for the not terribly difficult job of collecting rent from the taxpayer and flogging a few houses, trousered £2,632,000 (up 3 percent on last year). This is far above his peers elsewhere in the housing sector who have much bigger tasks on their hands.

Hopkins’ colleagues, commercial director Nick Vaughan and finance director Barry Chambers, haven’t done too badly either, scraping by on £3,314,000 between them. All in what Annington itself admits has been “a testing year”.

Don’t hold your breath for the tax Fifteen years on, the numbers show just what a dire deal the MoD, then led by defence secretary Michael Portillo, struck. So far it has paid more than £2bn in rent to Annington and received £161m back in profit share on house sales. In pure cash terms, Annington has thus already more than recouped its £1.7bn outlay (which the National Audit Office mildly criticised back in 1998). And it is still sitting on around 40,000 properties worth about £3.8bn, for which it paid less than £1.5bn. It hasn’t set anything aside, however, for the £600m tax bill that this value ought to generate when the properties are sold since “there is insufficient evidence that the liability will become due”. Thanks to adept tax planning, presumes Annington, it will keep the profits but not pay the tax.

The same goes for its annual operating profits, last year around £141m. None of this translates into compensation for the taxpayer by way of actual tax payments. All disappear tax-free to lucky offshore investors, marshalled by former Nomura big shot Guy Hands, who in 2002 set up private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners to manage investments including Annington (employing current Foreign Secretary William Hague on its “political council” for a number of years) – a job he now performs from a lonely Guernsey tax exile.

Nor is Annington cursed with the task of looking after the shabby military housing that it owns, a task long since outsourced to other private companies along with the painfully slow process of upgrading them, which would certainly benefit from Annington’s riches.”

David Wearing

Be fair – even you can presumably note that in the most recent news on the mit blog that claims of 2million war widows, that suggesting 250,000 of these may be widows of post-invasion violence (and other related deaths) leaves a rather large indication (effectively 1.75million war widows) that perhaps the death rate related to war is lower post-invasion than pre-invasion under Sadam. (or would one imagine most of the war widows were widowed pre-1979 in a country with a low life expectancy and a young population?)

Never close your mind to questions just because you have found an answer you like.

BenSix

true – and that would have denied us one of my favourite ever films.

As for your rant – I didn’t try to put a price on it – I pointed out why the article shouldn’t have done so by claiming that the loss of life was too high, when in fact the loss of life itself is somewhat subjective.

…I didn’t try to put a price on it – I pointed out why the article shouldn’t have done so by claiming that the loss of life was too high, when in fact the loss of life itself is somewhat subjective…

I didn’t say you did! (And object to the term “rant”. How bloody dare you claim that I’m anything but even-tempered – it’s the kind of thing that makes me flip my lid, you fucking, er…Sorry, where was I? Ah, yes…) It’s just the speculative measurements you offered would be useless if someone employed them for such purposes.

jim @ 2:

“the most vile culture ever seen on the planet since the Second World war”

So you are quite happy to stereotype an entire national culture while being so concerned about sexual stereotyping in Hamley’s toy shop?

As for your claim itself, what about China, Iran, Saudi Arabia or — my candidate – North Korea? The USA is worse than these? Though I would not sterotype the culture or the people of North Korea as being the most vile, but would make the judement apply to the governments of those countries.

Even those of us who opposed the conflict at the time will agree that a democratic Iraq is the best outcome among the range of possibilities on offer from where we are now. We would not have started from here, of course.

Given the opposition to the War was largely driven by the Socialist Workers Party and a variety of Islamists, I don’t think it is reasonable to say that those who opposed the war would agree that a democratic Iraq is the best outcome. For a lot of them, clearly, it was the worst outcome and that is why they opposed it.

But I am curious. Where would you have started from?

It’s not that there was ever any doubt about the brutality of Saddam Hussein, and no reason to think that he would have mended his ways had he remained in office.

And so …. what? You want a democratic Iraq with Saddam in power. You did not want Bush’s solution. So what did you want?

Yet as the events of the Arab Spring have since demonstrated, the people of the Middle East are perfectly capable of taking on their own dictators, perhaps sometimes requiring external support to achieve that end.

Post-Iraq. We have no idea whether they would have been able to do so without the experience of the Iraq War to show them the way. The loss of prestige. The support of the Americans. The fact that the Iraqis could and did vote. All of these had some level of influence on the Arab Spring. There is no reason to think it would have been possible but for George W.

Waiting for regime change from below might have proved rather less costly then imposing regime change from above.

It might. Then again it might not. Iraq had 5000 years of brutal dictatorship. So has much of the rest of the region. There is no reason to think that they would not have continued for another 5000 years in the same way.

3. David Wearing

The Iraqis could well have toppled Saddam in 1991 if the US hadn’t tacitly allowed him to crush a popular rebellion shortly after the first Gulf War.

So you’re saying that if the American Air Force had helped the Shia uprising, they could have defeated Saddam? Interesting. If only George H P Bush was more like his son George W Bush, hey? Wouldn’t the Iraqis have been so much better off! Now what was it that was stopping George Senior from doing that …. it wouldn’t have been people telling him to respect the UN process and the fact that regime change was illegal in international law was it? Go on, tell me what you think about the legality of the Americans engaging in regime change.

The Iraqis could well have toppled Saddam in the 1990s if US and UK backed sanctions hadn’t bolstered the dictator by forcing the people to rely on the regime for their very survival. Remember that those sanctions killed up to a million Iraqis, half of them children under the age of five, according to UNICEF.

Thank God for George W Bush who ended the spineless liberals’ preferred option of sanctions then, right? The Neo-Cons were right all along. By the way, I am waiting for UNICEF to estimate the number of people killed by sanctions against South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Would you care to condemn those sanctions too?

And of course, the US and Britain supported Saddam while he committed all his worst atrocities in the 1980s, only turning against him when he started threatening their other pet tyrants.

No they did not. Saddam was, consistently, supported by his good friends in the Soviet Union, as well as China and France. Not by the English speaking world.

It says something about the standard of political debate in this country that anyone can seriously claim the war was about liberation without being met with gales of laughter.

You’re commenting on delusion on this thread and you think it is the pro-liberation camp that has problems? Now that’s funny.

Are you all terminally naive or are you all wilfully ignorant? I mean this seriously.

“I still to this day don’t now what the war was about. Even Bush people admitted that weapons of mass destruction excuse was a load of bullshit. Oil? Making Bush junior look like a man? Avenging his father?”

Come on.

The war was agitated for by Neoconservatives in the US government on the behest of various lobbies, Oil and Gas being one, and AIPAC being another. You seriously think there was no method in that madness?

For the same reasons (exactly the same), you can expect a war in Iran within the next 2 years. America does not care about Iran, Israel cares about Iran a great deal. AIPAC is the most important political lobby in the US.

Any analysis which does not consider this is either dishonest or poorly informed.

The OP also makes the bizarre assumption that the “Arab Spring” will somehow be good for the region and for us in the west. I suppose it will be if you consider fundamentalist Islamic theocrats to be nicer guys than military dictators.

I have my doubts.

the a&e charge nurse

Western style democracy, and certainly liberalism cannot be imposed holding a gun to somebody’s head – one assumes the reason that such developments did not develop internally (before the war) is because most Iraqis, for reasons outsiders may not fully understand, prefer something else?

Why do you think that? America imposed democracy on Japan and South Korea. India is still a democracy and I am pretty sure we did that with a gun to someone’s head. For that matter so is South Africa. Kenya after a fashion. Jamaica. The list is rather long.

We probably will never know what was going on in most Iraqi’s minds. But I notice that there is no pro-Saddam political party in Iraq now.

There is no reason to think it would have been possible but for George W.

Er, SMFS – this is one o’ the things you have to demonstrate, not us.

In addition to my above comment, by the way, whether or not Iraq was a contributing factor to the Arab Spring, who’s to say if it’s something to celebrate or not? We’ve no idea how things will pan out in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other places. In at least some of those nations the consequences could be grave. We just don’t know. And, yet again, that’s the problem with inflicting such huge decisions on millions of people after the most tenuous predictions. We jus’ dunno.

22. BenSix

Er, SMFS – this is one o’ the things you have to demonstrate, not us.

No it isn’t. The liberation took place first. It would be extraordinary if the former event did not influence in some way the later event. That is kind of the way that history works. Especially as George W made democratisation such a big part of his policy to the region. We can have a sensible discussion about how great an influence it had. It is perfectly reasonable to say it was not important. But given that it took place with an explicit mandate to democratise the region (although it did not work out that way) under the Bush doctrine, it would be utterly unbelievable for it to have had no influence at all. It would be like saying WW2 had no impact on British welfare reform in the late 1940s.

In addition to my above comment, by the way, whether or not Iraq was a contributing factor to the Arab Spring, who’s to say if it’s something to celebrate or not? We’ve no idea how things will pan out in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other places. In at least some of those nations the consequences could be grave. We just don’t know.

Indeed. And that’s a perfectly sensible comment to make. We could discuss this. I am not sure it is going to work out well as things stand. Still, the Left has got what they wanted for a long time – Islamist governments in power with an openly anti-Israeli agenda. The Guardian must be pleased. Now we will see.

And, yet again, that’s the problem with inflicting such huge decisions on millions of people after the most tenuous predictions. We jus’ dunno.

And yet that is the nature of politics, especially politics in this region. Either we disengage completely or we gamble. I opposed the war at the time. It has turned out both worse and better than I expected. But the gamble has had its positive effects too. The next time we get dragged into this region – and we always have been dragged in – we will do so with clearer eyes and less naivete.

[21] “America imposed democracy on Japan and South Korea. India is still a democracy and I am pretty sure we did that with a gun to someone’s head. For that matter so is South Africa” – the dynamics I am talking about bear no resemblance to those in Iraq – it would simply be too tedious to go off on a tangent explaining why – if you believe they are the same (other than the fact some degree of violence was involved) then that is a matter for you.

24. the a&e charge nurse

the dynamics I am talking about bear no resemblance to those in Iraq – it would simply be too tedious to go off on a tangent explaining why

The Indians welcomed us with flowers did they?

Next time could you please make sure that when you say that you cannot introduce democracy at the point of a gun, you make it clear that actually you mean something else completely different?

TONB @ 17

As for your claim itself, what about China, Iran, Saudi Arabia or — my candidate – North Korea? The USA is worse than these?

Not the Country of America, the American culture. All these Countries you mention have pretty bad Governments and are oppressive regimes, without a doubt but none of these Countries has been responsible for anything like the death and destruction that the Right Wing, bible bashing, militaristic, anti science American culture has.

There are obviously plenty of decent, well rounded Americans, but their culture is swamped by bigots.

That is okay, up to point, but North Korea are not bombing innocent people back to the stoneage to appease bloodlust of a few talkshow hosts.

But given that it took place with an explicit mandate to democratise the region (although it did not work out that way) under the Bush doctrine, it would be utterly unbelievable for it to have had no influence at all.

Your claim, lest we forget, was that “there is no reason to think it would have been possible but for George W”, not “there is no reason to believe George W didn’t have the slightest influence”.

@18

You said,
“Given the opposition to the War was largely driven by the Socialist Workers Party and a variety of Islamists”.

Er, no it wasn’t. Just because you happen to see a few SWP placards on a march, that doesn’t mean that each and every demonstrator is a member or the SWP but I wouldn’t expect you to understand that. But even if the SWP are heavily involved what does that say about apologists for the Iraq War? You’re a dishonest, dissembling bunch. That’s what it says.

@19

“Thank God for George W Bush who ended the spineless liberals’ preferred option of sanctions then, right? The Neo-Cons were right all along”.

The sanctions began under Dubya’s father, George H. W. Bush. Here’s a suggestion: try doing some research instead of typing up drivel.

Am I the only one here who suspects that Saddam Hussein might have been better at surviving an Arab Spring uprising than any of his contemporaries? He never showed any hesitation in using maximum force, which was the ‘mistake’ the various other dictators showed, and had (and might still have had) very effective intelligence services – and unlike in Libya, the local tribes did not have the power or organisation to rise successfully on their own (apart from the alreay quasi-independent Kurds), as proved by the Shia rebellion in 1991, which was crushed by a then beaten (often routed) army.

There are a few states where protests are unlikely to win, because they will never be able to get traction. Iraq was one, North Korea another. It is only those states that play at a semblance of legitimacy in the world’s eyes that make themselves vulnerable (fortunately, it is very difficult not to play this game it seems).

Jim @ 26:

A culture and the group of people who compose it are not entirely distinct, as a culture is the way of life of a given group of people. I suppose you could identify a US sub-culture as “Right Wing, bible bashing, militaristic, anti science”; or apply that label to American governing elites. But to describe American culture as “Right Wing, bible bashing, militaristic, anti science” and then say there are “plenty of decent, well rounded Americans” is sloppy thinking, for the latter are part of the former.

As for death and destruction in the post-WW2 world, many more people were killed in China as a result of Maoism than have been killed by America’s military interventions. Then consider what Cambodia, North Korea and numerous other states have done to their own people or in war with another state. Can you begin to see how exaggerated your claim about the US is?

You exemplify the irrational hatred on the left of the USA. I’m not at all sure why this hatred exists; but it may have something to do with the fact that the US works and is a living refutation of socialism while all socialist states have been costly and miserable failures, or it may be a legacy of the Cold War, or it may be no more than resentment of the top dog. Whatever the reason, is it not time that the left grew up and developed a more balanced view of the US?

Are you apologists still bleating on about Iraq?

We have to hack the heads off women because of the American’s here.
We have to lynch Homosexuals from bridges because of the Americans here.
We have to rape and torture women we find uppity because of the Americans here.
We have to bomb our own mosques because of the Americans here.
We have to bomb market places and attack funerals because of the Americans here.
We have to commit genocide against one of the oldest (OLDER THAN US) Christian sects in the world because of the Americans here.
We have to butcher each others neighbours because of the Americans here.

WHAT BULLSHIT!

And seeing as (as predicted) this ‘Arab Spring’ has seen NOTHING BUT extremist, hardline, Islamists take full or majority power in every country where spring sprung…How much longer is this apologist term ‘Arab Spring’ going to last?!

How long before you run away from the truth Sunny and delete this post!?

27. BenSix

Your claim, lest we forget, was that “there is no reason to think it would have been possible but for George W”, not “there is no reason to believe George W didn’t have the slightest influence”.

Then we are quibbling about how much of an influence it had. Given that there was no push for democracy in the previous, let’s be generous, 1700 years, it would be astonishing if George W did not, as I said, make it possible.

buddyhell

Er, no it wasn’t. Just because you happen to see a few SWP placards on a march, that doesn’t mean that each and every demonstrator is a member or the SWP but I wouldn’t expect you to understand that. But even if the SWP are heavily involved what does that say about apologists for the Iraq War? You’re a dishonest, dissembling bunch. That’s what it says.

The Stop the War Coalition was, as I said, an alliance between the SWP and a variety of Islamists. I do not deny that a lot of Useful Idiots turned up as protest fodder, but that is beside the point. If not for those two groups, they would not have had an occasion to protest. It says that the people who supported the war are, as is obvious, supporters of democracy. And the people who opposed it are, of course, not.

buddyhell

The sanctions began under Dubya’s father, George H. W. Bush. Here’s a suggestion: try doing some research instead of typing up drivel.

That is, of course, irrelevant. Want to try again? Not that George Senior was in any way a neo-Con. Not even Jewish is he?

“But there is no reason to think that the Iraqis would have been any less reticent to settle accounts with their dictator then the people of other countries in the region. Waiting for regime change from below might have proved rather less costly then imposing regime change from above.”

There is however reason to think that they would have been about as successful as their Syrian neighbours have been thus far, or their cousins in Bahrain, Yemen etc. The chief reason the Tunisian & Egyptian revolutions succeeded was that the armed forces in both countries sided with the people, and abandoned the established regime. Arguably both also had more in the way of a ‘civil society’ or non-extremist opposition than either Syria or Iraq.

The Baath party in Iraqi guise would have had little compunction in answering any Iraqi spring (in your alternative history) just as brutally as Assad has done in Syria.. probably more brutally.

I agree that the Iraq conflict was both flawed in both concept and execution, and that it is chiefly responsible for the Afghan intervention not being as successful as it could have been had Iraq not happened. Where I disagree with you, and others like you, is in the inference that due to the fact Iraq was disastrously mishandled, the outcome was inevitable, andthat it can therefore forever be used as some trump card for non-interventionists.

It cannot and should not. Faced with a despotic regime backed up with security forces who are prepared to butcher their own people, the outcome is inevitable. There is not always a black and white choice between regime change from below a la Tunisia/Egypt, or regime change imposed from outside a la Afghanistan/Iraq.

Your thought experiment of leaving the Iraqi’s (or anyone else for that matter) to sort out their own problems may oftentimes come to look just as bad or worse than intervention, particularly interventions less cack handed than Iraq. In fact it might even be seen as a cop out in classical realist terms that, in the end, these are countries far away, about which we know little (or nothing?) and care less.