Wednesday, July 06, 2016 

Chilcot.

The publication of the Chilcot report hasn't felt the same as those other reports into past misdeeds of the British state.  How could it?  Many of the faces in parliament may be different, but Iraq is a decision still raw and on-going, with much of the guilt still lying in the Commons.  Unlike Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough, this was a decision that was parliament's to make.  It flunked it.  One of the saddest aspects of today is neither Robin Cook or Charles Kennedy are here to experience it, those two most understated opponents of the war, both of whom had much to lose but stuck to their principles regardless.

Perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way; deeply sad, lacking the motivation to point fingers for the umpteenth time.  Chilcot's conclusions are far more damning than I and it seems the vast majority expected, all but saying Blair launched a war of aggression, that it was not a war of last resort, and that while no one specifically lied, exaggeration and completely ignoring the other side of the argument was at the very heart of a war of choice.  It's just that it seems anti-climactic, when those other reports were anything but.  Iraq has been so argued about, so studied, so drilled down into, with positions long since set that it has been all too apparent Chilcot was going to settle little.

This was reflected in David Cameron's response.  The only reason we have had repeated inquiries into Iraq is because British troops died, and the war has been such an obvious disaster.  There has been no equivalent inquiry into Afghanistan, despite our role in that similarly benighted country being only slightly less disastrous.  Afghanistan has no natural resources and Afghanis matter less than Iraqis.  Similarly, there has been no inquiry into the intervention in Libya other than a broad investigation by a parliamentary committee.  No British servicemen died, see.  There have been endless investigations in America into what happened in Benghazi, mind, for equally apparent reasons.

When David Cameron was outlining his disagreements with Chilcot, he was in effect defending himself over Libya.  Most of the criticisms directed at Blair and the preparations for war in Iraq equally apply to that bloody fiasco.  Cameron took action when there was no clear threat, when all the options had very clearly not been exhausted, where exaggerations of what might happen if we didn't act piled up, and without the slightest plan for what to do afterwards.  Indeed, that there was no plan seems to have been the plan.  If anything, the way in which the UN Security Council's authorisation was abused, with NATO using it as cover for regime change was even more egregious than the way Bush and Blair had no intention of giving the UN weapons inspectors a chance to do their work.  The damage to the concept of the responsibility to protect has been incalculable.  So also we don't properly know how influential the deception over Libya was on Russia and Putin, with all that has followed since in Syria.

For it's apparent Chilcot's findings, crushing as they are for Blair, will change absolutely nothing.  Of course there must always be the option of acting quickly in the event of an attack definitively linked to either a state or a state harbouring a terrorist group, but this has not been the case in any of the conflicts since Iraq.  Equally, we should not shy away from intervening to prevent or stop a genocide, if it can be established forces can be deployed quickly enough, that our actions will stop it, that the threat is real and we have a plan for what comes afterwards.

The fact is politics doesn't work as Chilcot would like it to, as has been so amply demonstrated by the other events of the past couple of weeks.  Labour can't even get a coup 9 months in the planning right, while the Tories by contrast have such a lust for power that friendships and bonds of years can be sacrificed in a matter of seconds for the slightest of advantages.  Planning is an alien concept, unless there's something in it for them personally.  When the architect of the "not doing stupid shit" doctrine has done plenty of such things, what hope of our less thoughtful representatives pledging to do the same?  When we have a media that, again, has spent the past couple of weeks demonstrating its enduring belief in wielding power without responsibility, what hope of no repeat of the Murdoch press boosting of Blair?

Most pertinently, why would anything change when the consequences of setting an entire region on fire are so slight?  If Blair has suffered mentally for his decision, he certainly hasn't in any other aspect.  Our soon to be outgoing prime minister orchestrated a parliamentary standing ovation for him, while no bank or dictatorship is yet to decide a man partially responsible for setting off a conflagration that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be too toxic to pay millions.  He remains influential to many politicians, especially on foreign policy, even if they won't admit to it, while his ideas are still instantly reported on and debated seriously.  Would anyone in a similar position ever have been allowed to make so desperate a "defence" of his continued righteousness as he was today, a self-pitying diatribe (yes, I know) that hasn't changed in 13 years?  When Blair was allowed to get away with once again describing the decision not to attack Syria in 2013 as a grievous mistake, the Syria conflict a war that could not possibly have turned out the way it has if it hadn't been for the Iraq invasion, what possible chance that a future prime minister will think twice about launching a war of aggression against another shithole country that poses no direct threat to us?

How desperately, pathetically sad and predictable.  Much like this writer.

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Thursday, October 29, 2015 

Want to come over and Netflix and Chilcot?

(I am once again sorry for the title.)

The temptation to simply make bad jokes about the Chilcot inquiry at this point is all but overwhelming.  Iraq war inquiry still not to be over by Christmas.  No shock and awe as Chilcot says report to be launched within 45 years.  De'Chilcotisation process still not achieved, despite intervention of Daily Mail.  

And indeed, for all the protestations of Chilcot and his relatively few friends in the media, it is absurd that a report on a war that lasted 7 years should take an equal amount of time to gestate before finally emerging.  Delayed as it has been by the death of panel member Sir Martin Gilbert and incessant, interminable hold-ups over just what can and cannot be released of the conversations between Tony Blair and George Bush, the responsibility ultimately is on Chilcot himself.  If during the early stages he realised it was to be an even more mammoth task then he assumed, as he must have done, then he should have requested extra resources.

Far from all the blame can be laid at Chilcot's door, however.  Nor can it be pinned on Blair, or on the Maxwellisation process of contacting those due to be criticised for a response as a whole.  Such has the focus been on whether or not Blair will finally be held to account (spoiler: he won't) that it seems to have been forgotten Chilcot's remit was across the board, as it had to be.  Blair, both rightly and wrongly, has become defined by Iraq.  It will be how he's principally remembered, and yet this is far too simplistic a view of how we came to find ourselves riding the coattails of an even by historical standards exceptionally right-wing Republican administration's plan to remake the Middle East.  Blair was the driving force, certainly, but there are meant to be safeguards in place across government to prevent a prime minister from taking his country to war on such flimsy grounds.  They failed, with much of Whitehall working in concert with the prime minister to ensure Britain took part in a war it had no need to.

It's this that somewhat explains why Chilcot's task has taken so much longer than it should.  Gordon Brown delayed the inquiry itself until the last minute, no doubt partly because he hoped he'd be gone by the time it came to report.  The Tories' fervour for an inquiry, driven by the hope that it would further damage Labour, has long since transformed into the realisation that it'll be under their watch a potentially damning report will be published.  Cameron's public statements, that he wants the report published as soon as possible, mask what has in fact been an alliance with the Cabinet Office to delay it as much as possible.  Whether or not Richard Norton Taylor's reports are entirely accurate on Whitehall providing documents to those set to be criticised which Chilcot himself did not receive, it's apparent there has been a refusal to cooperate, at the very least in a timely fashion, that Chilcot will hopefully address in the report itself.

As argued previously, the idea the report will provide the "closure" some want sadly doesn't reflect how previous such inquiries have gone.  At best, Chilcot will be critical across the board, as that's precisely where responsibility does lie.  The idea Blair got his way in the face of resistance is nonsense: the intelligence agencies, the civil service, the military, other government departments, other ministers, the opposition Conservative party, all either acquiesced at the slightest prompting or actively went along with war plan Iraq.  Any criticisms that were made took place behind close doors (with the obvious exception of Clare Short), and either ignored or dismissed.  Some of this was also down to how they believed the war would be over quickly; no one suspected there would be such resistance, from both Sunni and Shia militants, let alone that a terrorist group to rival al-Qaida itself would emerge from the rubble.

The same cannot be said now, which again helps to explain why there have been such delays.  Should Chilcot's criticism go further than expected, it will only highlight how the same deficiencies, same refusal to plan for the worst, same touching belief in the power of bombing countries better persists.  You only have to look at the response from the government to parliament's refusal to vote for air strikes on Assad to see how practically nothing has changed: it wasn't that the government had failed to make an even remotely convincing case, it was everyone else's, whether Ed Miliband's or that of a country supposedly coming over isolationist all of a sudden.  Just as with Iraq, the attorney general assured everyone it was all above board legally, and an incredibly lacking intelligence briefing was also provided.  It's no coincidence that by next July a decision one way or the other will likely have been made on joining the action in Syria against Islamic State, when without doubt the same old arguments and same old practices will have reared their heads once again.

After all, Blair if nothing else recognises that Islamic State owes its existence to his war.  By contrast, the more out there interventionists still with us maintain that our involvement in Libya has no connection whatsoever to what has happened since, and to believe so is to fall into the ad hoc fallacy.  Casuality apparently doesn't exist.  Others argue that Libya would have descended into chaos if we hadn't intervened, which is probably true, but not an argument for having done so.  Chilcot, whatever conclusions he reaches, will not change the debate one iota.  How could he?

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Wednesday, January 21, 2015 

And we're back in the room.

A scary thought: we're closing in on the 12th anniversary of the start of the 2nd Iraq war.  A mundane reality: we're currently involved in the 3rd Iraq war, albeit against the self-proclaimed Islamic State rather than the Iraqi one.

Those wars are of course inextricably linked, just as they are to the first Gulf war, the one which arguably set the tone for the conflicts we've seen post-Cold War.  Good ol' Saddam miscalculated in the belief that no one would mind if he gobbled up Kuwait; after all, didn't he fight the good fight against the Iranians for us?  Sadly for him, the last thing the Saudis were going to stand for was a rival to their regional hegemony, and so in came the Americans, with ourselves alongside naturally.  Plenty of cringing Iraqi conscripts were incinerated in the name of freedom, Saddam was redesignated as worse than Hitler, and Iraq became the country of choice for lobbing cruise missiles at whenever there was a need for a distraction from domestic politics.

Until 9/11, when it was decided evil dictators could no longer be contained lest they provide sanctuary for evil terrorists.  Unfortunately, about the worst terrorist in residence in Iraq other than, err, Saddam himself was Abu Nidal, and even someone as bloodthirsty as he palled compared to al-Qaida.  Instead the debate focused around weapons of mass destruction, for what even at the time was described as "policy reasons".  Fact was, Saddam had to go.  Less thought was put into the post-war planning, something we're still living with the consequences of today.

Oh, and there's also been an inquiry looking into all this.  Frankly, I'd forgotten.  Not because the Chilcot report won't be important, because it will.  It just won't tell us anything we don't know already, or at least shouldn't know.  A true acknowledgement of the unmitigated disaster of the Iraq war simply isn't possible, as it would mean almost every single politician and almost every single establishment figure and institution admitting they either got it wrong then or have learned precisely nothing since.  Besides, the Chilcot inquiry was not established to do any such thing: it was meant, as state approved inquiries into complete and utter fuck-ups are, to look at everything that happened and then make a few recommendations that can be safely ignored or overruled on the grounds of government every so often needing to let off steam by chucking high explosives into foreign shitholes.

The reaction to the news the report will not be published until after the election is highly similar to that of the Sun dropping page 3 girls.  You'd think in an era when you can within a couple of clicks see a woman in exchange for meagre payment perform some of the most degrading sexual acts imaginable that a newspaper deciding not to show naked breasts wouldn't exactly be classed as a feminist triumph (the more reflective might also wonder if the diminishing market for softcore modelling might in the long run lead to more women having to go down the hardcore route), but then nothing really surprises any more.  It's a conspiracy!  It must be published now, regardless of how that would be against the very law governing such inquiries!  It's going to be a whitewash!  It's all Tony Blair's fault!  It's all Labour's fault!

And so depressingly on.  The focus on Blair just proves what this has been about from the beginning.  It's not about seeing Iraq for what it was, a culmination of mistakes by every arm of government, not to forget the role of the media or the public for that matter, let alone an examination of how there came to be a consensus on foreign policy which is bomb first, bomb often and only then wonder if there might be consequences down the line, it's about trying to nail custard to the wall.  Even if the report says Blair took Britain to a war on a lie, which it won't, his excellency will say he did what he thought was right.  He doesn't just still believe in the war, he's partial to more on the same model.  Nothing is going to change the mind of a true believer.

The reason for the delay is staring everyone in the face too.  It wasn't Blair or the others involved in the "Maxwellisation" process holding it up, it was the Cabinet Office, the securocrats and the Americans.  The public can't possibly know what a former president and a former prime minister said to each other 12 years on, no way, however fundamental it may or may not be to how the decision to go to war came to be made.  The metadata of everyone's online activity must be accessible by the state in order to protect us, but when it comes to transparency over the act that has done more than anything to increase that danger, you can whistle for it.

Whatever the conclusions the inquiry reaches, minds were made up long ago, mine included.  This isn't going to be a Bloody Sunday or a Hillsborough, where the sheer force of evidence alters perceptions, despite it already having been there had you looked for it.  While I seriously doubt the report would change anyone's vote, there is still a minority that regard Iraq as Labour's ultimate betrayal, holding it against the party despite nearly all those involved either having left parliament or exiting this year.  You only have to see the Lib Dems, SNP and UKIP jockeying for the slightest advantage to realise just the one party has something to lose.  We've waited this long to be disappointed, let down, have our prejudices confirmed; being deprived a few more weeks, months, years isn't going to make the slightest difference now.

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Monday, April 14, 2014 

How long before we need an inquiry into the inquiry?

Governments change, ministers come and go, but if there's something that doesn't alter in our modern political culture, it's there's always one inquiry or another stuck in the mire.  For a long time it was the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which took 12 years to report on the events of a single, if extraordinary, confused and controversial day.  More recently we had Sir Peter Gibson's cancelled inquiry into extraordinary rendition and the British state's alleged complicity in it.  Gibson's short report sat waiting to be published for 18 months, as arguments raged about whether a single, if crucial strand of correspondence within MI6 concerning the mistreatment at Bagraim air base could be declassified.  Not fully, it was decided, Gibson giving in.  Another inquiry now waits in the wings, due to conducted by those thoroughly decent chaps at the Intelligence and Security Committee.

We are though forgetting the Chilcot inquiry, aka the umpteenth attempt to have a definitive inquiry into how we went to war with Iraq, which started hearing public evidence in November of 2009.  Almost five years on, and three years since it finished its public hearings, we're still waiting for the report to published.  First the suggestion was the "Maxwellisation" process of writing to those criticised was likely to begin by the middle of last year; then came the news there were disagreements between Chilcot and the Cabinet Office over the publication of documents and memorandums between Tony Blair and George Bush.  It wasn't clear and still isn't clear now whether this the result of complaints by Blair or the state refusing to declassify this higher level material, or whether the US may also have objected.  The Graun reported at the end of last year that a compromise had been reached and the inquiry was likely to reach a conclusion by mid-year; now the Independent says those stories were "mere optimism" and the negotiations are still deadlocked.  With the "Maxwellisation" process still to start, and indeed with the very conclusions apparently yet to be written, even if there's a deal during the summer recess it seems unlikely the report will be published until this time next year.

Complaining that this is ridiculous seems to miss the point.  Every inquiry dealing with "sensitive material" is always caught up in seemingly endless discussion about what can and can't be safely made public lest national security be affected.  After all, when the MoD decides to block publication of a book it first commissioned, it doesn't seem quite as ludicrous more care is taken over personal communications between world leaders.  It does however suggest delay is built into these inquiries, governments always believing the more time passes between a controversy and its final resolution the less chance that something beyond criticism of those responsible is taken. 

This remains the case regardless of changes in government, as exemplified by the cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood.  Without letting Blair or Gordon Brown for that matter off the hook, the delay seems to rest with the refusal of the Cabinet Office to countenance releasing anything in the wider public interest that is also secret.  Hence Heywood's visit to the Guardian to demand the return of the Snowden files, where he made clear the government will decide when debates on such subjects begin and end.  This would also tally with the news from Craig Murray that the government has lobbied the Americans on the release of the Senate Intelligence Report on rendition, lest it undermine their efforts to block legal action by Abdul Hakim Belhaj over his rendition to Libya.  It was after all the release by an American court of far more damning evidence of the torture of Binyam Mohamed that led the High Court here to release the "seven paragraphs".

The very least we deserve is to know precisely why publication continues to be delayed and by whom.  It's all very well for Nick Clegg to say the report should be published now, without giving any suggestion as to whether he has done anything practical to smooth or speed the process, but we need more.  With Blair continuing to defend the war, it's difficult to see how he could be trying to delay the inevitable: he is more than ready to brazen out whatever Chilcot chooses to throw at him.  Instead it once again seems to be the secret state acting as a block, always wanting to be in control, while refusing to take responsibility.  Once Clegg and his party would have promised to try and do something about that.

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Friday, September 09, 2011 

Scum-watch: What a difference 4 years makes.

The Sun's editorial the day after the collapse of the court martial against six of the men accused of being involved in the abuse of Baha Mousa:

COMMON sense prevailed when two British soldiers were cleared of abusing Iraqi prisoners.

Major Michael Peebles and Warrant Officer Mark Davies served with courage and bravery in the most difficult conditions.

This ludicrous show trial ? which has already seen four other soldiers cleared on the judge’s orders ? has been a waste of time and money.

These men risked their lives in Iraq but were repaid by being hung out to dry.

Every aspect of investigating so-called crimes within the military needs to be re-examined.

Our servicemen and women deserve nothing less.

Today's Sun editorial following Sir William Gage's report into Baha Mousa's death:

NOTHING can excuse the savagery that led to the death of an innocent Iraqi prisoner at the hands of British squaddies.

As David Cameron says, it was shocking and appalling. And it must never happen again.

There are vital lessons for the Army over the scandal of hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died of 93 injuries inflicted by brutal captors in a detention centre.

The Sun's security expert, Andy McNab, points out that squaddies on active service are pumped up and highly aggressive. In war, their lives depend on it.

Responsibility for channelling that aggression, and enforcing rules on treating prisoners, falls to senior commanders and top brass at the Defence Ministry.

Yesterday's public inquiry report condemned a shameful failure of leadership. It also hit out at the conspiracy of silence over the killing of Mr Mousa.

Defence Secretary Liam Fox must act decisively with sackings — although he is right to insist that firm interrogation techniques remain an option.

Most Service personnel are fine men and women doing a tough job.

Yesterday the latest soldier to die in Afghanistan was brought home, a tragic reminder of the perils our brave troops face daily.

A handful of bad apples must not be allowed to tarnish the whole Army.

Whatever happened to common sense? And perhaps the Sun can also elaborate on whom outside the military contributed to the "conspiracy of silence" following the "savage" treatment meted out to Baha Mousa. After all, a handful of bad apples must not be allowed to tarnish the whole of the British media.

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9/09/2011 02:06:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, September 08, 2011 

Justice at long last for Baha Mousa.

When the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday finally reported, I asked whether the forthcoming report into the death of Baha Mousa, coming just 7 years after his death could shine a similar light onto the excesses of the military. To the great credit of Sir William Gage and the team whom worked with him both on the report and during the inquiry, it does. It also asks a lot of questions which have yet to be properly answered.

To call Gage's conclusions devastating and his report meticulous in its dedication to getting as close to the truth as any investigator coming up against what was described at the previous court martial as an "obvious closing of the ranks" possibly could would not quite capture the true essence of what is an indictment of the state of the military prior to going into Iraq. It's a story of very young, often naive men being thrown in at the deep end, into a city (Basra) where security was rapidly disintegrating with the population turning against them, often expected to work 16 to 20 hour days in temperatures of between 40 degrees at night and 59 during the day, all with inadequate training, most especially when it came to the arresting of both "regime loyalists" and just general criminals, and all for dispiritingly low levels of pay.

This doesn't however even begin to explain why Baha Mousa and the others who were arrested with him on the 14th of September 2003 were treated with such a staggering level of brutality by some of the members of the 1 Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Gage also doesn't a reach a single overriding reason: he does however suspect, as had long been suggested, that the soldiers who took Mousa into custody and then subjected him to prolonged beatings, "stress positioning" and sleep deprivation for the next 36 hours believed he and his friends were responsible either for the deaths of six military police killed by a mob a couple of months earlier, or for the death of the popular Captain Dai Jones, a month before, pointing to it as the "principal cause". The only evidence they had which even suggested there were possibly insurgents was a cache of weaponry found at the hotel they worked at, which included a couple of grenades without fuses, pistols, two assault rifles and a large quantity of Iraqi dinars. There's nothing to suggest that during the conditioning and "tactical questioning" they subsequently underwent that they admitted, or even alluded to being involved in either of the incidents.

He also pinpoints exactly why the ranks closed during the previous court martial: far from this being the work of two or three out of control, revenge seeking servicemen, he names 19 separate soldiers as having some role in the violence meted out to the detainees. This doesn't include those who either witnessed what was going on, heard about it, or subsequently minimised what happened. One of these was 1QLR's padre, Father Peter Madden, who Gage found to be a "poor witness". Madden it seems found nothing untoward when he visited the detainees on the Monday, by which point the conditions in which they were being held should have spoken for themselves. Likewise, while the unit's regimental medical officer, Dr Derek Keilloh, was not criticised for his attempts to revive Mousa, it seems remarkable that at the time he maintains he had noticed no injuries on the body other than blood under his nose. The photographs of Mousa which have since been published were taken just after he was pronounced dead; they clearly show the extent of the beating he had received, let alone the 93 separate injuries which were subsequently identified.

All of which brings into sharp context the response of some following the court martial. One strutting, preening cock was Colonel David Black, who said soldiers had to be able to "work without looking over their shoulders, inhibited by the fear of such actions by an over-zealous and remote officialdom", while the local Tory MP Ben Wallace accused the then attorney general Lord Goldsmith of conducting a witch-hunt. The Sun, which considers itself the forces' paper to the great embarrassment of many serving in the army, referred to it as a "show trial" and the allegations, despite the very real death of Mousa and the extensive injuries to the other men detained as "so-called crimes".

The 73 separate recommendations made by Gage will hopefully address most of the problems identified. The one thing it doesn't comment on, and which the Chilcot inquiry must is the politicians who put them in such a desperate position in the first place, just about prepared for the initial conflict but not for what came afterwards. Ultimate responsibility must as always reside at the very top.

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9/08/2011 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, September 01, 2010 

A journey into his own eternal self-righteousness.


If you're looking for something approaching a revelatory moment in A Journey, one of the very few to judge by the summaries and quoted extracts, it's probably in the part where Blair admits to asking Alex Ferguson what he'd do if his best player wouldn't do what he wanted him to and just did his own thing. In effect, this was the equivalent of asking himself what to do - not because Ferguson and Blair are in any way similar in style, but due to the qualities they share. Both could be described as great leaders, at being able to inspire when they need to - yet they also have substantial character flaws. Neither could ever find themselves imagining that they'd done something wrong, at least not something deadly serious; both are completely convinced of their own infallibility; and both are incredibly indulged by the media. The difference perhaps is that Ferguson has never been prepared to be overshadowed by anyone - hence why David Beckham was sent on his way. When it came to Gordon Brown, as Ferguson himself advised, it was impossible to get rid of him in a similar way as he was still going to be in the "dressing room".

Instead then, Blair's waited until now to finally give Gordon a kicking, and it really wasn't worth the wait. All we get is a repeat of the old slurs - no emotional intelligence, strange, a disaster which was foreseen yet allowed to take its course. Sort of the opposite of Iraq, in the latter instance, a "nightmare" which Blair didn't see coming and which was most certainly of his choosing. There's the nonsense as well, such as Blair's claim that it was he who thought up the independence of the Bank of England, not Brown as every other source in history has it. One wonders whether he'll later claim he was the one who came up with the "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" soundbite, another Brown creation, although one which Blair became famous for. Even the supposed shocking treachery of Brown is pretty feeble - threatening an inquiry into the loans for peerages scandal if Blair implemented the Adair Turner review on pensions. History, you suspect, might well judge Brown to be in the right on that one. The response from the Brown camp, or at least what remains of his supporters, described as being akin to a cult by Blair, which is a really quite astounding example of projection, has been remarkable in its reticence, amounting to Michael Dugher saying Blair's portrayal of Brown was unfair and unkind. If we were to believe everything else we've been told about Brown, he's probably chewing the carpet and throwing around the crockery up in Kirkcaldy in inarticulate frothing frustration as I write this.

The really, saddening, maddening, infuriating thing which his memoir most underlines is that beyond the few obviously false parts he seemingly felt he had to invent, such as his "premonition" of John Smith's death and his advice to Diana that Dodi was a wrong'un, is just how brilliant a politician Blair both was and still is. For all those now pointing out that he lost 4 million votes during his tenure as a response to his diagnosis as to why Labour lost, which I'll come to, he still won 3 elections, even if the last was just as much Brown's victory as it was Blair's. It's that this brilliant politician, had he truly been Labour, could have achieved so much in that time period, or at least so much more than he did. New Labour's real victory always has been, and remains, moving the country forward socially and ever so slightly marginally to the left politically, delivering a minimum wage and civil partnerships. If he had dedicated his energy to attempting to improve social mobility and life chances, displaying the same vigour as when he drove through public service reform and overcame all opposition to taking part in the invasion of Iraq, then much more could have been added to both his own and Labour's legacy.

The problem became, as John Harris has diagnosed, that Blair's belief in the virtues of New Labour as an ideology, if it can be regarded as such, is pathological, as well as delusional. This doesn't just drive him, as we've seen over the last few days: it also drives Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, the former most certainly pathological, as even Blair himself realised in the way he went after the BBC for getting far, far too close to the truth. Hence Labour didn't lose the election because it was tired and because New Labour itself had become outdated, it lost because Brown had actively repudiated New Labour policies. It doesn't matter that this is nonsense, and that about the only thing actively against New Labour which Brown introduced was the 50p rate of tax on those earning over £150,000, it's what's allowed Blair and the others to put the blame for the party's defeat elsewhere. It wasn't and isn't their fault; in fact, if Brown had done what Blair would have, Labour would still be in power. It's best to quote Blair himself:

Had he pursued New Labour policy the personal issue would still have made victory tough, but it wouldn’t have been impossible. Departing from New Labour made it so. Just as the 2005 election was one we were never going to lose, 2010 was one we were never going to win — once the fateful strategic decision was taken to abandon the New Labour position.”

The problem, I would say error, was in buying a package which combined deficit spending, heavy regulation, identifying banks as the malfeasants and jettisoning the reinvention of government in favour of the rehabilitation of government. The public understands the difference between the state being forced to intervene to stabilise the market and government back in fashion as a major actor in the economy.


Blair is in effect arguing that the credit crunch and the almost wholesale collapse of much of the British banking sector changed absolutely nothing, or should have changed nothing. If only Labour had continued as it had before, as if the recession never happened, adopting the Conservative stance of, if not quite doing nothing as was Labour's caricature of their policy, then doing less than they did, the voters would have given the party the benefit of the doubt. Blair is making the argument which the Conservative party even now is too scared to make openly - that it's the state which is the real problem, not the markets which so comprehensively failed to see that famous moral hazard in the bubble which they believed would just keep on growing.

Despite all his pretensions to the contrary, it's clear that he believes the Conservatives under Cameron have seized the New Labour mantra. He offers no criticism of the coalition, making not even the slightest reference to the public spending cuts which are coming, while claiming that the public got what they wanted in the coalition, something which the opinion polls are already starting to show is far from being the truth. Andrew Marr made much the same point in his interview: that Blair had always been a conservative at heart and only now is his head coming to terms with it. Not that he's necessarily from the mould which the Tories now draw from; instead he would probably seem most at home on the left of the Republican party, where his Manichean worldview on Iraq and now Iran would go down best, with al-Qaida and the Mullahs melding together into one amorphous whole which simply has to be opposed, regardless of any cost.

It's this which leads Blair to consider the ban on fox-hunting and the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act as amongst his biggest mistakes. The killing of defenceless animals for fun (sorry, I mean as tradition and sport) and a bill which makes it easier to hold governments to account are hardly incongruous choices when you realise that he still holds the Iraq war to be fully justified, for which he has accepted "responsibility" and where he has moved beyond compassion. More than that, he still wants to fight the battles of old, including five pages from Hans Blix's UN report in January 2003, documenting how Saddam wasn't co-operating with the weapons inspectors. And even though the WMD didn't exist, and therefore it makes no difference whatsoever whether or not Iraq was fully co-operating with the inspections, as he recognises as he also argues Saddam was just waiting until sanctions had been lifted to start the programmes up again, he still has absolute faith in his righteousness.

The well-publicised change in the title then, from The Journey to A Journey, doesn't just reflect a worry that using the definite article might have been construed as immodest or messianic, and if there's one thing Blair has always tried not to be, it's messianic, it's also that the journey hasn't yet finished. The direction of political trajectory is obvious, yet where it will end for Blair himself remains uncertain. There are hints of what could have been, as even now he's in Washington involved in the talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Perhaps also that reflects the greatest tragedy of all: that Blair helped relative peace to be achieved in Northern Ireland, something destined to be overshadowed by how he waged it elsewhere. And how.

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9/01/2010 10:02:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, April 19, 2010 

Iraq, the insurgency, and the death of Omar al-Baghdadi.

To get an indication of just how many times it's been claimed that either Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, now apparently positively identified as Hamid Dawud Muhammad Khalil al-Zawi, and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the two key leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq, more properly known now as the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq, have been killed or captured, you could do worse than look at my post from April last year commenting on the apparent arrest of, err, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. The Iraqi government claimed at the time that it was definitely al-Baghdadi, or al-Zawi, but today's press conference by none other than Nouri al-Maliki himself, along with the usual tasteful images of the corpses of those killed, and the approving comments from Joe Biden, suggests that this time they actually have been assassinated.

If the insurgency in Iraq was in decline in April of last year, buffeted both by the surge but far more effectively by the Awakening councils, which both revolted against the Sharia law based tyranny which the "Islamic state" imposed on the areas under its control, as well as its fratricidal nature, turning on other insurgent groups which it had once worked alongside, then a year on the position for the most extreme group of jihadis is even worse. It has to be remembered that at the height of its power, al-Qaida in Iraq, as it was relatively briefly properly known, had all but a stranglehold on the "Sunni triangle", control of major parts of Baghdad, and tentacles stretching right up to the northern city of Mosul. While it is probably still the most active Sunni insurgent group in the country, it has now been reduced down to a rump, forced back into a few remaining strongholds, and able only to carry out the multiple, coordinated suicide bombings it became infamous for, especially in Baghdad, mercifully, on far fewer occasions.

The reasons for this are not just that the Iraqi security forces have been increasingly growing in strength, coupled with the surge and Awakening councils, but also that the stench of defeat has been in the air ever since the insurgency turned decisively against the "Islamic State" back in 2008. While the other Sunni insurgency groups, especially the Islamic Army, prided themselves in being wholly Iraqi in origin and were mainly nationalist in ideology, the "Islamic State" depended on foreign jihadis to make up the majority of their willing suicide attackers, or as jihadists prefer to call the result, martyrdom operations. Compared with other areas where the jihad appears to going relatively well, such as Afghanistan, Yemen or Somalia, Iraq suddenly doesn't seem to be such an attractive proposition. Fighting what appears to be a lost cause, even if the end result is still the much yearned for martyrdom, discourages potential jihadis across the board.

Likely to be seen as the leading cause of the eventual downfall of what had been by far the most successful al-Qaida "franchise" was that al-Zarqawi's notorious brutality left the Islamic State with few allies, almost all of whom were absorbed into the "State" itself, but dozens of enemies. His determination to foment a civil war, by declaring all but total war on the Iraqi Shia, symbolised by the bombing of the al-Askari Mosque, apparently even caused Ayman al-Zawahiri himself to blanch. After his own death at the hands of the Americans, rather than change strategy, the leadership of the now formed "Islamic State" continued with the suicide bombings and sectarian killings, as well as imposing the strictest form of Sharia law on the areas they controlled and finally, turning on the erstwhile insurgent allies who had helped them into the position of strength they had at the beginning of 2007.

Just as al-Zarqawi's death did nothing to stop the insurgency, the killing of both main leaders of the "Islamic State" is hardly going to stop it dead in its tracks. Far more effective has been the political process itself, with the number of Sunnis voting in the elections earlier in the year, having mainly boycotted the vote back in 2005 vastly increased. If the US Army is to be believed then Hamid Dawud Muhammad Khalil al-Zawi in any case was only an attempt by al-Qaida central to give the "Islamic State" an Iraqi face, al-Masri being an Egyptian protege of al-Zawahiri and the State's true leader, identified previously as the State's war minister.

Just as al-Zarqawi was replaced, so will Masri and Zawi. The problem remains to be the Salafi jihadi ideology itself and the narrative which it provides, not the leaders that espouse it, however important bin Laden and Zawahiri have been in the past and will remain. The ultimate victory of 9/11 was not that it was a spectacularly successful attack, but that the Americans and ourselves walked straight into the trap of permanent potential involvement in Afghanistan, and as it seemed for a time, Iraq as well, radicalising a whole new generation in the process. The battle remains against the ideology itself, which we are still nowhere near being able to counteract effectively, just as much as it is those preaching it.

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4/19/2010 10:19:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, March 05, 2010 

Blair before Brown.

To call Gordon Brown's appearance before the Chilcot inquiry deeply underwhelming would be putting it too kindly. Boring, mundane, and mind-numbing would all be more suitable. While Blair's sessions were compelling if not always electrifying, they were indicative of his overall character: defiant, certain, convinced of his own righteousness. Brown merely had all his bases covered, and was incredibly well prepared, as you'd expect.

The one thing we've never learned, and which Andrew Rawnsley's book hasn't touched on, is just how much Brown really did believe in the Iraq war. He naturally defended it today, even if he did so on the equally spurious grounds that Iraq wasn't living up to its international commitments, rather than on its non-existent WMD and the intelligence as presented then, although why he continued on insisting that there was no possibility of a second resolution because of Chirac's intransigence, the classic Downing Street smear from the time, was a moment of dishonesty. As we know from Clare Short's evidence, this was happening at a time when Brown was being shut out from the Blair circle, which goes some way to explaining why he hadn't seen many of the documents from the time which the committee asked him about. Equally though there is more than a reminder of Brown's similarity with Macavity, the mystery cat, who isn't there when there's dirty work to be done. It always helped Brown to not be associated personally with the war, even if he was the one writing the cheques. His evidence didn't shed any light on this, but that was to be expected.

While Brown shares responsibility with Blair, as indeed the whole cabinet at the time does, and if you want to stretch it even further, all those in parliament who voted for the war, it's Blair that is always going to remain the one person associated with the decision, for either good or bad, and whatever conclusion the Chilcot inquiry eventually comes to, that also is unlikely to change.

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3/05/2010 10:20:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, February 02, 2010 

Short shrift for Chilcot.

To approach Clare Short's evidence to the Chilcot inquiry properly, you have to know just how much the New Labour true believers around Blair hated her. She was, according to Alan Milburn, a "political bag lady". John Prescott called her "fucking mad". Alastair Campbell couldn't stand her, and throughout his diaries expresses his contempt in the usual understated fashion. As for Blair himself, he felt that he had to keep her on board as a sop both to the left and the few remaining Old Labour dinosaurs, even whilst he became exasperated at her for failing to "keep on message" as everyone else was expected. Most famously she was slapped down after giving an interview in which she commented on the possibility of the legalisation of cannabis, which she felt was an issue worth considering.

She was, and still is, one of those few politicians that dares to be something approaching an actual human being. That the public tend to like politicians that step out of line every so often or who are indiscreet was doubtless one of the reasons why as time ticked by the Blairistas turned even further against her. The one drawback of being such a person is that it can encourage the belief that you personally are the conscience of an organisation, and it was one that Clare certainly fell into, as perhaps even she would admit. Her failure to resign despite the feeling that the Iraq war was going to be a disaster is now something held against her by anti-war critics, but she was hardly the only person to either be deceived by Blair or who, despite agonising over whether to vote for it or not, made the wrong decision. Many who either abstained or voted for now regard it as their biggest ever mistake in politics; few however will ever get their revenge in as forcefully as Short did today.

It took her just eight minutes before she directly accused Blair of lying, after he told her in September 2002 that he was not planning for war with Iraq. What followed was evidence which contradicted much of what the inquiry has been told so far. According to Short: there was no real discussion of the policy towards Iraq in cabinet; Lord Goldsmith misled the cabinet when he presented his third and final opinion on the legality of the war on March the 17th, which Short alleged he had been lent on to change, even if she had no evidence to back up her claim; she confirmed that Gordon Brown was another of the ministers to be "marginalised" in the run-up to the war; and that she felt she had been "conned" by Blair's promises on the creation of a Palestinian state and the reconstruction of Iraq, pledges that stopped her from resigning at the same time as Robin Cook. In one of the most damning exchanges, Short made clear that she believes Blair was "absolutely sincere" in his policy on Iraq, so certain that what he was doing was right that he was willing to be deceitful in order to achieve his aims. This is almost certainly the best explanation as yet given to the inquiry as to why we went along on the coat-tails of America: Blair believed, and still does, that getting rid of Saddam was so important that he would do almost anything to achieve it, and did. He may have lied to get us there, but to him they weren't lies, or even untruths: he was simply making the strongest possible case he could.

With Robin Cook sadly no longer here to provide an alternative account of what really happened in cabinet in those months leading up to war, Short's evidence is as close as we're likely to get to the perspective of someone not completely on board or supportive from the beginning. It also seemed to be one which the inquiry itself didn't particularly want to hear: we've had criticism from others over how the war was planned for and conducted, but all in diplomatic language and scholarly or lawyerly tones, without anything approaching emotion. She hasn't blown open anything approaching a conspiracy, but she has finally given colour to an otherwise sepia-tinged, plodding spectacle. And with it, she's also got her own back on all those unprepared to say to her face what they really thought of her.

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2/02/2010 09:34:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, January 29, 2010 

The last Blair show.

As it happened, you didn't need to bother paying any attention to Blair's performance before the Chilcot inquiry; you could instead have simply read it in this morning's Guardian. All Blair's main lines of argument were ready summarised and disclosed to Patrick Wintour, almost as if Tone himself had phoned up the paper's political editor and advised the hack on just how he was going to present his case. Surely not, doubtless the paper will protest: instead it was Blair's "friends" that had informed them of everything. It is though remarkable just how close his evidence was to that briefed to the Graun, especially on the September dossier: the paper said he'd now admit that they should have just published the joint intelligence committee's assessments, and lo, so it came to pass.

If Blair was initially nervous, his hands shaking as the session began, as some have claimed, then it's unclear what he was so worried about. He certainly shouldn't have been of the questioning, which varied from the obsequious and deferential all the way to the mildly troubling, like a small dog trying to hump your leg, embarrassing at first but easy to shake off. Around the only moment he faltered during the morning session (which I didn't see) was when asked about that Fern Britton interview in which he made clear that he would have attempted to remove Saddam even if he knew that Iraq didn't have any WMD. His explanation? That even he, with all his experiences of interviews, still had something to learn, and that in any case, he didn't use the words "regime change". It wasn't then that in a moment of weakness he had for once actually given an honest answer, but that he had, perhaps in that modern lexicon of politicians and celebrities, "misspoke".

This led me onto thinking that maybe we've approached this whole inquiry, if not the modern way in which we expect politicians to be interviewed and interrogated in the wrong way entirely. After all, it's not Blair's first slip to a "soft" interviewer: he previously said to Michael Parkinson that God would judge him on Iraq, which again, might well be what he truly believes. Instead then of having a panel made up of historians, mandarins and other peers of the realm, we should of had the thing chaired by dear old Fern, assisted ably by Davina McCall, Graham Norton, Alan Carr and Coleen Rooney. If nothing else, Carr asking about the legality of the war and the wording of UN Resolution 1441, and what difference there was between "consider" and "decide" when it came to what happened if there was a "material breach" by Iraq might have been amusing for oh, 5 seconds at least.

As the afternoon session drew on, and as it became clear that even Sir Roderic Lyne, the only panel member who has even been close to forensic in his questioning whilst also drier than dry in both his wit and ill-disguised contempt, wasn't as much as laying a finger on our esteemed former prime minister, you could sense that Blair was almost beginning to enjoy himself. The whole world used to be his stage; now the closest he gets are corporate junkets where he spouts platitudes and walks away with a massive cheque, which although doubtless pleasing on the bank balance, just isn't the same. He quite obviously misses being a politician, and although you can say what you like about his politics, and this blog has plenty of times, he remains untouchable at what he does. If David Cameron is Blair's heir, then he doesn't even come close, or hasn't as yet; the air-brushed pretender to Blair's possibly Botoxed brow.

And as it went on, the higher Blair's flights of fancy flew. Why, if we hadn't confronted Saddam in 2003 then by now he would likely be competing with an attempting to go nuclear Iran. It didn't matter that Iraq, being almost completely disarmed in 2003, with even his slightly out-of-allowable range missiles being dismantled by the UN inspectors, would have had to spent those years, still impoverished by sanctions which were never likely to be lifted rebuilding his army from the bottom up. You had to wonder just how he wanted you to re-imagine history: should we be thinking as if the UN inspectors were never allowed back in at all, or as if we'd backed down in March 2003 and given them more time? In the first instance the crippling sanctions would have continued, and in the second eventuality it would have been discovered that Iraq didn't have the WMD stocks which Blair and the intelligence so forcefully stated that they had. In either case Iraq would have been left as the weak link, with Iran the most to gain.

Unlike others who, if not exactly chastened by appearing before the inquiry, have at least admitted that not everything went according to plan and that they had regrets about their involvement, Blair was as rigidly certain as ever of the righteousness of all that he had touched. If things went wrong, it wasn't Blair or the coalition's fault: it was everyone else's but. It wasn't that the planning for after the invasion had been inadequate, it was that al-Qaida and Iran had actively opposed the Iraqi people's rightful safe passage into a post-Saddam era. Despite admitting that Iraq had no links al-Qaida, Iran and al-Qaida as the day wore on grew increasingly inclusive, until finally Blair suggested that the two had been actively working together. Considering that the Mahdi army and the other Iranian-backed groups fought against the Sunni militant groups which sprang up in the aftermath and that this reached its peak during 2007 when civil war and sectarian cleansing of entire parts of the country was taking place, this was something of a revelation. To top that, Blair had to go some, and he managed it with his beyond chutzpah quoting of child mortality figures in the first three years of the decade, as compared with now. That those mortality rates are in part almost certainly attributable to the sanctions regime was something that no member of the inquiry felt like bothering him with.

Asked whether he had anything else to say as the session drew to a close, he simply replied in the negative. Lord Goldsmith, giving evidence on Wednesday, took that opportunity to imply in diplomatic language that even if he had decided that the war was legal, in difference with all the advisers in the Foreign Office and almost every other lawyer versed in international law, it didn't necessarily mean that he thought that it was right, or that it had gone well. Blair could have used it to express his discomfort for all those that have lost their lives, and indeed, continue to do so as a direct result of our actions, even if not at the hands of the coalition. Despite this, you almost expected Blair's interrogators to rise to their feet and applaud, just as Cameron attempted to get the Tories to do on his last prime minister's questions. Delusional to the very last, but still religious in the fervour of his belief that he did the right thing, never has there likely been such relief that Gordon Brown is now our prime minister.

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1/29/2010 07:34:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 

Iraq inquiry groundhog day.

It's difficult not to feel the sensation of deja vu when you see Alastair Campbell once again holding forth, defiantly as ever, before a cringing committee of the great and good tasked with supposedly wringing the truth out of him. That they'd have more chance of draining red viscous fluid from a hard inanimate object is ever the unspoken reality. It is also touching though, almost heart-warming to see just how loyal Blair's ever faithful spin doctor remains to his former boss. Blair after all feels no such compunction to keep up the pretence that Iraq was all about the weapons of mass destruction and not, in that famous construction of his following the 9/11 attacks, the re-ordering of things while the pieces were still in flux, admitting as he did to that noted Rottweiler Fern Britton that he would have invaded even if he had known that there were no WMDs.

Campbell in his evidence continued to deny even the possibility that, as one of the leaked Downing Street memos made clear, that the plan to invade had already been settled and that the "facts were being fixed around the policy". Christopher Meyer, the ambassador to Washington at the time, made clear in his evidence that he felt the government never resisted the march to war once it was clear that the US was going to take action regardless of anything or anyone else. Meyer himself sent back a memo in March 2002 (PDF) after a meeting with one of the architects of neo-conservatism, Paul Wolfowitz, in which he stated that "we backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option". This was somewhat backed up by Jeremy Greenstock, who felt this was the case, but who was kept out of the loop, even though he was the person at the UN charged with trying to get a second resolution through. Campbell, for his part, later suggested that Meyer had been "glib" in not considering the consequences for the US-UK relationship in not supporting the war, with the implication that, as always seems to be the case, the illusion of the "special relationship" being maintained is always more important than the consequences of the alliance.

At points Campbell's evidence made you wonder whether his stubbornness to admit almost any mistake is not in fact borne of his continuing loyalty to Blair, or his own unstinting belief in his own righteousness, but in fact that he has to keep telling both himself and the world how he got everything right while everyone else has repeatedly got it wrong in order to convince himself that he is still on the side of the angels. Hence he'll defend "every single word" of the September 2002 dossier, while Andrew Gilligan's substantially confirmed report on the Today programme was a "dishonest piece of journalism", which is a quite wonderful example of projection, and almost anything which contradicts his evidence is a conspiracy theory, like the Guardian report of yesterday which suggested that he changed a part of the dossier to bring it into line with a claim made by Dick Cheney.

It is though perhaps instructive to compare how we conduct inquiries with the Dutch. Previously the government of the Netherlands resigned after a damning report into the Dutch military's failures at Srebrenica. By coincidence, their own inquiry today into their role in the Iraq war has concluded that it was illegal, as UN resolution 1441 could not be used as a mandate for armed conflict. Back here, we're still regarding Alastair Campbell as though he's a reliable witness. One suspects that the Chilcott inquiry's conclusions won't be anywhere near as incisive.

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1/12/2010 09:03:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, April 23, 2009 

Iraq, the insurgency, and the capture of Omar al-Baghdadi.

There have been many false dawns in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, none more so than the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, although the group was more properly known as the Mujahideen Shura Council at the time. Although the insurgency in Iraq was always far more varied than just involving Zarqawi's group, which was renamed al-Qaida in Iraq after he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, having formerly dreamt of building his own rival terror organisation, over-the-top media coverage and Zarqawi's brutal tactics, especially the beheading of foreign hostages, some of which he supposedly carried out himself, meant that his death was given far more significance than it was probably due. Reports of the capture of al-Zarqawi's self-proclaimed successor, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, do little other than suggest that there will still be life in the Iraqi insurgency for some time yet.

Like with Zarqawi and with the other man who may well be the real leader of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Baghdadi has been presumed both dead and captured before, but for now it does seem as if he has been arrested. This itself may come as a surprise to some within the US army, who have claimed repeatedly that Baghdadi does not actually exist, instead a phantom that gives an Iraqi leadership to a group which has always been regarded by others in the insurgency as being of foreign origin, but photographs of the man have supposedly previously emerged, showing someone who looks to be suffering from pattern baldness.

How much influence or control Baghdadi actually had over the organisation is impossible to know. Apart from irregular audio messages issued as videos, none of which Baghdadi has formally appeared in, unlike the gregarious al-Zarqawi, all of which give credence to the idea that he is simply a puppet to the formal "Minister for War" al-Muhajir, he doesn't seem to have done anything other than contribute to the war of words which ultimately led to the split between the insurgent groups and with it the rise of the Awakening councils, almost completely composed of former insurgents, although few were members of al-Qaida, or the ISI. The recent rise in violence in the country, although nowhere near the levels of 2004 to mid-2007, attributed by some to the dissolution of the Awakening councils in certain areas, reflects the difficulty with which those who have been ostensibly fighting for the last six years will be reintegrated into Iraqi society. Contributing to the problems is that a Shia government is simply not trusted by the Sunni fighters; their sudden dissolution threatens to be a repeat of the disbanding of the Iraqi army, almost certainly the biggest factor behind the rise of the insurgency.

From controlling almost all of the so-called "Sunni Triangle" at one point, the Islamic State of Iraq has been pushed back into the provinces of Diyala and Mosul, where the Salafist jihadist groups, which also includes Ansar al-Islam, are still reasonably strong. It's difficult to know just how much of an effect al-Baghdadi's arrest might have on the groups and their supporters, especially considering how unknown his power has been, and while al-Zarqawi's death was actively mourned by jihadists, it will still be some sort of a setback to the group. The suicide bombings today, which are almost certainly coincidences rather than the group striking back, show that the ISI still has the capability to carry out devastating attacks, but on a far reduced scale. The insurgency in general, which has been in decline since its high point at the heighth of the civil war which al-Qaida in Iraq did much to foment, seems to be shifting up a gear, if the number of videos released by the groups is a measure to go by. The real problem in Iraq though remains reconciliation between the Sunni and Shia, which despite some reasonably encouraging results in the recent elections, where secularists appeared to win out against the religious parties, seems as far away as ever. Al-Baghdadi's arrest will do nothing whatsoever to alter that.

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4/23/2009 09:08:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, December 17, 2008 

Abu Beavis does prison (having already done al-Qaida in Iraq?)

There seems to be a surprising lack of comment regarding Bilal Abdulla, convicted yesterday of his role as Abu Beavis in the Beavis and Abu Butthead do jihad plot and today sentenced to 32 years in prison. Surprising because, on the surface at least, Abdulla is the first verifiable example of genuine blowback against this country as a result of our involvement in the war against Iraq.

Unlike the 7/7 bombers and others since who have blamed their actions on foreign policy, Abdulla is the only actual Iraqi to have so far played any discernible part in terrorism plots in this country. Born here, but having gone back to live in Saddam's Iraq when he was 5, he personally witnessed the sanctions regime which crippled the country, resulting in the deaths arguably of 500,000 children, a figure which the US secretary of state at the time, Madeleine Albright, described as worth it. It doesn't seem however that he was fully radicalised until the invasion in 2003, losing at least one friend from university in the sectarian violence which emerged in the anarchy created by the development of the insurgency. He blamed not just the Americans, but the Shia also, according to one of his friends in Cambridge being fully supportive of sectarian warfare, as long as it targeted Iraq's long subjugated majority.

At the end of 2004 he came to study, as mentioned above, in Cambridge. Here's where it's difficult to know when his full radicalisation took place: it's known that he was a member or at least associated with the radical Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, but HuT usually serves as a stepping stone between the caliphate which HuT supports and the murderous, worldwide caliphate which appeals to the takfirists of al-Qaida. In any event, it was in Cambridge that he met Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian born Muslim also apparently radicalised, but more by the usual methods of alienation and anger over the perceived treatment of Muslims worldwide, as well as the inequality and injustice often served to the Muslim minority in his homeland. Together they would they come up with the plot to target the Tiger Tiger nightclub, using incredibly amateurish bombs that failed to detonate, in one case because it lacked an oxidiser and in another because the wiring had come loose. When that failed, they settled on an apparent suicide mission which succeeded in as much as Ahmed died, but sadly for their chances of receiving the much debated 72 virgins, without killing anyone else.

Most of interest here though is just what links Abdulla had with the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq, or as it was formerly known, al-Qaida in Iraq. Accounts seem to differ: the Guardian and BBC seem to discount the idea that Abdulla had anything more than a passing acquittance with the group, apparently in contact with some representatives of it online, and who might have helped, while the Times, quoting those all important security sources, claims that Abdulla during his time at Baghdad University came into contact with the forebears of al-Qaida in Iraq, even fighting with them before he left to come to Cambridge. This seems less believable: al-Qaida in Iraq at the time was still establishing itself, by no means yet the group which managed up until the middle of last year to control vast swathes of the "Sunni Triangle", still mostly a sect centred around Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His group did not pledge allegiance to Osama bin Laden until late 2004, just the time that Abdulla was leaving to come to this country.

More feasible was the prosecution evidence that in May 2006 Abdulla had returned to Iraq and stayed there for three months. Their case was that it was during this time that he joined up with the now far more powerful al-Qaida in Iraq, known at the time as the Mujahideen Shura Council. Again, there is conflicting stories of just how involved he was: the Guardian reports that Scotland Yard found little evidence he was personally involved in the insurgency, while the Times' sources suggest that he had planned to be a suicide bomber, only for his handlers to decide that with his qualifications and passport he should instead target this country. The evidence that he was the first member of al-Qaida in Iraq to attack this country rests mainly on his will, which was directed to the "Soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq", and on an audiotape, released only a couple of months back featuring the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, in which the group very belatedly claimed responsibility for the London and Glasgow failed attacks, even ascribing the failure to a mistake made by the bomb-maker, which, as it turns out, is in at least one of the cases eerily accurate. At the time I was suspicious that the group should so belatedly, and mid-trial claim responsibility for the attack, especially as the ISI has been so emasculated over the last year, reduced to only a fraction of its former power. With the additional evidence now though, the claim looks far more credible.

Worth mentioning at this point is the fact that Abdulla was a doctor and Ahmed was an engineer, something that attracted more comment than it probably should have. While few of those dedicated to al-Qaida's ideological bent are as well qualified or with such bright potential prospects as Abdulla and Ahmed, poverty and poor qualifications are not generally good signifers of radicalisation, as the leaked MI5 document suggested. As Majjid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation pointed out on Newsnight, Osama bin Laden is an engineer, following in his father's footsteps, while Ayman al-Zahawiri is a doctor. Intellectuals with similar interests to Abdulla and Ahmed have often been well represented in the jihadi movement, it's just that as is often the case in other armies and terrorist groups, it tends to be those considered expendable that do the actual fighting. Hence Abdulla was considered too good to be a suicide bomber, or at least in Iraq, especially when at that point there was still more than enough willing young "martyrdom seekers" without such credentials.

Regardless of Abdulla's alleged links to al-Qaida in Iraq, it seems he received little in actual funding, if any, from the group itself. Nor did he apparently learn to make bombs whilst there; it was Ahmed instead who apparently set himself that task, experimenting in India. The bombs were originally described as similar to those used by AQI, but this was erroneous; AQI had resources far removed from patio gas canisters, hence their horrific and continued success at car and suicide bombs, and considering how unlikely it was that Abdulla would get his hands on actual explosives, it would probably have been wasted anyway. They instead settled on a plan which was always going to be difficult to pull off, and as a demonstration by the BBC's resident explosives expert showed, even if the bombs had gone off, it seems hardly likely that they would have resulted in the carnage which the prosecution itself claimed, let alone the "thousands" of deaths even more sensational press coverage has suggested. If they had succeeded in getting the 4x4 into Glasgow Airport, and the car bomb had successfully ignited, there could have been a very dangerous fire which could have quickly raged out of control. People could have died in the panic and smoke, but most likely not in the numbers claimed. This was a suicide mission where those most likely to die were the two men in the car, as it so proved.

There will obviously be debate about whether Abdulla did have links with AQI prior to coming to Britain, and where and when he moved beyond simple anger and hatred of American and Britons, from being a passive Islamic radical to being a radicalised jihadist prepared to kill people, but no one is denying that our role in Iraq had a substantial role in his radicalisation, perhaps even providing the catalyst that persuaded him that violence and murder could be justified as revenge for the calamity that Iraq was between 2004 and mid-2007 when he launched his assault. This should not be seen as being an argument for not involving ourselves in action like that in Iraq again, or as a veto on action because terrorists might attack us as a result, but as the evidence that has long been disputed by those in power who ignored those, both outside government and inside it who warned that the invasion of Iraq would result in more insecurity and more terrorism, not less, and that al-Qaida itself would win a massive propaganda victory, with more recruits than it could ever than have imagined. That has long been their modus operandi: they know they cannot possibly defeat this country or the United States, but what they can do is draw us in where they can attack and kill the "infidels" and "crusaders" far easier than they can ever manage in our own countries. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, al-Qaida in that country did not exist. We created it just as much as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did.

The good or bad news, depending on your perspective, is that Abdulla, if he was involved with AQI, was poorly trained and that he picked a partner in jihad whose bomb making skills were just as poor. Undoubtedly however other Brits have fought with AQI, and might well have already returned, far better "educated" in the "university of terrorism" than they were, also potentially without wider links to al-Qaida central or other known extremists. While the threat remains often exaggerated, what is clear is that those who apparently slip through the net such as Abdulla are potentially far more dangerous than those trained in Pakistan/Afghanistan and known about. We cannot be blamed for the situation in Pakistan, however much grievance you imbibe; we can for what we have created in Iraq. Abdulla may be a one off; he might be just the beginning.

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12/17/2008 10:41:00 pm | | | links to this post

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