Month: July 2016

The Brits are always a step ahead of us.

In my lifetime, and I’m assuming in the life of the United States of America, there has never been a major-party candidate other than Donald Trump who anyone would think to ask if they’d actually serve as president if elected as president. But that’s what New York Times reporters asked Trump during a recent interview with him in his New York office. His answer wasn’t what you’d expect.

Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.

“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said, minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.

And he definitely left more than a spoken impression.

But the only person who could truly put any doubts to rest seemed instead to relish the idea of keeping everyone guessing, concluding the recent conversation with a you’re-on-to-something grin and handshake across his cluttered desk.

“We’ll do plenty of stories,” Mr. Trump promised enigmatically. “O.K.?”

Now, maybe he’s just messing with people’s minds, but it hardly helps him to leave the impression that he considers this just a game and that he won’t serve as president even if elected. It’s actually a kind of dangerous impression to leave at a time when he has not yet actually been confirmed as the nominee of the party.

I think this show was a lot more fun for Trump when he was leading in the polls and he wasn’t responsible for anyone else’s fate. Maybe, consciously or unconsciously, he actually wants to have the nomination wrested away from him in Cleveland. That’ll make him much more of a martyr than a loser, or at least he might feel that he can spin it that way.

The latest Field Poll out of California shows something that might be a little disconcerting to Democrats. The headlines about the poll all read that Clinton is crushing Trump in the Golden State, and that’s true. The poll finds that Clinton is beating Trump by an eye-popping 58%-28% margin, with 14% undecided. That hints at a much worse spanking than Mitt Romney (38.3%) received from President Obama (59.63%) in 2012. It suggests that Clinton is on track (when undecideds are allocated) to outperform the 61%-37% smackdown that Obama administered to John McCain in 2008.

But is she?

When the Field Poll tested a three-way race including Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, the 14% undecided vote did not move an inch. What happened was that Trump’s support dropped by two points to 26% and Clinton’s support dropped eight points to fifty percent.

Part of the explanation might be found here:

Trump is also drawing an unusually low level of support from voters outside the Republican Party, polling in single digits among Democrats and at 20 percent or below among independent voters.

“I think Trump supporters in California appear to be pretty hard-core supporters,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the poll. “But they’re down to a relatively small number, and that’s really his problem.”

In California, at least, Trump is testing the Crazification Factor again, straddling that magic 27% Alan Keyes Constant. This, not 40%, is probably Trump’s absolute floor. He’s so low already that there are hardly any more votes to peel off, so if you add more options to the mix, most of the support they’ll get is from people who’d otherwise vote for Clinton.

Clinton and the Democrats don’t need to care about this too much in a state where they have a thirty-point lead over Trump, but nationally they don’t want all of Gary Johnson’s support to come out of her hide. They already know that pretty much all of Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s support will be at her expense.

California may be a special case, I don’t know. In battleground states, it could be that more disaffected Republicans and right-leaning undecideds will come around to voting for Gary Johnson. But the results of this one poll out of California are at least a warning that this cannot just be assumed.

Console scandal creates fresh difficulties for charities – Independent.ie

I am a director and honorary treasurer of a number of charities. I give of my time freely and without compensation. I am glad to do so and feel honoured to have the opportunity to be of assistance.

But I am also a hostage to fortune. I rely entirely on the salaried staff to provide me with accurate information so the board can make wise decisions.

One of the fall-outs of the scandals in the Central Rehabilitation Clinic, and now in Console, is that charitable donations have declined precipitously. Another less publicised consequence is that it is increasingly difficult to find anyone with suitable skills to volunteer to serve on the board of charities.

I have offered my resignation on several occasions because I feel it is time to give others the opportunity to serve, and yet there are never any replacements available. The responsibilities of directors are increasingly onerous under both company law and the Charities Act. Few people feel they have the time or expertise to take them on.

Others may feel discouraged by the prospect of finding themselves at the centre of a scandal should some irregularities be discovered in the running of their organisation.

Not many people have the skills of a forensic accountant to uncover those irregularities by themselves.

As a result, the voluntary and community sector in Ireland is in freefall. Those charities which have not closed have generally downsized substantially in recent years.

It would be a pity if our rich tradition of voluntary work were to die out substantially because of the scandals at a few major charities. I urge people not tar all charities with the same brush.

Frank Schnittger, Blessington, Co Wicklow

The voluntary and community sector in Ireland has been devastated by a couple of scandals at major charities where senior executives were seen to have been awarded excessive salaries or where the founder is alleged to have diverted substantial funds for his own use.  In both cases there was a substantial failure of governance by the Board, although in the latter case it seems doubtful that there was a functioning Board at all. Fraud can occur in any walk of life, but it is particularly damaging in a sector which relies on popular goodwill and a degree of altruism on all sides.

As a result, charitable donations are in free-fall, and many charities have either closed or downsized considerably as a result.  Many charities are also reliant on state funding for a significant part of their income, and this has been savagely cut back in recent years of government austerity policies. In addition, the level of state supervision of charities and the degree of information they are required to provide has increased exponentially, and most simply do not have the administrative resources required to comply.  State funding is generally only provided for the direct provision of services, and Charities have to fund their administrative overheads from other sources.

In many ways the squeeze on the voluntary and community sector has thus been both financial and administrative, with higher ranking civil servants questioning the value of services provided, or preferring that those services be taken in-house under their direct supervision. Most charities wouldn’t have a problem with being made redundant in this way, but the reality is that the vast majority of services they provide simply cease when they close, because there is no governmental appetite or capability to take them on.

There are many reasons the state uses charities to provide some services.  Firstly, their arms length contractual arrangements absolve the state (and senior civil servants) of all responsibility if something goes wrong.  Secondly, those services are often provided much more cost-effectively by charities, because many of the services are provided on a voluntary basis, and even salaried staff are on lower pay (and pension) benefits than their equivalents in the state sector. Thirdly, it is much easier for the state to cut funding to a charity than it is to make permanent public service employees redundant.

But there are also many positive reasons why Charities can do a better job than their equivalents in the public sector. One of the charities I am involved with, the Clondalkin Addiction Support Programme (CASP), employs a community based and holistic approach to drug addiction treatment programmes which have been shown to be much more effective than the exclusively Medical Model used by the statutory health services. Another, Restorative Justice Services , provides a restorative justice service which successive governments have refused to provide on a statutory footing despite Official reports recommending that they do so. For a more detailed description of Restorative Justice Services available in Ireland, see my my diary here.

So the differences between the voluntary and statutory sectors are not only organisational and financial, they are ideological and political as well. In general statutory organisations are dominated by the professional interests of the medical or legal professions which place little value on the social, community, family and personal dimensions of the problems being addressed, and it can even be argued that they have a vested interest in ensuring that those dimensions are never properly addressed: Where would the legal profession be without crime?  

For all the lip service being given to “evidence based approaches” – to solving problems, the relative failure of the medical model to deal with addiction based problems, or the retributive justice systems failure to reduce victim trauma or the incidence of crime, alternative approaches are only tolerated on the margins even where they have been shown to have been far more successful in dealing with the problems they are supposed to address.

While in an ideal world there would be no need for charities, and all human needs would be met by  the private or statutory sectors in each society, the reality is that we are very far from that ideal. Not only are conventional approaches to many problems prohibitively expensive, they are often not that successful in addressing them.

The voluntary and community sector in Ireland has had a key role not only in filling the gaps in services provided by the private and statutory services, but  in advocating for the victims of crime, in meeting the personal, social and community needs of addicts, and in pioneering alternative approaches to resolving the problems arising.

I live in hope that restorative justice services will be mainstreamed in Ireland, and their provision placed on a statutory footing. I also hope that the widespread failures of conventional medical approaches to addiction and other health problems will be complemented in mainstream public health services by holistic methods proven to provide better results. And indeed some progress is being made. In the meantime, however, there will be a need for pioneering voluntary and community based organisations to highlight unmet needs and to address them where these are not being provided by private for profit or statutory services.

The crisis facing charities in Ireland is not only one of funding, but of a lack of understanding of what they can do better than anyone else. We risk a takeover by political and professional interests which will be very much more expensive, but often less effective as well. Rather than exploiting public outrage at a couple of scandals in major (and well funded) charities, we need to fix the problems in the effectiveness of the good charities which we still have and ensure they have the resources and the expertise to do their jobs better than ever. That doesn’t just require more donations, it requires more people volunteering their expertise at every level of their organisation.

Yet even today as Sir John Chilcot read his half hour statement to a baffled audience, Tony Blair was unrepentant: ‘I believe we made the right decision’. In the aftermath of tenure as UK’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair made millions in a similar fashion as the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation. Clair and Clinton are a product of the same era of politics in the 1990s and they are so wrong on foreign policy and choosing the same Arab regimes of the Gulf States as their close friends. After Iraq, both parties set the nest steps towards Libya and Syria. The chaos these people wrecked, unbelievable. Next chapter Clinton II.

Most fortunate that after Brexit and the UK’s alienation from mainland Europe, the Chilcot report on Iraq Inquiry will lead for a political split of the British people with the politics from across the Atlantic. Great Britain, an island adrift in a self-inflicted wound by Eton elitists. Unsurprising as the EU referendum showed so very clearly, the City of London outside the reality of everyday life of people from Mainstreet. It’s another step towards a Revolution on Inequality in the Western world.  

The Guardian view on the Chilcot report: a country ruined, trust shattered, a reputation trashed | Editorial |

As always in matters of military aggression, the humane perspective has to start with the victims. Since the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003, estimates of the lives lost to violence vary from a quarter of a million to 600,000. The number of injured will surely be several times that, and the number of men, women and children displaced from their homes is put at between 3.5 and 5 million, somewhere between one in 10 and one in six of the population.
…

The 2.6m words of his report will necessarily take much longer to digest, but the defining sting was conveyed in just six words penned by Tony Blair himself, in a letter to Mr Bush in July 2002 – “I will be with you, whatever”.
…

Politics demeaned

Meanwhile, as Jack Straw and top officials would plot in private for how to secure a UN seal of approval for a course that was already set, Mr Blair protested in public that he was pursuing a “diplomatic solution”. There was diplomacy, all right, but it was diplomacy aimed at licensing war. When even this failed, the final cabinet discussions were less concerned with the real looming battle, than about the PR war with the French. For any progressive internationalist, and Mr Blair was once one, the most damning of all Sir John’s verdicts is that the result of the invasion was not – as was claimed – to uphold the authority of the UN, but instead to undermine it.

The gap between the public and the private rationale fed the mistrust which has since – amplified by the banking and MPs’ expenses crises – fuelled the Brexit vote. The whole conduct of politics in Britain was demeaned, but the highest price was paid on the left. The otherwise unthinkable ascent of Jeremy Corbyn occurred, prompting Labour’s lapse into civil war. Many Labour MPs are still struggling to understand it. As they do so, they should reflect on the cool rage of Mr Corbyn, who always opposed the war, in the chamber on Wednesday, and contrast it with the complacent tone adopted by David Cameron, who originally voted in favour.

Mr Blair’s impulse to trot alongside a know-nothing cowboy might reflect a deep need to bury the CND badge of his youth and earn some muscular respectability. Mr Corbyn’s ascent is the most ironic of the consequences of his historic mistake. But by far the most serious are still being played out far away – on the streets of Iraq.  

From my diaries ….

○ Do Recall World Begging Uncle Sam … – Feb. 2011
○ Saudi King Abdullah: “… no other option but WAR” – June 2006

Damn. hate to see those villains on my computer screen again … even Stephen Hadley, architect of Obama’s overthrow of Assad in Syria.

“This proposed legislation will provide free tuition at public colleges and universities for all families in America earning $125,000 a year or less – 83 percent of our families.

“In other words, the dream of higher education in America will become a reality for all, regardless of the income of one’s family. This proposal will also provide very substantial relief for students and families carrying student debt.”
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/7/6/1545641/-Bernie-Hillary-s-New-College-Plan-is-Revolutionary

I posted here once about Clinton own plan – which was so complicated it seldom made its way into her speeches.  Sanders plan was simple – this plan is simple.

A very large, and unambiguous win that will help with a key demographic that is resisting Clinton right now.

A comparison:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/sanders-vs-clinton-who-ha_b_8216290.html

I don’t watch much Fox News because it makes me physically ill, but I’ve seen enough to know Gretchen Carlson’s face, if not her name. I guess I thought she was still on Fox & Friends in the morning, although she hasn’t done that show since 2013. Instead, she’s been doing a 2pm slot, apparently with solid ratings and good results. I honestly had no clue.

In any case, she recently was fired when Roger Ailes declined to re-up her contract, and now she’s taking Ailes to court.

The lawsuit — filed in Superior Court in New Jersey, where Mr. Ailes maintains a residence — portrays the Fox chairman as a serial sexual harasser, charging that he ogled Ms. Carlson in his office, called her “sexy” and frequently made sexually charged comments about her physical appearance.

Ms. Carlson, who joined Fox in 2005, charges that during a meeting last fall to discuss her concerns about what she considered ill treatment, Mr. Ailes told her: “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.”

Document: Gretchen Carlson’s Lawsuit Against Roger Ailes

When she refused, the lawsuit claims, Mr. Ailes retaliated by reducing Ms. Carlson’s salary, curtailing her on-air appearances and, ultimately, declining to renew her contract last month.

The suit, filed by the law firm Smith Mullin in Montclair, N.J., seeks a variety of compensatory damages.

She also takes a swing at Steve Doocy (in my estimation, one of dumbest men on television) for subjecting her to “severe and pervasive sexual harassment.”

Like I said, I am the furthest thing from a Fox-watcher, so I don’t know how this might be going over at headquarters. I do know that it takes some courage to go after a guy like Roger Ailes. That fact alone leads me to give some credence to her accusations. Suing Ailes for sexual harassment just seems like something a sane person wouldn’t do without a very good reason. He’s nasty. He’s got an media empire at his fingertips (ink by the barrel). He’ll have the most aggressive attorneys. She presumably would like to work again someday, and her history is with rightwing outlets. Can she land a job at a more balanced network?

Of course, I have no idea what did or did not happen. Maybe there will be some settlement and that’ll be the end of it. But if it goes to court, it might get real interesting.

I spent two hours this morning reading the Executive Summary of The Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot Report) that was just released in the United Kingdom. There are countless documents and individual sections yet to read, but I’ve already formed some initial impressions. One is that the enormous dance that Tony Blair’s government did to try to steer the Bush administration toward a U.N.-sanctioned disarmament policy was a giant illusion from the start. It appears that the Brits were sincere in their efforts, but I keep going back to what Paul Wolfowitz said in June 2003 when it started to become obvious that Iraq had maintained no weapons of mass destruction programs or stockpiles.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and said a “huge” result of the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason,” Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.

The magazine’s reporter did not tape the telephone interview and provided a slightly different version of the quote in the article: “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

The Chilcot report spends a lot of time talking about the fusion of two separate concerns in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The longstanding worry about WMD and missile technology proliferation became married with a panic about the mass casualty murderous ambitions of anti-western Islamic radicals. This was understandable to a degree, but never to the degree that Dick Cheney took it with his one percent doctrine (“Even if there’s just a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty.”)

Even if understandable, though, the Chilcot report makes clear that British intelligence assessed that North Korea, Iran and Libya were much more likely to form some kind of alliance with terrorists than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

503. Iraq’s chemical, biological and ballistic missile programmes were seen as a threat to international peace and security in the Middle East region, but Iraq was viewed as a less serious proliferation threat than other key countries of concern – Iran, Libya and North Korea – which had current nuclear programmes. Iraq’s nuclear facilities had been dismantled by the weapons inspectors. The JIC [Joint Intelligence Committee] judged that Iraq would be unable to obtain a nuclear weapon while sanctions remained effective.

504. The JIC continued to judge that co‐operation between Iraq and Al Qaida was “unlikely”, and that there was no “credible evidence of Iraqi transfers of WMD‐related technology and expertise to terrorist groups”.

505. In mid‐February 2002, in preparation for Mr Blair’s planned meeting with President Bush in early April 2002, No.10 commissioned the preparation of a paper to inform the public about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and WMD more generally in four key countries of concern, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Iraq.

506. When the preparation of this document became public knowledge, it was perceived to be intended to underpin a decision on military action against Iraq. The content and timing became a sensitive issue…

509. When he saw the draft paper on WMD countries of concern on 8 March, [Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Jack] Straw commented:
“Good, but should not Iraq be first and also have more text? The paper has to show why there is an exceptional threat from Iraq. It does not quite do this yet.”

510. On 18 March, Mr Straw decided that a paper on Iraq should be issued before one addressing other countries of concern.

511. On 22 March, Mr Straw was advised that the evidence would not convince public opinion that there was an imminent threat from Iraq. Publication was postponed.

This is all interesting, but it was, as Wolfowitz freely admitted, all in the service of settling on a bureaucratic casus belli that everyone could agree on. The actual reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein had very little to do with this heat-fevered dream of a fusion of Baathism and Wahhabi-inspired nihilism. There was no intelligence supporting such an alliance, and the threat of WMD proliferation was seen as much more substantial in other countries. Removing Hussein solved the problem (seemingly, anyway) of the increasing lack of compliance with the sanctions on Iraq. It theoretically could allow us to reestablish normal global trade with Iraq (including their oil) and put an end to a humanitarian disaster that we were taking much blame for perpetuating. And, as Wolfowitz said, it gave us a face-saving way to accede to bin-Laden’s demands that we remove our military bases from Saudi Arabia because we wouldn’t need such a heavy presence in the Gulf if we didn’t have to enforce the No-Fly Zones.

These were all reasonable rationales for wanting regime change in Iraq and for not being satisfied with the status quo containment policy, but they were hopelessly optimistic about the problems an invasion would solve and our ability to anticipate and cope with the problems that we’d be creating. The key, though, is that WMD really didn’t factor into this except in one usually unstated way. Had we ever actually given Hussein a clean bill of health and lifted the sanctions and allowed the resumption of normal global trade with Iraq, then Hussein may have used the freedom and the money to reconstitute WMD programs that could threaten his neighbors and our troops in the region. Our country was locked in to never letting that happen, with some justification, and that meant there could never be any end to our containment policy until Saddam either died or was deposed. It was either No-Fly Zones and sanctions forever, or it was regime change, and the sanctions were eroding and 9/11 proved that there was blowback for the No-Fly Zones and the heavy military footprint in the peninsula needed to sustain them.

Yet, the Chilcot Report focuses on this effort by Blair to steer everything into a disarmament policy that would have solved none of these problems as our foreign policy leaders saw them. If anything, the endgame of a successful UN disarmament program would have been even less support for sanctions and even more support for letting Saddam resume ruling Iraq with a free hand. It’s tempting to say this was just the neoconservatives’ view, but that’s overstating the case. It was largely a bipartisan view, with the main difference being that the neoconservatives were just crazy enough to throw every caution to the wind and go for regime change without really explaining the actual reasons why it was being done.

Tony Blair seems to have understood the American position less well than I thought possible. What he focused on was the impossibility of his government joining a preemptive war in Iraq based on nothing but an impatience and dissatisfaction with a deteriorating status quo. So, he forced the administration to adopt the “bureaucratic” rationale for the war, and that worked for the Bush administration up to a point because they, too, needed to use the fear of an improbable fusion between Hussein and al-Qaeda to gain domestic support for their recklessness.

You may remember how Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives who supported him worked the Iraq/al-Qaeda angle from the get-go, starting mere days after the 9/11 attacks. There was the Mohammed Atta visiting an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague story that Cheney and Bill Safire kept pushing long after it had been thoroughly debunked, for example, so the faux-nexus was there from the beginning. But, at least initially, this seemed like an effort to pin 9/11 on Saddam rather than to make some kind of case that he’d hand out mustard gas to bin-Laden’s underlings.

My last point, for now, is that the Chilcot report reiterates that the intelligence community never seriously considered the possibility that Saddam had unilaterally disarmed and was only giving the impression that he retained WMD capabilities and stockpiles in order to deter internal and external attacks.

334. On 12 October 2004, announcing the withdrawal of two lines of intelligence reporting which had contributed to the pre‐conflict judgements on mobile biological production facilities and the regime’s intentions, Mr [Jack] Straw stated that he did:

“… not accept, even with hindsight, that we were wrong to act as we did in the circumstances that we faced at the time. Even after reading all the evidence detailed by the Iraq Survey Group, it is still hard to believe that any regime could behave in so self‐destructive a manner as to pretend that it had forbidden weaponry, when in fact it had not.”

For a long time I was reluctant to credit the idea that the intelligence community was this blinkered, but it appears to be true. Yes, the policymakers pressured them and set up their own channels for intelligence gathering and stovepiped only the stuff that justified their views. But the assumption was nearly complete that Hussein would not behave the way behaved if he wasn’t hiding something. And this is what gave Bush and Blair the confidence to go to such lengths to justify the war on the basis of WMD. If they had actually cared about the WMD the way they said they did, they would have been a lot more interested in learning if it actually existed. But they didn’t care. It was all a misdirection and a lie.

I’d say that they got what they deserved, but they really haven’t. A lot of people have suffered the repercussions of their actions, but I can’t see how Bush and Blair have. Not really.

Today across the globe, Muslims celebrate the end of Ramadan with the feast of Eid al-Fitr.

More than a decade of chaos, deaths and political turmoil in the greater Middle East, George Bush promised an independent state for Palestine by 2005, of course a promise not kept and most likely never intended to.

The blue print for the Assad overthrow in Syria was written, a contingency plan for war … no details of its aftermath.

Yesterday the extension of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) established in 2003, bombed in the heart of Baghdad with over 250 deaths and multiple casualties of maimed and wounded. There are hundreds of Saddam Hussains in Iraq and across Syria. Did I forget Hillary Clinton’s push for Gaddafi’s overthrow in Libya in 2011? The lady is presumptive candidate for the Democrats as presidential candidate. Even president Obama wants his wonderful policy to brought to fruition under Clinton II.

In the meantime in the former empire of the British Commonwealth, despair with no hope for an economic recovery as the citizens dealt a blow by voting FOR Brexit.

The Tory government rid itself of Eton man David Cameron … hell, he can’t manage a bit of defeat as the results of his referendum by counting the votes made clear.

The Blairites in the parliamentary delegation to the House of Common want to ditch its leader Jeremy Corbyn ahead of the Chilcot report. The Blairites, as did many Democrats in Washington DC voted FOR the Iraq War briefly before the November 2002 mid-term election. Appearances, can’t risk to display any weakness … it’s national security and fear of terror from outside our borders. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jeremy Corbyn voted AGAINST the war.

The family members of the 179 British deaths and the press are gathered in the Queen Elizabeth II conference center to get a briefing ahead of its official publication at 11:00am London time.

○ Chilcot report live: ‘We just want the truth,’ say families

[UPDATE:] A SCATHING REPORT OF CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE IN DECISION TO GO TO WAR IN IRAQ

• There was no case to go to war in March 2003;
• Tony Blair unconditional loyality to the U.S. severely criticised;
• Blair’s government could not manage decision making;
• Both U.S. and U.K. failed to meet their responsibility as occupying powers;
• Unprepared in post-conflict Iraq to decure the nation;
• Azores meeting set goals which were not achieved;
• British were humiliated in the southern provinces and Basra.

France and the majority of members in the United Nations Security Council were correct in their assessment there was no case for military intervention, there was still time to continue the policy containment of Saddam Hussein and there was no imminent threat. More than 150,000 Iraqi lives were lost, mostly civilians. The people of the greater Middle East as a consequence of the war are suffering today.

 
My previous 2 diaries –

○ Labour to Remove Corbyn Ahead of Chilcot’s Iraq Report?
○ Labour MPs and Media Smear Corbyn [w. Update]

DON’T YOU DARE

David Cameron says international prosecutors have no right to investigate Our Boys for war crimes when Chilcot Inquiry report is released.

David Cameron has slapped down international war crime prosecutors to insist they have no right to drag “brave” British troops into court. The International Criminal Court sparked fury by saying it will comb through the long-awaited Chilcot Report for evidence against Our Boys.

The PM stepped into the row today to tell the Netherlands-based body to butt out of the inquiry’s findings when they are finally published on Wednesday.

Downing Street insisted:

“The ICC is only able to investigate war crimes if a state in unwilling or unable to itself. We
are confident we are able to demonstrate we are already doing that ourselves.

It’s worth bearing in mind that you have also had the Iraq Historic Allegations Team looking into a
number of cases, and indeed the majority of those investigated so far have been found to be false.”

The PM’s official spokeswoman also insisted the Chilcot report is “not about punishing our soldiers, who served with bravery and dedication”.

Case against Tony Blair over Iraq war a legal impossibility, says QC | The Guardian |

To be continued ….

It’s possible that playing a game of gotcha with Donald Trump for the sin of saying that Saddam Hussein was good at killing terrorists is the most boring thing ever. Over 250 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad on Sunday when a lorry exploded in a busy shopping area of the city. The area is mostly Shiite and the Sunni extremist group Islamic State took responsibility. Believe it or not, this was the single worst loss of life since the invasion in 2003. Here’s how Jermey Bowen of the BBC put it:

Saddam Hussein’s regime was harsh, and it could be murderous. He led the country into a series of disastrous wars and brought crippling international sanctions down on their heads.

But with the benefit of 13 years of hindsight, the world that existed before 9 April 2003 seems to be a calmer, more secure place. They have not had a proper day of peace since the old regime fell.

As for democracy, many I have spoken to believe the hopelessly sectarian political system is broken. At least, they say, law and order existed under Saddam.

We need to reckon with this reality. It does no good to keep going back to the old rhetoric about what a tyrant Saddam Hussein was to his own people. What Trump is trying to say in his own awkward way is that Hussein kept the lid on and what we’ve gotten in his place is far worse. And, if he stuck to making that limited point, he’d be on solid footing, which means that it’s just a perpetuation of our national stupidity and infinite capacity to avoid self-reflection to go out and say, “Ooh, ooh, Trump said something halfway complimentary about Saddam Hussein!”

No, the actual valid critique of Trump is that he wants to address our own vulnerabilities to terrorism by emulating the tactics of Saddam Hussein. If the American home front hadn’t enjoyed a proper day of peace since April of 2003, then maybe we’d all be ready to elect a strongman who would restore some law and order. But this is not Baghdad or Fallujah, and we have no good reason to cede our civil rights to Donald Trump.

Trump wants to torture people. He wants to kill the relatives of terrorists. He doesn’t want to read people their rights before summarily executing them. These are the things he’s promising that he can do for us.

There was a time not too long ago that these kinds of actions were considered so loathsome and beyond the pale that they were used as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling the Baath regime there, but now one of our major party presidential candidates is offering to behave the same way.

That’s ironic and sad, but the lesson in this is not that no one should ever say one sort of complimentary thing about Hussein. There are other lessons. For one, we now know that governing the factions inside Iraq was no cakewalk and that there were forces threatening to rip the country apart that weren’t so evident to the outsider or even most Iraqis. That doesn’t excuse Saddam Hussein’s ruthlessness and pitiless treatment of dissenters, but it puts that record in some context. It’s a little easier to see now that Hussein was a monster who was fighting even worse monsters, and it’s clearer that our own foreign policy elite did not know what the fuck they were messing with when they decided to single out Hussein as the world’s most malevolent actor and remove him from power. They also didn’t know what they were doing when the empowered these Islamic State types to go fight the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya thinking that they could use their religious fanaticism against the officially atheist Soviet system. They had no understanding that beneath the old Cold War schisms between Arab Nationalists and Communists and the Muslim Brotherhood was a festering Sunni/Shi’a divide waiting to break out on a global scale. Hussein’s regime was like a bathtub plug that prevented the whole region from circling the drain.

In this context, and in retrospect, playing gotcha on Saddam is depressingly beside the point. It’s the equivalent of treating Iran as if the hostage crisis just ended yesterday and the Shiites never took over Iraq. We can’t have a worldview trapped in 1980’s vintage amber. And this is particularly true because we made our biggest mistakes in the 1980’s. Back then we signed off on the Israelis’ invasion of Lebanon (which basically created Hizbollah) and the massive expansion of West Bank settlements (which created Hamas), and we ramped up support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan (which created thousands of radicalized military veterans), and we actively abetted the stalemated Iraq-Iran War (which left two war-torn and embittered countries), and we didn’t think about the blowback potential from our military alliances with Saudi Arabia and Egypt (which created the bin-Laden-Zawahiri Al-Qaeda alliance).

We have blundered at every step and yet the best we seem to be able to do is to score political points when someone points out that Iraq was better off under Saddam than it is today.

If we can’t even learn the tiniest bit from this history, we are going to wind up electing a strongman eventually, simply because we’re too stupid to keep ourselves safe any other way.

Our elites want to know why no one is listening to them, and it’s because they go around scolding people for not understanding basic things when their own recent record has been disastrous. Trump is tapping into this, and the way to keep him at bay is not to nitpick him for saying something politically incorrect about Saddam Hussein.

When I wake up tomorrow, I am going to read the long-awaited Chilcot Report. You should, too. If the Brits can hold their elites accountable, then so should we. One of our presidential candidates voted to authorize the fiasco in Iraq and the other falsely claims to have opposed it. This is not where we want to be as a country.

We need our elites to do their jobs well. And that’s not going to happen if our discourse about Iraq is stuck on Saddam Hussein being a uniquely bad guy.