Let’s hope the US troops will begin to pull out of Iraq and that the country does not revert to its old style of rule after 30th June 2009. Where does that leave the country's people, who are still reeling from decades of war? In Baghdad, it will not be surprising if the countries mullahs will continue to face a drought, sectarian conflict and the scramble for oil riches.
President Obama speaks to the dwindling numbers of troops during a recent visit to Baghdad. On 30 June the last US troops will pull out of the Iraqi cities. America's great adventure in Iraq is ending. Already there are few US military patrols in Baghdad. The American-held area of the Green Zone, for long a forbidden city in the middle of the capital, has been squeezed in size. The hotel that Baghdad taxi drivers fondly believed was the headquarters of the CIA has removed the concrete wall protecting it and reopened for public business. The knowledge that all US military forces will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011 immediately reduces American influence in Iraq. No Iraqi wants to nail his flag to the mast of a departing ship, which is one reason why Washington for so long resisted setting a timetable for a US troop withdrawal.
American forces leave behind a country which is a barely floating wreck. Its society, economy and very landscape have been torn apart by 30 years of war, sanctions and occupation. I first came to Iraq in 1977 when its future looked rosy, but it turned out I was visiting the country at the high tide of its fortunes, a tide that has been ebbing ever since. Iraqis have been engulfed by successive disasters: the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war starting in 1980; the defeat in Kuwait in 1991; the bloodily suppressed Shia and Kurdish uprisings the same year; UN sanctions amounting to a 13-year-long siege which ruined the economy and shattered society; the US invasion of 2003; the Sunni Arab war against the US occupation in 2003-7 and the Sunni-Shia civil war over the same period.
How many other countries in the world have endured such traumas? Is it any surprise that Iraqis are so heavily marked by them? The Iraqi government announces proudly that in May 2009 only 225 Iraqis died from war-related violence, a lower figure than we have seen in any month for at least four years. Of course this is far better than the 3,000 tortured bodies which used to turn up every month at the height of sectarian war in 2006-7. Baghdad is certainly a safer place these days than Mogadishu, though not perhaps as secure as Kabul, where violence, at least for the moment, is surprisingly limited. But the attitudes of Iraqis are not determined solely or even primarily by monthly casualty figures or even the current security situation. Their individual psychology and collective political landscape is shaped rather by the memory of the mass killings of the recent past and fear that they might happen again. Iraq is a country so drenched in blood as to make it next to impossible to reach genuine political accommodation between Shia and Sunni, Arab and Kurd, Baathist and non-Baathist, supporters and opponents of the US occupation. "How do you expect people who are too frightened of each other to live in the same street to reach political agreements?" asks one Iraqi friend in exasperation.
Tuesday 23 June 2009
Openess, & Accountable During The Iraq War Enquiry
Of all the predictable things in life, one of those that you could have put your shirt on was Tony Blair trying to avoid anything about the lead-in and the conduct of the war in Iraq being heard in public.
Because our ex-prime minister has much to hide and much to be ashamed of.
His loud proclamations of his Christian faith and the morality that attaches to it were always deeply suspect and, following hard on his miserable collaboration with the Bush administration during the war, always looked like someone desperately trying to cover his tracks in the face of a failed gamble.
Had it succeeded, had Saddam Hussein been proved to have had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction pointed at the West with a 45-minute margin for destruction and mass killing, Mr Blair would have triumphed in his gamble and he would forever have walked around boasting of having saved the West from millions of deaths and awful destruction.
But it failed. There were no weapons, the gamble didn't pay off and, instead of Mr Blair wearing the halo, he is now skulking around, trying to avoid accounting in public for misdeeds including gambling with the lives of over a million people simply because his philosophy of international relations was based on snuggling up to the playground bully and pressuring those less able to defend themselves.
And it was also based on a policy which has been parodied in plays and films ever since - the obscene secret service mantra of plausible deniability.
Because that's where the unprincipled vandals that have taken democracy and disfigured it so totally that it is virtually unrecognisable are coming from.
To Blair and his ilk, the truthfulness and sincerity of a policy are not the issue.
What is at stake for them is the shape and structure of the world, and that shape and structure must match what their class and their financiers demand.
If you make a claim and base a war on it, its untruthfulness must be plausibly deniable, you must be able to say that, at the time, you believed in all the rubbish that you were spouting and proceeded on it in good faith.
Being right doesn't matter, being honestly misled is an acceptable excuse.
But we aren't talking about the finances of a crown green bowling club here, we are talking about a million lives lost and a country plunged into anarchy and mass killing. It's certainly not a shock that Mr Blair doesn't want to account for the devious manipulations that he was involved with in public, where they can be recorded and held against him later.
And it isn't surprising that Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and all the others who went through that period in Cabinet are trying to get away with a secret inquiry where their testimony will not be publicly scrutinised but, when challenged, are indigantly denying that secrecy was ever on their minds.
But these are not respectable politicians. They are war criminals with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands and it ill behoves new ministers to stand up in public and equivocate.
Iraq saw an illegal, bloody and murderous war, prosecuted by people who still, in this country, hold the reins of government. They were supported by an opposition which is now trying desperately to backtrack on that support.
But, once again, this paper insists. They are war criminals and must pay the price for their crimes.
Openness is not an issue. The Iraq inquiry must be completely transparent and public.
There are no security issues large enough to justify secrecy here.
And, ultimately, the war criminals must pay for their crimes or we live in a society that has foresworn and abandoned any ideas of decency and justice.
Because our ex-prime minister has much to hide and much to be ashamed of.
His loud proclamations of his Christian faith and the morality that attaches to it were always deeply suspect and, following hard on his miserable collaboration with the Bush administration during the war, always looked like someone desperately trying to cover his tracks in the face of a failed gamble.
Had it succeeded, had Saddam Hussein been proved to have had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction pointed at the West with a 45-minute margin for destruction and mass killing, Mr Blair would have triumphed in his gamble and he would forever have walked around boasting of having saved the West from millions of deaths and awful destruction.
But it failed. There were no weapons, the gamble didn't pay off and, instead of Mr Blair wearing the halo, he is now skulking around, trying to avoid accounting in public for misdeeds including gambling with the lives of over a million people simply because his philosophy of international relations was based on snuggling up to the playground bully and pressuring those less able to defend themselves.
And it was also based on a policy which has been parodied in plays and films ever since - the obscene secret service mantra of plausible deniability.
Because that's where the unprincipled vandals that have taken democracy and disfigured it so totally that it is virtually unrecognisable are coming from.
To Blair and his ilk, the truthfulness and sincerity of a policy are not the issue.
What is at stake for them is the shape and structure of the world, and that shape and structure must match what their class and their financiers demand.
If you make a claim and base a war on it, its untruthfulness must be plausibly deniable, you must be able to say that, at the time, you believed in all the rubbish that you were spouting and proceeded on it in good faith.
Being right doesn't matter, being honestly misled is an acceptable excuse.
But we aren't talking about the finances of a crown green bowling club here, we are talking about a million lives lost and a country plunged into anarchy and mass killing. It's certainly not a shock that Mr Blair doesn't want to account for the devious manipulations that he was involved with in public, where they can be recorded and held against him later.
And it isn't surprising that Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and all the others who went through that period in Cabinet are trying to get away with a secret inquiry where their testimony will not be publicly scrutinised but, when challenged, are indigantly denying that secrecy was ever on their minds.
But these are not respectable politicians. They are war criminals with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands and it ill behoves new ministers to stand up in public and equivocate.
Iraq saw an illegal, bloody and murderous war, prosecuted by people who still, in this country, hold the reins of government. They were supported by an opposition which is now trying desperately to backtrack on that support.
But, once again, this paper insists. They are war criminals and must pay the price for their crimes.
Openness is not an issue. The Iraq inquiry must be completely transparent and public.
There are no security issues large enough to justify secrecy here.
And, ultimately, the war criminals must pay for their crimes or we live in a society that has foresworn and abandoned any ideas of decency and justice.
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