Thread: The Abominable Lies of War Criminals Tony Blair & Jack Straw

I think you are assuming too much about what inspectors are capable of finding. We had intelligence from mulitiple governments, and it was from witnesses. That doesn't mean the weapons inspectors were able to find their own evidence. Something that gets lost in all of this is that Hussein's own officials believed the Hussein government had WMD's and was working on creating more. Another fact is that they had a history of working on WMD's and could get back to it in the future if they had not already. Giving power to jihadist organizations for the sake of the jihadist cause makes ownership of WMD's completely out of the question.

The U.N. is corrupt as Hell any way. When they do something about the Genocide in Sudan, I will maybe start to sort of give a damn about what they have to say.

I haven't assumed too much at all. The above certainly displays that there was not enough evidence to declare war which Blair did without the proper consent of the war cainet; and I don't think you have read all of the posts as you don't seem to understand Blair's motivations.

He was a pathological liar and I can't understand why nobody cared enough to vote him out.

On second thoughts he was dishing out free money and his chancellor had manufactured a credit bubble, and people are unscrupulous, greedy bastards.

Originally Posted by mcwillis

I haven't assumed too much at all. The above certainly displays that there was not enough evidence to declare war which Blair did without the proper consent of the war cainet; and I don't think you have read all of the posts as you don't seem to understand Blair's motivations.

I can't tell you much about the war cabinet issue or Blair's secondary motivations that may have been selfish (as you suggest), but jihadist WMD intelligence from six governments plus twelve years of noncompliance with a cease fire is justification for war by itself. The reasons for the war go beyond just those.

I think it is always justifiable to overthrow a dictatorship. Dictatorships are not just or legitimate. The people should always have the power to put in new leaders. When you add genocide, jihadist terrorism, ceasefire noncompliance, the need to scare other jihadist governments into compliance with WMD destruction, and the need to influence democratization of the Middle East to all of that, there is justification for war. If leaders use that fact for their own gains, then fuck them, but that doesn't mean the war is therefore unjust.

*cough* lack of any actual weapons *cough*

Just keep talking.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

I think it is always justifiable to overthrow a dictatorship. Dictatorships are not just or legitimate. The people should always have the power to put in new leaders. When you add genocide, jihadist terrorism, ceasefire noncompliance, the need to scare other jihadist governments into compliance with WMD destruction, and the need to influence democratization of the Middle East to all of that, there is justification for war. If leaders use that fact for their own gains, then fuck them, but that doesn't mean the war is therefore unjust.

If that is the only justification then can you please explain why didn't the invasion take place in Iraq in 1988? I think weapons inspector Scott Ritter has some telling tales regarding this:

I also hasten to emphasize the charmingly simplistic idea that bombing the shit out of the East somehow encourages the Arabs to aspire to the American political system.

Do you think Ahmadinejad would've been able to crush the recent youth democracy protests if his demagogic rhetoric about being threatened by the West wasn't actually vividly evinced by reality?

Perhaps you actually believe that there is Arabic hatred towards America because the Arabs 'hate your freedoms'. Not because you recently murdered hundreds of thousands of their fellow civilians.

Originally Posted by Xei

*cough* lack of any actual weapons *cough*

Just keep talking.

If something can't be found, it never existed? If so, then it is impossible to lose something permanently. If you never find it, it never existed. That would mean I haven't owned too many pairs of socks in my life.

Originally Posted by mcwillis

If that is the only justification then can you please explain why didn't the invasion take place in Iraq in 1988? I think weapons inspector Scott Ritter has some telling tales regarding this:

I didn't say Bush and Blair agree with me. I was just telling you my perspective. As for Bush and Blair, the justifications added up over time. The war was about a list of issues. That does not mean any one issue alone was seen by the U.S. and Britain as justification for war.

Originally Posted by Xei

I also hasten to emphasize the charmingly simplistic idea that bombing the shit out of the East somehow encourages the Arabs to aspire to the American political system.

Do you think Ahmadinejad would've been able to crush the recent youth democracy protests if his demagogic rhetoric about being threatened by the West wasn't actually vividly evinced by reality?

Perhaps you actually believe that there is Arabic hatred towards America because the Arabs 'hate your freedoms'. Not because you recently murdered hundreds of thousands of their fellow civilians.

Bombing the shit out of key targets in Iraq did not encourage Arabs to aspire to the American/British system. It allowed us to set up such a system and preserve it. The system is still there.

Not all Arabs hate us. Tons of them love us for bringing them freedom. The brainwashed nut cases who believe in jihad for Allah for virgins hate us for our military policies as well as our freedoms. Bin Laden's "Letter to the American Nation" shows that. (Please nobody start arguing that Bin Laden was not an Iraqi. I know that. I am talking about general Arab hatred for the West.)

"Yes" on the Ahmadinejad question. He is quite powerful in Iran.

Originally Posted by Xei

I also hasten to emphasize the charmingly simplistic idea that bombing the shit out of the East somehow encourages the Arabs to aspire to the American political system.

Actually it is Britain that has the dirtiest hands instead of the US. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France drew the boundaries of the new states in the Middle East with absolutely no input from the people of the region. All promises of Arab independence the British had made to various local leaders during the First World War were scrapped. At the 1919 peace conference, when the victorious powers sat down to divvy up the spoils, foremost in their minds was the need to keep the region divided and thereby easier to control. Private oil concerns pushed their governments (in the national interest, of course) to renounce all wartime promises to the Arabs. For the oilmen saw only too well that oil concessions and royalties would be easier to negotiate with a series of rival Arab states lacking any sense of unity, than with a powerful independent Arab state in the Middle East. Britain took the areas that became Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. France took Syria and Lebanon. Each state was then handed to local kings and sheiks who owed their position to British tutelage. Kuwait was handed to the al-Sabah family. After he was promised a united Arab republic, the Hashemite King Hussein was awarded Jordan. Britain gave Sheik Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world named after its ruling family. France put Lebanon in the hands of the Christian minority. Journalist Glenn Frankel describes how British High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox settled boundaries between Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia at a 1922 conference in Baghdad - 'The meeting had gone on for five grueling days with no compromise in sight. So one night in late November 1922, Cox, Britain's representative in Baghdad, summoned to his tent Sheik Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, soon to become ruler of Saudi Arabia, to explain the facts of life as the British carved up the remnants of the defeated Ottoman empire.' 'It was astonishing to see Sheik Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud being reprimanded like a naughty schoolboy by His Majesty's High Commissioner and being told sharply that he, Sir Percy Cox, would himself decide the type and general line of the frontier,' recalled Harold Dickson, the British military attaché to the region, in his memoirs. 'This ended the impasse. Sheik Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud almost broke down and pathetically remarked that Sir Percy was his father and mother who made him and raised him from nothing to the position he held and that he would surrender half his kingdom, nay the whole, if Sir Percy ordered.'

Within two days, the deal was done. The modern borders of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait were established by British Imperial fiat at what became known as the Uqauir Conference.

There was one unique exception to this arrangement. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had committed Britain to supporting the formation of a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine. When the postwar settlement made the country a British protectorate, Britain backed Jewish immigration to Palestine, hoping to create a 'secure strategic outpost in an Arab world.' Though Lord Arthur Balfour was an anti-Semite, he and other members of the British ruling class could see the value of creating a colonial-settler outpost that, dependent on British support, could become a loyal protector of British interests in the area. The full significance of the role of such an outpost would not become apparent, or fully taken advantage of by the U.S., until several years after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

I think it is always justifiable to overthrow a dictatorship. Dictatorships are not just or legitimate. The people should always have the power to put in new leaders. When you add genocide, jihadist terrorism, ceasefire noncompliance, the need to scare other jihadist governments into compliance with WMD destruction, and the need to influence democratization of the Middle East to all of that, there is justification for war. If leaders use that fact for their own gains, then fuck them, but that doesn't mean the war is therefore unjust.

Any reasons given for the war to the public - including the WMDs, terrorist connections, "evil" dictatorship etc - are basically a front to conceal actual motivations. The U.S and British governments and military are being used as a tool of some very wealthy and powerful people to seize further control of the planet. I would say the official story is secondary to selfish motivations, not vice versa.

Even it was about instilling democracy and fighting terrorism, it was at the cost of upwards of 100,000 civilian deaths - which of coarse will just breed more hatred and terrorism directed at the west. Using force to instill democracy is absurd. You remove the organization at the top, but those at the bottom have no history of freedom, thus the power vacuum will be quickly filled by others searching for power. Thus we're back at square one.

This is a world of self interest, and the reason for global conflicts are no exception.

Its kind of silly to blame Blair, or Bush for that matter. As if they have real power and are acting alone. People say it was about oil. O.k. But understand its not the U.S or British government who wants oil - they aren't even cohesive organizations. Its private interest groups; wealthy families who have managed to gain control over policy making. Bush or Blair are just front-men.

Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

Any reasons given for the war to the public - including the WMDs, terrorist connections, "evil" dictatorship etc - are basically a front to conceal actual motivations. The U.S and British governments and military are being used as a tool of some very wealthy and powerful people to seize further control of the planet. I would say the official story is secondary to selfish motivations, not vice versa.

Even it was about instilling democracy and fighting terrorism, it was at the cost of upwards of 100,000 civilian deaths - which of coarse will just breed more hatred and terrorism directed at the west. Using force to instill democracy is absurd. You remove the organization at the top, but those at the bottom have no history of freedom, thus the power vacuum will be quickly filled by others searching for power. Thus we're back at square one.

This is a world of self interest, and the reason for global conflicts are no exception.

Its kind of silly to blame Blair, or Bush for that matter. As if they have real power and are acting alone. People say it was about oil. O.k. But understand its not the U.S or British government who wants oil - they aren't even cohesive organizations. Its private interest groups; wealthy families who have managed to gain control over policy making. Bush or Blair are just front-men.

Really, I don't rule out what you are saying about corrupt self-interests of private groups. I know that such thing is a reality and a very powerful one. However, that does not mean the war did not have justifications. Even if it all turns out to be a big failure because the democracy cannot hold up without our help, going to war for the reasons I mentioned, which a lot of the soldiers believed in as they were fighting, was at least understandable.

I have said in recent years that I do not believe in the bright future of Iraq as much as I used to. My pessimism has greatly increased. I really hope it works out. Unfortunately, it might not.

It is the U.N. that should have gone in there to do the job any way.

Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

Any reasons given for the war to the public - including the WMDs, terrorist connections, "evil" dictatorship etc - are basically a front to conceal actual motivations. The U.S and British governments and military are being used as a tool of some very wealthy and powerful people to seize further control of the planet.

If you recall in my opening post I mentioned sending Michael Meacher an email. I chose him as my first point of contact due to the following article he wrote that illustrates your view. The article appeared in the Guardian newspaper of London:

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Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

Even if it all turns out to be a big failure because the democracy cannot hold up without our help, going to war for the reasons I mentioned, which a lot of the soldiers believed in as they were fighting, was at least understandable.

Understandable that such a view may be taken, yes. Don't agree with myself.

I feel sorry for these soldiers. They had their emotions and minds manipulated so they would put their own lives are risk while killing others. They were used like pawns.

I really hope it works out. Unfortunately, it might not.

I have mixed feelings. If it had gone perfectly, the public may not have lost its appetite for war and the current propaganda revolving around Iran would be much more effective. Plus giving these private interest groups control over another country is not good for the planet.

I clean easy war would have resulted it less bloodshed, however. And maybe more freedoms for Iraqis, although somehow I doubt it.

Originally Posted by mcwillis

If you recall in my opening post I mentioned sending Michael Meacher an email. I chose him as my first point of contact due to the following article he wrote that illustrates your view. The article appeared in the Guardian newspaper of London

I'm not from England, is the Guardian a major newspaper? If so, nice to see something like that in the mainstream.

Although that article points to political and governmental groups as the motivators, instead of tools for those who operate beyond political or national bounds, it still strikes close to the mark.

The Guardian is one of the most prestigious newspapers on the planet.

Well nice to see they published that. I'm used to the North American media not daring to wade very deeply into such waters.

This has been a long time problem for me. Every time I hear the name "Jack Staw", I think of this song:


It's pretty funny. Great melody.