It Must Be Bad

This is a turn up:

US, Turkey, Iraq, China urge citizens to leave Egypt

Egypt is too dangerous for Iraqis?

Quote Of The Day

On the subject of the newly emerged opposition of Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Ed 209 to the Iraq war, Nick M makes a good point:

Ed Milliband is on the other hand so much the true believer and people’s commissar that he believes the most important consequence of a war was its effect on the reputation of the Labour Party.

Profiles In Courage

If you opposed the war in Iraq, what sort of candidate for leader of the Labour Party is preferable- someone who supports the war or someone who didn't believe in it but voted for it anyway but didn't think to mention their opposition until they thought it was beneficial to their careers?

Preparing For The Iraq War

The latest news from the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war make depressing reading. Geoff Hoon's revelation that Gordon Brown blocked funding for helicopters and the news that Tony Blair delayed preparations for the war for months in order to pretend that the decision to invade had yet to be finalised is appalling.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of going to war, and I believe the case for removing Saddam was persuasive, there can be no justification for going to war knowingly unprepared. Blair always seemed to like being hailed as an international statesman by committing British troops to action but was unwilling to make the political sacrifice of confronting his Chancellor in order to secure the funds to pay for it.

There is no justification for going to war incompetently and this is the real reason why the war has become so unpopular not the arguments about the legality. The public were largely supportive of the war when Baghdad fell to the allies and previous wars of similar legal status have been generally supported if they are successful.

Most of the above also applies in spadesto the inept American handling of the invasion too, at least under the mismanagement of Donald Rumsfeld.

Senseless & Unjustified.

When it comes to coercive interrogation techniques like water boarding, regardless of whether it is torture or not, there is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether it is justified in a ticking bomb scenario. It is unpleasant but not seriously harmful so whether that outweighs the potential mass slaughter that may be prevented* by water boarding someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a dilemma. I am genuinely ambivalent about what has happened to him, I don't like the idea of subjecting prisoners to water boarding but I don't like the idea of letting hundreds of people be killed by the terrorist cells that he gave up.

That said most of the uses of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were not for the purpose of preventing imminent attacks and saving lives, but instead used to confirm the Bush administration's preconceived notions of Iraqi - Al Qaeda links, which is both a retarded way to interrogate anyone and renders arguments over whether that the ends can justify the means rather moot, as there were no credible ends in the first place.

As I've said before I don't think prosecuting anyone makes much sense from a legal or pragmatic position, but the treatment of those prisoners really was shockingly incompetent and served no discernible purpose and those that thought it was a good idea should have to explain themselves to the public in full.


* I discount the idea that "torture doesn't work", as merely a slogan to avoid having to decide between two hideous alternatives. Torture can work, just today for example is an news story about a criminal torturing a hostage in order to get her bank details and various examples can be found throughout history.

Nobody's Perfect.

Barack Obama on the Surge:

“I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,”

Count me as nobody then, somehow I suspected more soldiers might be a good solution to a lack of security caused by an insufficient number of troops. It was mystifying to me at the time why the pundits were so convinced that the Surge would fail given how obviously sensible it was.

More pertinently John McCain anticipated it perfectly well and several years in advance.

Iraq Banned From The Olympics.

The team was already the subject of an interim ban after the Iraqi government replaced the country's Olympic committee with its own appointees.

Under the IOC charter, all committees must be free of political influence.

The Iraqi Olympic Committee used to be headed by Uday Hussein without being banned so presumably the IOC think that he was promoted to the job on merit.

Killing Terrorists Is A Surprisingly Good Counter-Terrorism Strategy

In the 1990s the idea took hold that terrorists were just misunderstood and you had to negotiate with them to solve the underlying problems. This approach has proved disastrous in many countries with armed groups being given space to commit more and more terrorism. In the last three or four years a new approach to defeating terrorists has enjoyed immense success in Colombia, Sri Lanka and Iraq. Instead of talking to them you kill them, it turns out that far from breeding more terrorists, the whole 'being killed' thing really puts off potential recruits.

As this excellent WSJ article from bret Stephens puts it:

When military strategies fail – as they did in Vietnam while the U.S. pursued the tactics of attrition, or in Iraq prior to the surge – the idea that there can be no military solution has a way of taking hold with civilians and generals eager to deflect blame. This is how we arrived at the notion that "political reconciliation" is a precondition of military success, not a result of it.

{via Centre Right}

Iraqi Deflation.

Inflation might be a growing problem over here, but in Iraq prices are plummeting.

The head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al Masri, just got demoted. The U.S. reward for his capture, dead or alive, was reduced from $5 million to $100,000.

That's got to hurt, terrorists have feelings too and having your value slashed by 98% is just upsetting. This is possibly related to Al Qaeada's increasing ineffectiveness as their brutality alienates even those who quite enjoy mass murder.

Pretexts For Terrorism.

When I referred in my previous post to how I focused too much on the arguments made by the antiwar crowd, one of the claims that I had in mind is the idea that it would cause more terrorism. The recent statement released in the name of Osama Bin Laden shows the problem with that line of reasoning:

Osama bin Laden accused Pope Benedict XVI of helping in a "new Crusade" against Islam and warned of a "severe" reaction to European publications of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that insulted many Muslims.

Bin Laden's new audiotape message raised concerns al-Qaida was plotting new attacks in Europe. Some experts said bin Laden, believed to be in hiding in the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border area, may be unable to organize an attack himself and instead is trying to fan anger and inspire his supporters to violence.

Sure the terrorists might find that an invasion of an Arab country is an excuse to commit terrorism, but if they also regard publishing cartoons or making obscure references to what medieval statesmen thought about Islam is an excuse for mass murder then it suggests that they were hardly going to lead productive and peaceful lives in the absence of an invasion. The Iraq invasion may well provide the pretext for a terrorist attack but it is not the real reason.

Iraq Five Years On.

The fifth anniversary of the start of Iraq war is coming up in the next couple of days. As I wasn't blogging at the time  I can't remember my precise views. I was though broadly in favour of it although I had reservations over how achievable some of the ambitions for the country were. After the massacres of Shias and Kurds after the allies had encouraged them to rise up at the end of the first Gulf War it seemed like a point of honour to rectify that mistake. Also I believed that a country in the Middle East that was a more or less open democracy would neutralise the attempts by Islamists to encourage young men into terrorism as the only way of accomplishing anything with their lives.

Overall though I did not enough attention to examining the claims of the proponents of the war and too much attention looking at what the opponents were saying. Just because the anti war case was mostly nonsense that did not preclude the pro war case from also being mostly wrong.

In my lifetime up to that point almost every war that Britain or the United States had entered (Falklands, Panama, Grenada, Iraq 1, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and others) had accomplished the stated aims in the face of nay saying by the anti war mob so I kind of assumed that any reservations that I thought of about Iraq, had been taken care of by the planners in the Pentagon and MOD.

Five years on I still believe that there was a case for entering Iraq but not a strong one, and not in the way that we did. There should have been far more troops, the Iraqi army should not have been disbanded and we should have moved to set up democratically elected bodies to administer Iraq within weeks of taking over.

Quote Of The Day.

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto explains Barack Obama's policy on Iraq:

So let's see if we have this straight. Al Qaeda in Iraq isn't worth fighting because it wouldn't be there if it weren't for Bush and McCain. Obama is going to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq to go fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although he will send them back to Iraq if al Qaeda are there, even though he now wants to withdraw notwithstanding al Qaeda's presence.

Yes, we can!

Involuntary 'Suicide' Bombers.

There was a pair of suicide bombs in Iraq today that killed more than 65 people, one of the highest death tolls in recent months. What makes the attack particularly awful is the choice of human bombers:

Two mentally disabled women were strapped with explosives Friday and sent into busy Baghdad markets, where they were blown up by remote control, a top Iraqi government official said.

Horrific though it is the treatment of these two women is it does say something about the situation in Iraq that is by no means a bad thing. The supply of voluntary* bombers is diminishing. In Afghanistan the Taliban have long found it difficult to recruit suicide bombers and instead rely on tricking or coercing the mentally ill, the mentally disabled, drug addicts and young children into becoming bombs. This means that the bombs tend to take fewer lives as the carriers of the suicide belts have little enthusiasm about mass murder.


* Even the voluntary ones are brainwashed dupes usually.

So Everyone's Not Dead Then?

450000 Iraqis have come back from the dead. It seems that a new survey of Iraq has estimated a much lower death toll than the earlier much hyped Lancet study. I wasn't a knee jerk dismisser, see my comments over at Laban's at the time for example, of the John Hopkins/ Lancet study but the figures did seem ludicrously high. At the time I looked at the number of car bomb deaths it estimated and the daily amount of killings needed to accomplish that was vastly higher than what was being reported in the media, despite the fact that the media were reporting blasts in Baghdad that killed no one, so it didn't seem right. Given the level of corruption in Iraq it wouldn't have surprised me that researchers collecting data on behalf of a noisily anti war campaigner would just happen to find sky high death rates.

As I said at the time seeing as there was no alternative study to refer to the John Hopkins report could not easily be dismissed, no though there is an alternative report.

150000 people dead is still vastly more than I would have anticipated at the beginning of the war though so there is no reason for me to feel vindicated at all. However combined with the success of the surge, the decision to invade Iraq looks much better now than it did 12 months ago.

Update: Incidentally the Lancet report estimated that there had been 426,369 to 793,663 excess deaths over pretty much an identical period of which over 90% were caused by violence, so even the lower bound of their 95% confidence interval is more than double the estimate made by the World Health Organisation. In other words any attempts to spin these two reports as complementing each other is nonsense.

As the later report doesn't make a comparison to the level of violent deaths before the invasion, it doesn't purport to assess the number of 'excess' deaths which is by definition lower on account of the fact that there was plenty of bloodshed prior to the invasion.

More Petraeus.

On the subject of General Petraeus and the Surge strategy, the General has suffered a lot of criticism by political partisans whose interest in undermining their political opponents outweighs their interest in the truth. Even now this tendency is still pronounced with lots of sneering about how it is all propaganda. So a lot of people are choosing to disbelieve the reports of the Surge's success, to which I would say, fair enough don't believe them, have a look at the recent statement by Osama Bin Laden instead:

Our duty is to foil these dangerous schemes, which try to prevent the establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq. The most evil of the traitors are those who trade away their religion for the sake of their mortal life,

Does this desperation sound like the words of a leader of an organisation that is winning?

Man Of The Year.

The Sunday Telegraph is right to crown General David Petraeus as its Person of the Year. His job is far from complete but his accomplishment in turning around a conflict that looked as though it could result in a jihadist victory is immense. At the beginning of the year the vast majority of media and political commentators were dismissive of the Surge strategy but it was a rational response to the problems that had developed. Oliver Kamm recounts General Petraeus's achievements more eloquently than I could before finishing with a bizarre statement at the end:

Had Tony Blair and General Petraeus been, respectively, the leading political and military figures in the Coalition's Iraq campaign from the outset, much more might have been achieved.

Other than a vague misplaced hero worship of Tony Blair why would anyone assume that he would have enabled a better outcome to the Iraq invasion than what actually happened? Did Blair criticise the lack of manpower when he was Prime Minister? In fact the area that he was responsible for, Basra, saw a strategy of appeasing the local militias which now looks to have been seriously misjudged. Now if Robert Gates had been the leading political figure then things might really have improved.

Iraqi Employees Of The British Army.

Iraqi employees of the British army are being refused entry into the United Kingdom. It isn't as though the government is particularly selective about whom we allow into this country so it seems perverse that just about the only group who are refused entry are people whose lives are in danger because they helped our troops in trying to bring peace to our country. Dan Hardie who has been conducting a campaign to allow them in has quite a bit to say on this decision:

There are a great many methods which our Government, acting in our name, is using to keep out Iraqi ex-employees at risk of being murdered for having trusted this country. Officials have rejected 125 out of 200 applications for help so far, and one of the grounds that they are citing is absenteeism. One of the skivers, an ex-interpreter named Safa, says that he served UK Forces for two and a half years and was unable to come to work when militiamen began observing the British bases, targeting those working for the Army.

Read the whole thing.

The Surge.

I didn't write about the Petreaus report on the results of the American 'Surge' strategy last week. The results of the strategy have been successful to some degree as I predicted back in January:

if we know that there were too few troops then why has it become the received wisdom that the troop 'surge' that Bush is currently implementing is doomed to failiure and we should be cutting the number of coalition personel? It seems to me that the surge is the correct policy and that only by wresting control of Baghdad from sectarian militias will Iraq be stabilised.

My opinion was vindicated to some degree, as both the Petreaus report and other sources such as the BBC's 'Monitoring the Surge' have demonstrated. Obviously it is not a panacea and some militias will simply have taken a break for the duration, but those insisting on judging it a failure, such as the infamous "General Betray Us" ad by Move On (it's an interesting quirk of American politics that the Democrats constantly whine about having their patriotism questioned, yet actual examples of patriotism questioning are almost exclusively made by them, plus Ann Coulter) are not doing so based on the evidence.

Colossal mistakes were made in the Iraq war, particularly the failure to impose order as soon as Allied troops took control and the dissolution of the Iraqi army, both of which appear to have been based on a horribly naive misreading of human nature, although Petraeus was cannier than most British and American Generals back in 2003/2004. Yet that does not justify the idea that everything that the US government does from here on is automatically mistaken, in fact since Robert Gates became defense secretary their policies have become far more rational in terms of identifying the problems of Iraq and attempting to deal with them systematically.

Neil Clark, A Rancid Little Moron.

I hate to jump on a bandwagon, but sometimes the consensus on an issue is entirely correct. So I'm going to add my voice to the huge number of people who have said that the article by Neil Clark about the Iraqi 'Quislings', is utterly contemptible and the derision he receives from all sides of the political spectrum, even from Comment is Free posters, is deserved.

Neil Clark is known both for his extreme stupidity and his perverse support of the war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, but going from denying the the guilt of a war criminal is a whole other thing from actually encouraging war crimes as he does there. I haven't previously commented on the campaign to ensure the safety of Iraqis who have worked for the British army to try and rebuild their country because I doubt that I have enough readers to make it worthwhile, but it is obviously the right thing to do both morally and pragmatically.

In Simon Schama's 'Rough Crossings' he relates the story of black slaves who joined the British army during the American War of Independence in order to fight for their freedom. Obviously that war was lost but the behaviour of the British Commander in Chief in New York after the surrender showed moral courage that deserves to be remembered more than 200 years later. Sir Guy Carleton was steadfst in his refusal to return the human 'property' of of the victorious republic even when it looked as though war might break out again because of this. In the sick mind of Neil Clark and his thankfully tiny band of supporters this protection for the 'Quislings' would have been 'nauseating'. However to most decent people deserting those who have stood by you to the perils of mob retaliation is despicable and not something to strive for.

What Goes Up....

The much welcomed win by the Iraqi football team in the Asian Cup has raised a question that philosophers may ponder down the ages. Are there any downsides to firing guns in the air in the middle of a crowded city? I don't know the answer to that but this old post on another blog answers that very question- Celebratory gunfire, good idea or not?