Britain's Foreign Policy on IS: Building Towards Military Intervention.

'As Washington seeks to build a multi-national coalition to support an expansion of air strikes against the jihadists....the prime minister returned to work in Downing Street to intensify plans for an emergency action plan to be agreed at the Nato summit'. The Guardian

'We have been putting in humanitarian aid. I can confirm that last night I authorised two Hercules to participate in the big aid drop on Amerli, a town that has been under siege for nearly two months. The RAF dropped 14 tonnes of food and water there for a population that has been completely besieged'-Michael Fallon, British Defence Minister.

Since the US bombing of IS positions commenced a couple of weeks ago, there has been a growing feeling that Britain too could be dragged back into involvement in Iraq at a level beyond RAF Hercules aircraft dropping food supplies to Iraqis in need and surrounded by IS foot soldiers.

The emphasis has been, therefore, upon humanitarian intervention once more, something invariably leading to the suspicion of yet another 'western war' being planned or else that IS is a creation of the CIA acting in tangent with Israel and with the Caliph himself a Mossad plant.

Certainly, there is not much evidence of public support for any military intervention. Had there been, it is far more likely Cameron could have taken a Blair-style 'shoulder to shoulder' stance. If anything, Cameron was playing for time throughout August 2014, not wanting to be seen as rushing into another conflict.

Cameron claimed Britain's 'military prowess' and 'assets' would be deployed, that 'boots on the ground' were not an 'option on the table' nor air strikes-unless requested. The language of Cameron and his ministers is standard fare and so yawn inducingly banal that many people would feel like switching off the TV.

It looks likely that the British government does not know what could be done or else, far more likely,  it does but is putting out constant spin and managing the media to try and play down the imminent threat of military intervention until some sort of trump card, yet to be played, could be produced.

The task of Britain's politicians seems to consist in trying to anticipate what Washington is going to require its 'first ally' to do the better to position themselves and Britain's 'military assets' at the service of the US should they be requested and so pose as independent 'global players'.

The attempt by the government to ramp up the rhetoric about IS is about softening up public opinion ready for military intervention. Bombing IS positions is not going to defeat it, however, and there is not much sign of any shift away from the failed foreign policy towards Syria. So a 'generational struggle' is on.

This is known as 'public diplomacy'. The basic fact is that the military intervention in northern Iraq is primarily about protecting the Kurdistan region and the oil producing regions from IS and to prevent the Iraqi state collapsing. This would trigger off a potential surge in global oil prices. 

The international development minister Alan Duncan "This is such a complicated conflict that any response needs to be a well co-ordinated international effort." John Kerry went on in a speech later to claim there was a need for a 'world coalition' to defeat a 'genocidal ISIS'.

By 'international', that means 'the west' taking action to ensure energy security as some 20% of Iraqi oil is exported to Europe. But more oil goes to East Asia which is heavily dependent upon imported oil. Higher oil prices would mean higher production costs in China and the cost passed on to Western consumers.

It is partly because the US and Britain back in 2003 caused the havoc in Iraq, still unfolding to such an extreme degree in 2014, that military intervention of some sort of a continued basis appears inevitable. But it also underlines the way the global economies have become dangerously overdependent upon oil.

This is a fact many in the West refuse to confront. It is one thing blaming the politicians as bungling and pursuing a contradictory strategy in Syria and Iraq. But, at a deeper level, the hyper-consumerism that those citizens enjoy requires that this sort of military intervention becomes more frequent.

So, in this sense, political double standards are necessary whereby the most obvious facts about British foreign policy, such as the energy interests ( i.e oil and gas ) are seldom talked about sensibly and reduced to cynical sneers by 'anti-war' activists about military intervention being 'all about the oil'.

This, in turn, means that the very serious problem of the most advanced global economies being fragile and dependent upon oil prices, and the continued access to easily available supples, is impossible to discuss without the accusation of peddling conspiracy theories being made by the defenders of the foreign policy.

Tony Blair on 'Religious Extremism'

'The fact is that, though of course there are individual grievances or reasons for the violence in each country, there is one thing self-evidently in common: the acts of terrorism are perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion. It is a perversion of faith-

'Tony Blair on 'religious extremism' as the force for global conflict in The Observer, January 27 2014)

'Well, I think if you have faith about these things, then you realise that judgment is made by other people...If you believe in God, [the judgment] is made by God as well.".

Tony Blair to Michael Parkinson in 2006 on the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Likewise, the decision to invade Iraq could be considered to be at least partly motivated by a perversion of faith, a belief that both all dictatorships and all terrorism were alike motivated by a seamless global geopolitical Evil that could be comprehensively defeated by the USA and Britain.

Of course, the invasion of Iraq was based on geopolitical calculations,namely the idea of controlling the second largest oil supplies on earth and spreading democratic revolution across the Middle East through a 'domino effect' that would be stages in rolling back Assad's Syria and the Ayatollah's Iran.

Blair's evangelical zeal was probably far more sincere than Bush's born again Christianity but in both cases the war was about calculated strategies leavened by a militant and missionary foreign policy that appealed to scores of atheists, most noticeably the Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens.

There were some prominent atheists who disagreed with the Iraq War and chose to do it on the basis alone that the US was dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, such as President GW Bush pretended to be, and the fact that Blair was prepared to invoke God and religion in his decision for war.

Dawkins, however, remains largely ignorant of global geopolitics and peddles the banal idea that wars are all 'the fault of religion' or that only societies in which religion is predominant could wars be aided and abetted enthusiastically, the parochial conceit of those reaching maturity in a more secular Britain in the 1960s and 70s.

Most of the violence perpetuated by terrorists globally is largely due to politics and politicised versions of religion-or 'political religions'- that gain ground in lands beset with conflicts over territory, scarce resources from oil to diamonds and even water, and great power conflicts. This is the case in the Middle East.

Syria's crisis is a consequence of global climate change, increased scarcity of cheap food, an incompetent dictatorship that represented certain minorities which could no longer ensure sufficient living standards for all and the geopolitical contest between regional and global powers over pipeline routes and access to oil and gas.

Syria's civil war is in reality a series of civil wars between minorities created by the fracturing of the artificial state into warring factions that want to break away ( such as the Kurds into a new oil rich state ) and the Sunni Muslims who have less of a stake in gaining from new gas pipeline projects from Shia Iran and Iraq.

The way Blair draws attention to the Syrian Crisis at present is always, however, with a view to portraying it as a consequence of sectarian divisions and 'perverted faith' that has ramped up casualties without US and British intervention to levels surpassing his mendaciously low figure of 100,000 deaths in the Iraq War.

'At present, our screens are dominated by the hideous slaughter in Syria. We have to hope that the peace negotiations succeed. But with more than 130,000 dead – and, on some accounts, the total is nearer 200,000 – millions displaced and the country in a state of disintegration...'

When Blair gives his opinion on any matter of global significance, it is invariably connected to his attempt to consolidate his image as a 'visionary' statesman and guarantee his 'legacy' in world politics. And that, in turn, means attempting to rationalise the catastrophic impact the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has had.

Contrary to the claims that Blair is a 'psychopath' and a mere 'warmonger', Blair does have a conscience which is why he seems to be obsessive in trying to prove that his decision to back the US invasion was justified in the light of some broader providential plan for the world.

By claiming contemporary terrorist atrocities are part of a 'clear common theme' and that other world leaders must 'start to produce a genuine global strategy to deal with it', Blair is trying to argue that the hitherto underestimated potency and power of religious based terrorism derailed his plans for Iraq.

The line Blair takes is that had it not been for 'the acts of terrorism...perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion', then democracy would have come to Iraq relatively quickly and it is they and not him who bears responsibility for the vast majority of the bloodshed.

'All over the region, and including in Iraq, where exactly the same sectarianism threatens the right of the people to a democratic future, such a campaign has to be actively waged. It is one reason why the Middle East matters so much and why any attempt to disengage is so wrong and short-sighted'.

Moreover, by maintaining that the sort of sectarian based religious violence is a 'growing' global threat, Blair can relativise the significance of the bloodshed in Iraq as one that is part of a wider trend that was just emerging at the time of his decision to invade Iraq to free it from a secular dictator.

The purpose of this propaganda is that Blair can absolve himself from the responsibility for the carnage in Iraq by trying to have it that this sort of sectarian violence was bound to break out anyway sooner or later. Just as governments have had to be 'engaged' over Syria, so too did he earlier with Iraq.

This way of 'framing' events in the Middle East over the past decade is meant to salvage Blair's reputation and it is motivated by vanity and egotism. All his efforts since being officially out of office are geared towards ensuring that he is retrospectively vindicated by History.

Even so, if that were the only aim Blair has, he could easily keep writing post ex facto justifications for the Iraq War and collecting vast amounts of money from his global lectures and speeches. But-and this is why Blair does have a conscience-he seems intent on promoting 'global harmony'.

Blair is obsessing with his 'place in history' because he does not want to be remembered only as the man whose decision brought widespread death and destruction to Iraq. So his 'TonyBlairFaithFoundation' is there 'to promote greater knowledge and understanding between people of different faiths'.

As a fairly recent convert to Catholicism, Blair can shift away from the Protestant idea of 'justification by faith alone' to one of atoning through a devotion to doing good work in the world by funding educational and exchange programmes and university courses to students across the world of faith.

Blair's message is that what happened in Iraq did not have to be that way. In fact, he was warned by numerous experts on the Middle East that an invasion to remove the secular dictator was going to lead to an outbreak of sectarian and ethnic tensions. Blair 'believed' it did would not happen that way.

So Blair is bound to blame violence on an 'abuse of faith' because his own decision to invade Iraq was based on a messianic faith based crusade to liberate the Middle East, one given impetus by the fact he had liberated the Muslim Kosovans in 1999 and the Afghans from the Taliban after 2001.

Blair is not going to cease trying to make up for-in his own way-the bad done in Iraq and that he blames on the evildoing of sectarian terrorists and not on himself because he believes he had the best of intentions. Blair knows all about faith based violence because his decision to go to war was based on it.

 

Iraq and Blair Ten Years On

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair is still trying to justify his decision to join George W Bush in what proved to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in recent British history.

More concerned with his place in History than the Blair's spurious grasp of events merely seems to be a concocted series of 'what ifs' and prely hypothetical conjecture. He stated on Iraq,

“If we hadn’t removed Saddam from power just think, for example, what would be happening if these Arab revolutions were continuing now and Saddam, who’s probably 20 times as bad as Assad in Syria, was trying to suppress an uprising in Iraq. Think of the consequences of leaving that regime in power".

It's amazing how Blair has a clairvoyant talent to know what "would have" happened if he "hadn't" invaded. It may help him to sleep a bit better at night but it is not persuasive as an argument to anyone who isn't Blair or a fanatic acolyte of this deranged creature.

Not least if you lie to yourself about the sum total of dead being 100,000 as opposed to the real figure which is about 600,000 or even over 1 million dead according to the peer reviewed Lancet Report. And then ignore real statistical facts by conjuring up one about Saddam being '20 times' worse than Assad.

'I’ve long since given up in trying to persuade people it was the right decision. In a sense what I try to persuade people of now is to understand how complex and difficult a decision it was...Because I think if we don’t understand that, we won’t take the right decision about what I think will be a series of these types of problems that will arise over the next few years....You’ve got one in Syria right now, you’ve got one in Iran to come. The issue is how do you make the world a safer place?"

How can Blair claim it was a "complex decision" when it was quite clear from the evidence he had already made up his mind to join the US invasion of Iraq as far back as 2002 when he met Bush at Crawford and looked at maps of Iraq's oil wealth  ? ( see Strachan's The Last Oil Shock )

Blair kept repeating he invaded because "it was the right thing to do" when quite clearly the decision has led to more deaths than otherwise would have happened. So he has had to give up justifying the war and shifted to an attempt to justify being in the position of having to make a decision.

Instead of being asked to look at evidence and facts, the public, even presuming many even bother listening to this has-been, are being asked to empathise with his anxiety over the war, even if one "disagrees" with it, an attempt to accrue to himself a form of integrity he never had at any time in his wretched failed career.  

Blairs words are not the words of a leader with a grasp of complexity nor even any substantial knowledge of the history of Iraq and the sectarian and ethnic tensions that were always likely to emerge on getting rid of this dictator and, as it turned out, having no coherent plan for a post-Saddam Iraq.

If the decision was so "complex" you would have though he'd have taken consideration of that. Yet, as with everything Blair says, the point is all about how he would be able to put the point across because he would be bound to be misunderstood.

Yet Blair, who now in 2013 wants to portray the decision as agonising and complex, presented the decision back in 2003 to invade Iraq as a stark binary choice: "either" we get rid of Saddam Hussein "or" he poses a real threat to us and his peopl ( hence the misinformation about WMD's, the 45 minute warning ).

Blair's career is entirely one of bad acting and wish thinking. His political line tends to shift and change according to the message he wishes to convey. A decade on, and he has learnt nothing. As is clear from the threat to Iran embedded in the line it is a 'problem' that is to 'come'.

Blair's entire "career" since he left office has been one long post ex-facto rationalisation for his role in unleashing carnage in Iraq. His hyperactive fidgety inability to clear off the global stage is possibly due to his colossal vanity.

The interesting question is whether Blair has a conscience over Iraq or whether he's even faking that in order to preserve his public image as a 'statesman'. From the contrived speech after Princess Diana's death in 1997 and his use of 'the people', from the outset Blair was a dangerous fraud.

The Case Against Tony Blair.

Evidently, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was one of controlling Iraqi oil and removing the over dependence of the USA and UK on a Saudi regime that was looking more unstable. The foreign policy of the USA has increasingly been based on diversifying supplies of oil as documented in Michael T Klare's seminal Blood and Oil.

The continual shifting between moral and legal precepts to rationalise the invasion are relevant only in trying to absolve Blair from the notion of intentionality as regards the crime of aggression. The fact that insurgents murdered and killed in Iraq after the invasion hardly absolves Blair from his part in initiating it.

The actual consequences of the Iraq war were not, of course intended. But pursuing the war, ignoring the due procedure of international law and doing so as part of a plan to take the resources of another nation, even if under the control of a criminal dictator, was intentional and was the aim.

The war was an intentional act of geopolitical strategy. Any effects that could have been posited as "moral" would have been a spin off from a successful invasion and only had Saddam Hussein really offered a threat so serious that no military action would have been more harmful to life than invading.

This was the case put before the electorate.And that view was discredited by the manipulated "intelligence" and fraudulent claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The war was not about a "moral case" even if a moral case could be offered.
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Nor about non-existent WMD, the acronym itself being a euphemism, one that downgraded a sensationalistic term implying the imminent threat of being blown to bits by a rogue state to a sort of bureaucratic process when that form of spin was required to downgrade the original implications.
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Weapons of Mass Destruction could destroy us in 45 minutes. WMD was the preferred term for an administrative procedure based on a supposed objective detachment based on a discussion of fact and evidence. That would be a matter for debate. And one that could be spun out.
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That Saddam had the intention to use Weapons of Mass Destruction was supposedly obvious. Yet it was hardly less obvious than the intention of the USA to invade Iraq no matter what the evidence really was. And that was made quite clear from much of what leading neoconservatives had said in the run up to war.
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Weapons of Mass destruction was a pretext that turned out to be a ruse to invade, though the real question is whether Blair knew that there were no WMD or whether he simply believed any facts were "essentially true" just to be able to justify an action he had already decided on.

No matter the level of self delusion, the rationale for the invasion was to grab Iraq's resources. That was decided upon by Bush and Blair at Crawford when they looked at geological maps of the oil wealth ( as documented by David Strahan in his The Last Oil Shock ).
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All else was a form of logic chopping apologetics. Blair must be put into a War Crimes Tribunal, his motives and actions questioned forensically and all the factors looked at and subjected to assessment. This is not only something vital to uphold principles of justice. It is essential to preserve democracy and accountability.

Given that resource wars are the norm today-as is Afghanistan, a war to construct the TAPI Pipeline and to secure geopolitical advantages in Central Asia-it is unlikely that any Western government will consent to Blair being arrested and put on trial as he should be. They could never embark on such a war again.

So unless Power is to trump the Rule of Law and expedient falsehood win over truth and justice, Blair must be tried. For the alternative assumption might be, however, that if other Powers without democracy can protect their access to resources without the annoyance of such things as public enquiries, rule of law etc, we might be "better off" without them.

The Failure to Look at the Facts of the Iraq Conflict.

With the Wikileaks it has become even clearer now the US colluded with death squads such as the 2nd battalion of the interior ministry-the Wolf Brigades-as the price of defeating the Sunni based militias opposed to the new Iraqi government and involving leaders of Shia Badr militias.

Many such as Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and others who backed the Iraq War have remained silent on this or simply "moved on", despite having attempted to use the invasion of Iraq as a great cause with which to upgrade their reputations as stalwart defenders of the West's essential liberal values in the war against global Islamofascism and totalitarianism.

Some such as Peter Bracken still think they are fighting the good cause, almost parodying the language of Hitchens and Paul Bermann about the need for democratic or "decent leftists" to stand up for the West against barbarians who seek to destroy it. Bracken seems to have transposed the fight in Iraq against barbarians to anti-war opponents in Britain too,

,....the authentic left renounces everything the deluded left has embraced. And in embracing an illiberal perspective on world politics it has – I believe – forfeited its right to membership of the left.....this section of the left denies the mainstay of the authentic left's agenda: liberalism.

Yet few supporters of the Iraq war to defend liberalism not their opponents bothered to look at the facts of Iraq on their own terms, waging polemical battles as part of their ideological creed wars and fitting the facts to them accordingly. Compared to what was really at stake-energy security and geopolitical hegemony-these disputes will remain a footnote in history.

Even so, what is curious about Bracken's sententious waffle about the USA's "moral authority" in invading Iraq is precisely the moral relativism of the practice of the US strategy for "pacification". It was prepared to co-opt fanatical Islamists and former Baathists to crush other insurgents. As the Guardian reported,

In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for "further questioning". Typical entries read: "All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning" (from 29 November 2004) and "The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning" (30 November 2004).

The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films : "US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing," while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.

An interview conducted by Maass in 2005 at the improvised prison, accompanied by the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.

The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects.

In the light of the hundreds of thousands killed and displaced by the invasion of Iraq back in 2003 and the cost in lives and morality amount of evidence will convince those Bracken of the sheer scale of the criminality involved in getting control of Iraq.

The stupidity of some self styled "liberal imperialists" or "humanitarian interventionists" from Hitchens to Cohen et al is that they shared the same mental vices that they accused the anti-war protesters of having: a lack of interest in the real situation in Iraq and scoring polemical points.

Obviously, those like Tariq Ali and Seumas Milne who referred to some "the Iraqi resistance" were using the term to glorify and dignify the Sunni militias and trying to impose a left wing Third World anti-colonial narrative on to a brutal sectarian and ethnic conflict where the Vietnam model failed to fit.

Yet that does not absolve those who argued the case for invading Iraq of responsibility for the that it was a catastrophically bad move, of very dubious legality and which from the outset had control of Iraqi oil as its purpose, as most of the military effort went into securing the oil infrastructure and not on nation building.

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An Exchange with Peter Bracken.

Peter Bracken responded today,

You misunderstand the term moral relativism. In a sentence, moral relativism disables discrimination between the moral behaviour of states or cultures or individuals.

On your own terms by colluding with precisely the forces that the US set out to overthrow the US mission in Iraq was very much defined by moral relativism, that morality can be defined according to the principle wholly of the means justifying the ends.

That necessarily means overlooking the behaviour of those 'on our side' simply in order to advance a political objective thought of more overriding importance than preserving precisely those universal moral injunctions enshrined in prohibitions of torture.

The irony is that even if those such as Seumas Milne only cared about Iraq is so far as to discredit the USA whilst simultaneously extolling Sunni Militias as "the resistance", the advocates of war in Iraq also overlooked atrocities committed in the name of a higher cause.

Clearly, moral relativism disabled any critical capacity from many in the left, not only some "anti-war" activists ( who at the same time rationalised ideological violence from "the resistance" ) but those who supported Iraq.There is one more flaw in this definition.

By the terms of reference set out by those who supported the invasion of Iraq to get rid of torture, the whole point is that moral relativism is not an absolute category that applies only to enemies of the USA and UK as defined for purposes of political expediency and realpolitik.

If that is the case, then logically it is essential that the moral behaviour of the USA and UK is judged according to the standards that are set up for others to follow ( e.g the universal prohibition on torture ) but which have not been followed by both powers in the light of the evidence coming from Iraq.

So instead of looking at the truth of the Wikileaks, the collusion of the US with murderous Baathists people such as yourself assured people the invasion was about removing for moral reasons, you prefer to take pot shots at the apparent self-interest of lawyers to deflect attention from the substance of the accusations of collusions in torture.

And that is known as taking the moral position.

Peter Bracken

..what's interesting about the Wikileaks is how few atrocities have been committed.

Collusion with that there is a just measure of atrocity that is acceptable. How that calculus can be arrived at is curious. What's interesting is that the US worked with the Baathists who were depicted as the enemy even after 2003.

Moreover, the Frago 242 order to the US miltary to ignore detainee abuse by Iraqi authorities is illegal in international law.

Supporters of the Iraq War cannot have it both ways. To maintain that the war was fought to prevent humanitarian abuses but that the success can only be achieved by systemic collusion with torture is exactly what the hero of the supposedly "decent left", George Orwell, called doublethink.

..all you ever do is highlight the self-interest of states - it's all about oil.

Well, its necessary to do so, though it becomes claustrophobic to have to re-iterate the damned obvious. But contrary to this, I emphasise oil and its role in geopolitics and the balance of power and not the standard obsession with the USA as though it were a vampiric power drinking oil like blood.

Nor that wars for energy security are about sinister waxen faxed silver haired plutocrats loving the thrill of war for profit, the sort of tripe that comes from anti-war activists of the kind who seem intent on emulating the cliched radicals of something from the 1980s anti-terrorist film Who Dares Wins.

Clearly losing the argument Peter Bracken snarls,

You are hamstrung by your contortions. One doesn't have to be a saint to apply moral judgements. That's the point of the anti-relativist stance

No, but clearly you think there is a God given right somehow for the USA and UK not to be held accountable for colluding with torture when the ostensible point of the invasion was supposed to be to remove Saddam and hence torture.

So no contortions but simply the plain obvious truth. It's clear to any sane person that the actual conduct of the war as well as the bogus pretexts used to justify it in the first place failed to be in any sense ethical or moral at all.

Unless morality is subordinated to the ultimate victory of the politically correct creed. In which case, those justifying Iraq ( as you still are ) are paradoxically coming very close to the rationalisations people made for Stalin's USSR in the 1930s.

Bracken on collusion with torture through Frago 242 retorted then,

Nonsense, and you know it to be. By your reckoning one case of abuse would be enough to condemn the military and its government.

The point is that the collusion with torture was systemic, a consequence of the Frago 242 which provided a licence to torture. That decision meant that "abuses" such as torture were not a series of unfortunate one off but implicit in the very way in which the US decided to conduct the war.

As Nick Davies wrote in the Guardian,

A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

The systematic viciousness of the old dictatorship when Saddam Hussein's security agencies enforced order without any regard for law continues, reinforced by the chaotic savagery of the new criminal, political and sectarian groups which have emerged since the invasion in 2003 and which have infiltrated some police and army units, using Iraq's detention cells for their private vendettas.

This should not be so difficult to grasp. The continuities with the old Baathist regime are clear here. It could be maintained, ruthlessly of course, that such collusion in barbarism was necessary to defeat barbarians but that reduces the moral case for the Iraq War to dust.

Today Peter Beaumont writes on Iraq,

...when things sometimes became too embarrassing – too obvious – a local police chief implicated in killings might be removed or officials at the ministry re-organised. But the murder continued.There was a new excuse: the police had been infiltrated by Shia extremists. Which was true, up to a point. Except it wasn't really infiltration, more of an alliance in many places: a coincidence of sectarian interest.

So the "liberal interventionist" case for Iraq has been disproved by the facts: the systemic collusion in torture represented by Frago 242 by which US troops were to allow Iraqi militias such as the Wolf Brigades to torture their enemies and ethnic cleansing tacitly permitted as the price of controlling Iraqi oil for which the war was fought.

Peter Bracken responded robotically,

Iraq is no longer under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam. The innocent life that has been lost since the occupation is due almost entirely to the campaign waged by Iraqi insurgents.

It is your suggestion (read the quote) that coalition forces are equivalent to Saddam's murderous regime that is the sad, despicable feature of this Wikileaks episode.

There are no "Iraqi insurgents" as such. They were Sunni or Shia insurgents as Iraq from the start of its creation was never more than an artificial state held together by the Baathists.

With the evidence that the US colluded with Shia militias infilitrating the police and partaking in Wolf Brigade practices of torture alongside Baathists, that means that relevant comparisons between before and after the invasion can me made.

The fragmentation of the Iraqi state and sectarian war as a consequence of the invasion was predictable before the invasion of 2003. Therefore the responsibility for the deaths is attributable to that invasion.

No invasion, then not hundreds of thousands of deaths. No collusion in torture by the US. And no collusion with the very Baathist operatives that sustained Saddam's brutal dictatorship.

Moreover, the loss of innocent life created by the Shia militias as well as the Baathists both before and after the "liberation" , including the murder of civilians, was rewarded by the US by co-opting them to serve the new regime.

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All of the evidence coming from US war records now has failed to dissuade Peter Bracken, Nick Cohen or Christopher Hitchens who still bang on about Iraq as though it was a struggle for civilisation. Or as Hitchens put it in an interview rather feebly in an interview in May 2010

"Do I ask myself do I think our civilisation is superior to theirs? Yes, I do. Do I think it's worth fighting for? Most certainly."

The Centrality of Oil in the Decision to Invade Iraq in 2003.

The spurious notion that oil being a central objective in the invasion of Iraq was a "conspiracy theory"ought to refer only to those who have espoused ridiculous conspiracy theories-such as that Iraq was invaded to profit Halliburton and Cheney or else that 9/11 was a choreographed inside job to justify invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

Evidence is always important, despite most newspaper and TV news journalists failing to do their job by investigating the reality of what was at stake in Iraq .Explaining the reality of why Iraq was a resource war is not the same as offering arcane conspiracies. It was journalists that failed to correct the official version of events.

Indeed the absurd forms of conspiracy theory are not that much more absurd than the conspiracy of silence in much of the mainstream media about the central importance of oil, one admitted after the invasion by Paul Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair and who also in on record stating that WMD's were a pretext.

Wolfowitz stated,

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....

...there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.

WMD were "the one issue that everyone could agree on" . By that Wolfowitz means that it was the one rationalisation that they would be able to sell as public diplomacy. He then later on a tour of Iraq claimed after the non-existence of WMD's was confirmed that it was now a "historical issue".

Neoconservatives and "liberal interventionists such as Thomas Friedmann expanded on Wolfowitz's portrayal of Iraq as an imminent threat to conflate terrorist threats from various regions in the Middle East with different causes into one seamless threat of which Saddam was just one part.

The issue of WMD's was a peripheral sideshow. The centrality of oil was revealed by Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, who stated “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” .

The evidence is clear from what the main architects said about the Iraq invasion themselves.

Wolfowitz claimed in Vanity Fair that the geopolitical objectives were about withdrawing from Saudi Arabia, removing Saddam, installing a democracy and thus inaugurating a domino process as other states would thus feel compellled by an upsurge of pro-democracy activism to want the same as Iraq.

That control of Iraqi oil was essential if the revenue was to flow into the new model states coffers made it crucial but the claim that this would amount to a foreign policy of enlightened self interest, as claimed by Niall Ferguson in Colossus, was mistaken. ( Ferguson , however, dismissed the oil motive as a "conspiracy theory" too ).

On the contrary, little thought about the post-invasion plans reflected less of a "mistake" but the utter ruthlessness of the Bush II regime. The Oil Ministry was protected along with the oil infrastructure. Yet little or no investment was made in civilian infrastructure. There was no interest in nation building.

As Condaleeza Rice put it, the American forces were not in Iraq to help make sure children got safely to school. So the humanitarian intervention argument or enlightened interest case that was fervently adhered to by those advocating regime change such as Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens was false.

The reason for the failure of any post-invasion aftermath was not incompetence so much as a fervent belief that creating a secular market democracy would necessarily create of itself the conditions to get oil flowing again for the mutually beneficial interest of the USA, UK and, so it was claimed, Iraq.

All evidence that pointed to the contrary was ignored, mostly because Bush and Blair were prepared to gamble on being able to control the oil, maintain Western hegemony against an energy hungry China that had been flexing its military power in the Pacific before Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cheney thus got a geologist Louis Christian to work on surveying other sites in the south of Iraq that were not as yet tapped. Fears that Iraqi oil's drilling components were failing apart ( and once they do completely the wells are lost forever as any oil geologist knows ), meant that it was ever more necessary to remove Saddam.

The reason Iraq's oil husbandry was poor and failing to yield enough oil for the future projected increase in energy predicted by Cheney's task force was that sanctions had prevented the components getting through. The sanctions were set to cripple Iraq's potential oil producing capacity.

Cheney's advocacy of the Iraq War did not lie in the simple hunger for the profit he would make from having Halliburton involved in the reconstruction of Iraq's oil infrastructure. Conspiracy theories and paranoid focus on hidden hands and profiteers are irrelevant. As an oilman he looked at the diminishing oil capacity.

David Strahan in his The Last Oil Shock outlined in detail the fact that the sanctions by banning "dual use" equipment meant crucial chemicals water pumps could not get through. Experts working such as Paul Wood reporting to the UN Security Council claimed that,

" A sharp increase in production would severely damage oil-containing rocks and pipeline systems, and would be against accepted principles of "good oilfield husbandry"

A second report claimed,

"Poor oilfield husbandry has already resulted in an irreversible reduction in the ultimate recovery of oil from individual reservoirs. Crisis management will continue to exacerbate the permanent loss of huge reserves of oil"

Cheney became aware that inaction would possibly lead to up to half of Iraq's recoverable oil being permanently lost and with Saudi Arabia becoming more unstable and a major financer of Islamist charities that funded terrorism, Iraq as the third largest oil producer was targeted for regime change.

This was nothing to do with WMD's as what capacity Saddam had had been destroyed in the First Gulf War in 1990-91. Condaleeza Rice admitted that in the early days of the Bush II administration but the tune changed by 2001 when sanctions were found to be damaging Iraq's oil capacity.

That was a concern not only to Cheney but also Rice who had served on the board of Chevron for a decade and whose oil production had slid by 1998 donwards in consecutive years. Blair, close to BP, was also concerned about North Sea Oil peaking in 1999 and impact of the 2000 Fuel Protest.

That dovetailed at the same time with a build up of ideological zeal from neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle who supported the Project for the New American Century and coalesced around various think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

The oil objective was made clear in a PNAC open letter to President Clinton as early as 1998 which called for Saddam to be removed and conjectured that if Saddam acquired WMD's,

"the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil, will be put at risk"

The Cheney Energy Taskforce was convened expressly to look into the oil capacity of Iraq before 9/11 happened in February 2001 and which was found in some 39,000 disclosed documents, that they were forced to reveal under the FOI act, that some 36 energy representatives had lobbied for influence.

It was then that Louis Christian's geological map was revealed ( below ) with the new virgin oilfields in 9 slab blocks divided up the spoils amongst different oil companies from across the globe. The invasion of Iraq was not about benefiting US companies. It was to control Iraq and get supply increased.

At the Crawford Meeting in 2002 Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and had set up a permanent diplomatic liason team known as The US-UK Energy Dialogue which had as its main aim to get "energy security and diversity" and "mitigating the risks of increasing global reliance on Middle Eastern oil.

The next cliche that needs dispelling is Blair's contention before Iraq that

"If the oil had been our main concern we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It's not the oil that matters but the weapons".

Not only was the statement on WMD false but also the assumption that Saddam would trust the US.

Saddam was hardly going to strike a deal with the UK and US and had sanctions been lifted, then it was France, Russia and China that would benefit, not least as they had already had their major companies positioned to attain a stake in the 9 virgin oilfields. This is the cynical reason for why France's Chirac opposed the Iraq War.

The USA and UK were interested in invasion for geopolitical advantage, control and energy security and not profit. Oil would be an essential part of that strategy also as It would also allow US and UK companies to get a share of the oil contracts and reconstruction work. As Strahan put it, ( p 29 Last Oil Shock )

'for the US-UK axis the conundrum was this: Iraqi production could only be raised if sanctions were lifted, but lifting sanctions would benefit their international rivals. It followed that the only way to raise Iraqi output , fend off the global peak oil threat and keep some kind of US-UK stake in the new Iraqi production was to depose Saddam

This is precisely why Iraqi exiles such as Dr Salah al-Sheikhly of the Iraqi National Accord and Chalabi were positioned into power once regime change was successfully secured and who would then reward American and European lobby groups, those who had helped install their clients.

Yet overwhelmingly the objective of the invasion of Iraq was to maintain control over Iraqi oil as a lever in bargaining with emerging new power blocks that threatened the USA's global hegemony. Strahan cites a despatch from Washington from the US Embassy in 2002 ( p 30 ) ,'

The British strongly support this dialogue with the US and want to use it to leverage US and UK influence on energy issues in Russia, the Caspian, and the Middle East....Officials report that the Prime Minister's office request regular updates on the preparatory work'

By' preparatory work' is meant the invasion that it was hoped would raise Iraqi oil production twofold by 2010. That has not happened. But that has no bearing on the centrality of oil in the invasion, a fact borne out in Michael Klare's Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: How Scarce Energy is Creating a New World Order.

Klare emphasises the importance of strategic necessity in exercising ultimate control over Persian Gulf as "an American Lake" and preserving unhindered American access to petroleum supplies, something made explicit in the Carter Declaration of January 1980,

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

That was manifest in the decision to remove Saddam Hussein as well as the threats to Iran following the implosion of Iraq into sectarian conflict and the rise of Shia militias. Though Bush II's diplomacy was "catastrophic" according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the strategic necessity of controlling the Persian Gulf unites leading figures both Republican and Democrat.

Indeed the last part of the Carter Declaration was worded by his National Security Adviser Brzezinski himself who opposed the invasion of Iraq as it would contradict the objective of controlling Afghanistan and isolating and encircling Iran as a priority, as well as getting the TAPI pipeline built.

This has represented a continuity dating back to 1979 when Brzezinski viewed Soviet Union's ambitions in the Middle East with distrust and reacted to the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the Iranian Revolution with the foreign policy of controlling Central Asia and in the process the Middle East by hemming in Iran.

To that extent, Brzezinski's policy of funnelling aid to the mujahadeen to fight the Soviet Union, to give it its own Vietnam and thus brought about both the collapse of the Cold War enemy. This subsequently would open up oil and gas rich Central Asian republics to US influence but bring about the failed state of Afghanistan and the growth of Al Qaida.

Yet as in Iraq, so too Afghanistan can be seen to exhibit the same problems where the protection of pipelines again insurgents diverts colossal sums of money away from economic redevelopment and undermines the ostensible political goals of bringing freedom and democracy.

Klare writes of the continuing problem of guarding the oil, that the decision to create a navy "command and control facility" in 2007 on top of an offshore Iraqi oil platform in the Persian Gulf to protect vital oil-loading terminals was,

"an unambiguous signal that the United States intends to play a direct role in defending Iraq's vulnerable oil infrastructure for years to come" ( p 188 )

The navy facility was designed with guard operations at two main terminals, Khawr Al Amaya and Al Basra which loads 2 million barrels of oil a day, some 2.4% of global demand. The USA retains some 4 of its existing mega-bases in Iraq to safeguard the oil for which the war was fought.

Bibliography.

David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock.

John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions.

Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.

Iraq was an Oil Grab.

The Observer seems to specialise in sententious waffling editorials every Sunday. On the subject of the Iraq War, the editorial today opines,

There was no single reason why Britain and the US went to war in Iraq. The motives that inspired George W Bush and Tony Blair have been variously dissected, analysed and psychoanalysed. It is too early for history to have formed a settled view on the war, but the case that it was a monumental error gets ever more compelling.

There never is exactly just one reason why wars are fought. Yet that Iraq was an oil grab was clear at the time and even more so now. Leading establishment figures have admitted oil as the principle driving force. In 2001 Cheney set up an Energy Task Force to look into Iraq's reserves and got a geologist to work on it.

Iraq was invaded because of geostrategic desperation, the need to control some of the largest reserves in the world after the increasingly unstable Saudi Arabia and hostile Iran. By controlling Iraqi oil , the USA would have increased its hegemonic bargaining power vis a vis a rapidly industrialising and energy hungry China.

That it did not work out that way, which China taking over many of the Iraqi oil concessions as the chaos ensued and the US dollar stopped being the globe's strongest petrocurrency was made worse by the costs of invasion, did not invalidate the fact that the Bush II regime invaded Iraq for oil.

That was inherent in the way that in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Iraq descended into anarchy and the treasures of the museum in Baghdad were looted whilst the Oil Ministry was secured along with the infrastructure. With regard the collapse of civilian infrastructure Donald Rumsfeld callously remarked that "Stuff happens"

Those who routinely denied oil as the key objective are not only deluded but are obfuscating the facts about the West's lethal over reliance upon petroleum in dangerous lands and that really needs discussion if civilisation is to continue. The invasion of Iraq was not a "mistake". It was an intentional resource war.

The Observer then has it that,

Most of the official justifications for war, on grounds of security from terror and weapons of mass destruction, have been discredited.

Well, it's a pity that loopholes in the official version and the spin that was used to justify going in to Iraq was not discredited by newspapers such as The Observer at the time of the invasion as opposed to actually supporting the Iraq War as a "humanitarian intervention". But that would mean doing some journalism of the investigative kind.

Iraq War Logs: The Humanitarian Catastrophe of the Iraq War.

The Wikileaks Iraq War Logs provide detailed confirmation about how the USA colluded with the Iraqi authorities in appalling crimes that were inherent in the ruthless way this war was conceived and executed, an invasion that reflected the "geostrategic desperation" of the USA and Britain in wanting control over Iraqi oil.

The fact that the USA and Britain failed to get that as China makes inroads in controlling Iraqi oil concessions simply shows the unintended consequences of Iraq, a war costing trillions of dollars which intensified the colossal debts of both nations, brought about overstretch and permanently damaged the standing of both powers across the globe.

The Guardian reported on the significance of the leaks that,

A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

This is the first draft of the history of the Second Gulf War's humanitarian impact. Those who supported this oil grab on the basis of a "humanitarian intervention" should have pause for thought. Yet those like Kingston University's Brian Brivati have fallen curiously silent. Christopher Hitchens has not written much on Iraq recently.

The Mantra of Blair's "Mistake" or "Misjudgement" Over Iraq.

A response to Martin Kettle's Guardian piece The real problem was Blair's policy to America, not Iraq

"He was not wrong about intervention. It was his political judgment that went badly awry. If only this was Chilcot's focus"

Kettle, a Blairite, trots out the usual mantra of Blair's "mistake". It was not. Iraq was an intentional and pre-planned war based on neoconservative ideology, lack of democratic accountability, the role of spin and energy security i.e OIL

To say Blair got the national interest wrong over Iraq, and that Iraq was the pivotal error of his premiership, is true. But to say such things now feels like weirdly perverse understatement. The level of hyperbole has been raised so high, and the level of Blair-hatred is so intense in some quarters, that anyone who says "Yes, but" about Blair and his era struggles to make themselves heard, much less have themselves taken seriously.

Yet heard we should be. And heard we probably still are – by rather more people than some may credit – the further one journeys away from medialand self-absorption and the rantings of parts of the blogosphere, I suspect. Only 29% of voters think Iraq was Blair's fault, said a PoliticsHome poll last night. The issue plays less in the hard-grind Britain that elected Blair and his party three times and that – who knows? – might even elect him again if it had the chance. I'd certainly back him to give it as good a shot as the other fellow, anyway.

The "high politics" surrounding the decision to go to war are, of course as important as the attention paid to them by Martin Kettle and Chris Ames. But the level of denial about the central role of energy security is still relevant in the statements and evidence we have of why Blair went to war.

David Strahan has documented this in his The Last Oil Shock and the discussions Blair had with the Bush administration over the problem of energy security.

In The Last Oil Shock, the CIA was also well aware of Iraq's unique value, having secretly paid for new maps of its petroleum geology to be drawn as early as 1998. Cheney also knew, fretting publicly about global oil depletion at a speech in London the following year, where he noted that the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.

Blair too had reason to be anxious about oil: British North Sea output had peaked in 1999 and has been falling ever since while the petrol protests of 2000 had made the importance of maintaining the fuel supply excruciatingly obvious.

The British government has never conducted its own assessment of when global oil production will peak, at least not one it has made public, and despite being urged to as part of its 2006 Energy Review. But it is significant that two of Blair's closest advisors believe the event will happen by around 2015. In a speech last year Sir David Manning ?

Blair's chief foreign policy advisor in the run-up to Iraq ? noted the growing consensus that the peak would come at some point between 2010 and 2020?, while chief scientific advisor Sir David King told me emphatically in 2005, ?ten years or less?. So while the government refuses to engage with peak oil publicly, the idea has clearly penetrated policymaking at the highest levels.

Britain and America?s shared energy fears were secretly formalised during the planning for Iraq. It is widely accepted that Blair's commitment to support the attack dates back to his summit with Bush at Crawford in April 2002.

The Times headline was typical that weekend: Iraq Action Is Delayed But Certain. What is less well known is that at the same summit Blair proposed and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent diplomatic liason dedicated to ?energy security and diversity?. No announcement was made, and the Dialogue?s existence was only later exposed through a US Freedom of Information enquiry.

Both governments continue to refuse to release minutes of meetings between ministers and officials held under the Dialogue, but among some papers that have been released, one dated February 2003 notes that to meet projected world demand, oil production in the Middle East would have to double by 2030 to over 50 million barrels per day, and proposed ?a targeted study to examine the capital and investment requirements of key Gulf countries?.

So on the eve of the invasion British and American officials were secretly discussing how to raise oil production from the region and we are invited to believe this is mere coincidence. Iraq was evidently not just about corporate greed but strategic desperation.

This article was actually published in the Guardian on 26 June 2007. Leader writers, "political framers" and other windbags such as Kettle are there to simply maintain the illusion of impartiality. Yet the mainstream media has, as always, to be treated with scepticism ( no less that unofficial media and propaganda as well of course ).

This issue of energy security has to be addressed because, as John Gray has pointed out in Al Qaida and What it Means to be Modern, it is of seminal importance in what could end with a twenty first century full of resource wars such as Iraq and, of course, Afghanistan.Barely any media article in the newspapers mention oil seriously or the looming energy crisis.

The "no war for oil" stance of the StWC's shrill moralistic platitudes achieve nothing in the way of dealing with that nor of the fact that, though the leaders had no chance of "stopping it", Blair was also far more shaken by the protests in 2000 over oil prices led by hauliers, a protest now generally forgotten.

Blair, as any leader in the industrialised West, knows Britain's consumer economy depends upon a secure supply of oil.

Mere "outrage" is insufficient. As Michael T Klare points out in Blood and Oil, the American version of high octane capitalism that even most protesters benefit from as citizens of one of the largest economies in the world ensures that oil is central the way most Britons live: the great car economy, out of town supermarkets, cheap air travel etc.

One is reminded of George Orwell's criticism of those anti-imperialists who condemned it whilst continuing to enjoy the comforts of the fruits of Empire. When Orwell wrote, it was the working poor who missed out on the prosperity. These days those who shop at ASDA or Walmart are part of the reason for Iraq.

Such consumers are not guilty. They just do not understand as no journalist is really trying to make people understand the connection between their lives and consumption and the fact it depends on pursuing dangerous policies in the Middle East and in Central Asia. The task of journalists and public intellectuals ought to be to make educated citizens realise it.

In the Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell pointed out that the British standard of living at the time depended on inhabitants of other parts of the Empire living in abject poverty, otherwise it would be relegated to an obscure island living on herrings and potatoes. The same goes today with regards oil, not least as oil has replaced coal since 1945 as the major fossil fuel.

Needless to say, there is the need both to bring Blair to justice and accountability for lying over the "official reasons" for war in Iraq. Equally so, the opponents of the war need to make it clear that constructive alternatives are a matter of national emergency.For a collapse of the oil supply over night would be a catastrophe, though Chomsky thinks that is not so bad.

Screaming "no blood for oil" is simply outraged self righteousness. Any person who is honest knows Iraq was about oil. But reforming British democracy, putting Blair on trial and reducing the executive power of the Prime Minister are constructive steps that are needed. No screaming "No blood for oil" as if this is shocking news.

Britain needs a responsible civil society movement led by genuine democrats and concerned citizens. Not platform demagogues like George Galloway, a leftist shock jock who has made a lucrative media career from exploiting outrage over Iraq whilst working for Iran via Press TV a nation which has a bad human rights movement and oil interests as well.

Protesters need to act in a more mature fashion. There has been little evidence of this. The Iraq War protests in 2003 were Ballardian occasions for bored consumers to pretend that their lives could be made less mundane by protest over something. A lot of the protest had a kind of peculiar carnival atmosphere about it.

Without understanding the complications, the sheer scale of the overdependence upon oil and having no alternative than following a group of ex-Communists like Galloway, Kate Hudson et al played into the hands of those who regarded the war as a liberal interventionist crusade ( e.g Cohen).

The irony is that those who stress their "decent left" credentials are no more informed than the anti-war left: they just decided Britain right or wrong, spouted forth messianic moralistic guff no less than Blair and seven years later nothing substantial will have changed. Except further depletion of oil, the collapse of American power mired in debt and Afghanistan too.

The link to Strahan's journalism is real journalism of the investigative sort that is needed. John Pilger is past it and was always too eager to make overt propaganda points. Everything is a rerun of Vietnam as it is for Milne and the other "anti-imperialists" who laud Chavez but omit mention of Chavez's petroleum realpolitik.

The alliances Chavez has with Zimbabwe and Iran and Ken Livingstone's grovelling before China and the anti-US non-aligned block is also petroleum realpolitik. Anti-imperialists merely support others large power blocks in true Orwellian style of doublethink.

If, as Chomsky maintains, that change begins at home then that is acceptable but a degree of "tranferred nationalism" is creeping in, where the USA's and UK's "rapacious" desire for oil is all about BP, Chevron etc and not about propping up the living standards that ensure political legitimacy.

If Orwell is going to be claimed as some moral mentor by Pilger, then he ought actually to read Orwell a bit more closely whilst taking into account that the West is no longer as dominant as he thinks anyway. Precisely the insecurity , the fear of losing "hegemony" that by controlling oil that led to Iraq.

New thinking is necessary. Alternatives to oil and conservation of supplies need to be accepted as well as the harsh truth that people in the West cannot have their cake and eat it: more oil fuelled prosperity means more Islamist "blowback", entanglement in resource wars and authoritarianism at home.

The Treason of the Intellectuals on the Iraq War.

The total ignorance of the circumstances driving the USA and UK to War in Iraq back in 2003 was at least partly a result of intellectuals utterly failing to come to terms with what was at stake and mechanically writing off, as did Tony Blair himself, the oil grab motive as a "conspiracy theory".

Certainly John Gray was correct to assert that support for it from "progressive" intellectuals was posited on the belief that it was a Utopian opportunity to create a new world order where conflicts of interest could be overcome by toppling a vile and cruel dictator and initiating a "domino effect" in the Middle East.

By getting rid of Saddam and allowing the oil to flow again without sanctions, Iraq would be able to pay for its own reconstruction and become a new model secular democracy. Thus it would destabilise remnant Arab nationalist dictatorships on its borders such as Syria as people there, as in Lebanon, would demand some kind of version of Europe's Velvet Revolution" in 1989.

The big idiocy behind thinking that a military invasion would bring that about meant projecting fantasies that were purely Euro-Atlanticist on to an Iraq that had never been a unitary nation state in the first place but an oil protectorate carved out of the Ottoman Empire by Britain in the aftermath of the First World War.

The fact that Blair had decided long before at Crawford Ranch with George Bush in 2002 that Iraq should be invaded can only be understood against the background not merely of dodgy dossiers, political lies about Saddam's threat to the West in the 45 minute scare warning that he could launch missiles against it.

It has to be understood that by 2001 North Sea Oil has peaked and was inexorably declining and Blair had faced a revolt by haulage companies who went on strike because of the increasingly high price of oil as David Strahan asserts correctly in his superb The Last Oil Shock.

Historians will no doubt start to debate the origins of the Iraq War within time. At the moment documentation will be sealed up in the Foreign Office and the exact reasons Blair supported Bush will remain concealed, with the Chilcot Enquiry being a mere Establishment cover up.

However, it's depressing that even Norman Davies, the great historian of Poland in his East and West , though opposing the war, claimed it was merely part of neoconservative ideology and omitted to mention anything about oil or the number of Polish intellectuals who supported it like Adam Michnik.

Yet mere outrage that Iraq was "all about the oil" tends to have Marxoid overtones that liberals shy away from as it upsets the vision of Europe, including the UK in particular, as settled and basically functioning and decent liberal democracies. No less than Poland which even supported the invasion without a vote in the Sejm .

The outrage of the supposed "anti-war" left did nothing to look at the structural factors leading to the war, looming shortages of oil, Peak Oil, Chinese inroads into other oil producing areas in Central Asia and Africa and the threat that poses to the notion that the Middle East should remain in the Western "sphere of influence".

The reason many protesters against Iraq, as well as others who opposed it, saw it as "ideological" or a simplistic Moral Evil is because few have the courage to accept that Iraq might have been a necessary invasion if it is accepted that the West's energy intensive lifestyles and what Thatcher called The Great Car Economy is not challenged.

Erstwhile fans of 'The Iron Lady, ' such as Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski of the PO, believe that Poland must follow the rugged individualism of that vision. For Poland's New Model Democracy now exhibits many of the features of this over reliance on the car and which is evident as cities like even Krakow become gridlocked by smelly and snarling SUV's.

The oil imperative was wholly ignored by by many liberals who continue to espouse a bland belief in Progress and tended to define themselves as "leftists" or the "decent left". Precedents were hunted around for. For those like Christopher Hitchens, his "leftist" post-Trotskyism indicated a proclivity to smashing "Islamo-Fascism".

The notion that the cultural radicals of 1968 had actually created and supported an antinomian politics in which an infinite growth Utopia was taken for granted and would "liberate Iraq" from the dark spell of theocratic tyranny , even though Saddam's dictatorship was secular, was quite simply never something other intellectuals have looked at.

Few "leftist" intellectuals were prepared to face up to what amounts to a crisis in civilisation as opposed to asserting a "Clash of Civilisations" where growing global demand for oil and diminishing supplies was a major factor in the drive towards the Iraq War. Timothy Garton Ash has not mentioned oil once in any commentary on the "mistake" of the Iraq War.

That few liberal intellectuals will face up to what the intelligent liberal thinker Sir Isaah Berlin called "agonistic dilemmas" is a total betrayal of the better critical aspects of the better sections of the older secular left intelligensia such as George Orwell in Britain and Albert Camus in France.

Instead the Iraq War was literally sold by feeble journalists like Nick Cohen, whom Lord Bragg pitifully called a successor to Tom Paine for his What's Left ?, a pathetic attempt to have an "Orwell moment" as Orwell did when fighting, yes actually fighting, in the Spanish Civil War against Fascism and when he declared in Why I Write,

'The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it'.

But the Spanish Civil War was not remotely comparable to the Iraq War, unless one thinks that by defining oneself against those on the remnant totalitarian left who controlled the "anti-war" movement that one is fighting for the freedom of Iraqis instead of an armchair polemics where empirical facts are omitted.

The fact is that the invasion of Iraq, never a nation state anyway in the European sense, descended into Civil War after the invasion as was predicted clearly by John Gray. If comparisons with the Spanish Civil War are apt, it might be in seeing the napalming of Fallujah in 2005 as akin to the Fascist attack from the air on Guernica in 1936.

Such support as was given to the Iraq War by people who really should have known better like the ex-dissident and Czech President Vaclav Havel was not a sign of innate badness but folly. It was a sign that ageing 68ers were hitching themselves to the sole remaining hyperpower in the USA on the lines that many in the 1930s supported the USSR.

The naive belief, and it was a belief merely, that the USA as the world's last great hope could free Iraq with very minimal bloodshed and that secular democracy as opposed to an Islamist one would arise in the wake of a War of Liberation that would be in linear continuity with "the West's" victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War.

If that was not bad enough, the anti-war protests were choreographed and led by those who have situated themselves carefully into iconic anti-war organisations such as CND, those like Kate Hudson who was a member of the Communist Party or those who extolled the USSR such as Andrew Murray and the repellant Seumas Milne, an important editor in The Guardian.

The importance of the anti-war movement being led by people no less fanatical than the neoconservatives was not that they constituted some vast "enemy within" in aligning with Islamists such as Soumaya Ghannoushi or the psychopathological Dr Tamimi Azzam or Anas Al-Tikriti.

It was that a serious politics of dissent outside Parliament was ruined by the presence of people who really are motivated by the urge to see Western Civilisation destroyed for purely nihilistic reasons as opposed to reforming the political system so that decisions could not be over concentrated in the Prime Ministerial executive represented by Tony Blair.

However, to cite such nonentities and cranks as a reason why the West was threatened from within and without by some "seamless totalitarian threat", as Michael Gove asserted in his intellectually feeble tract Celsius 7/7, was utter drivel. A responsible anti-Iraq War movement would have quelled the force of such loony assertions.

It was merely comical that the Respect Party, an incoherent bunch of ex-Trotskyists and Islamists, would bring any good any more than they could, as the Socioalist Workers Part mantra goes, "Build the Party" and present Islamists in Britain as some proto-proletarian spearhead of global insurrection against Imperialism and Capitalism from Gaza to Hackney.

Whilst nobody could take these cargo cult cranks seriously, with George Galloway the leader of Respect quickly absorbed into what J G Ballard called "the entertainment economy" by appearing on the cretinous reality telly show Big Brother, they simply blocked the need for a coherent movement for for political and constitutional change.

As Orwell made clear in novels such as Coming Up for Air, the ideologues of Respect were similar to the gangster gramophones he parodied in 1984 where George Bowling, who is trying to make some sense of the world around him, comments on one bald little lecturer spouting slogans.

The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis. I wasn't particularly keen to hear what he was saying--get the same stuff in the News Chronicle every morning--but his voice
came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr, with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.

'Bestial atrocities. . . . Hideous outbursts of sadism. . . .
Rubber truncheons. . . . Concentration camps. . . . Iniquitous
persecution of the Jews. . . . Back to the Dark Ages. . . .
European civilization. . . . Act before it is too late. . . .
Indignation of all decent peoples. . . . Alliance of the
democratic nations. . . . Firm stand. . . . Defence of
democracy. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . .
Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . .'

You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. What's he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It's a queer thing, I thought, to be known as 'Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist'. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along? And what'll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course.

But the grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all--feels every word he's saying. He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.

Such a view must have been that of those who opposed the Iraq War without wanting to embrace an Islamo-Bolshevik cause in the process but just knew that Blair was slightly deranged and that the Iraq War was being based on systemic lies and falsehoods. One reason the march in March 2003 failed to keep up momentum or translate into real politics.

Ian McEwan was quite correct to state at the time of the anti-Iraq War March that most of the protesters most likely knew nothing of Iraq or what was at stake: as a literary man he knew his Milan Kundera and the fact that these protests were festooned with what the Czech novelist called, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the 'Kitsch of the Grand March'.

Much of the protest was pathetic, an attempt by bored consumers who did not make the connection between their consumerism and energy intensive lifestyles and that Blair was invading Iraq to protect that. Knowing that, instead of dumb placards reading Make T Not War, might have stimulated them into thinking about energy alternatives to oil.

The Iraq Protest march 0f 2003 was atrociously kitsch: it was a fun day out and gave the feeling at least of being part of "the oceanic effect", some higher cause that would alleviate boredom and give errant children and infantile consumers something more important to their banal lives. There was no coherent politics involved at all.

The simple fact remains that the Iraq War happened because few challenged the basis of their consumerist existences. Neither the self styled "decent left" who supported the war nor the old "hard left" opponents like Galloway added up to much with their tedious polemics. It reflected the total sense of impotence such people had in the face of events beyond their control.

The only public intellectual to challenge this malaise has been the liberal social democratic historian Tony Judt who wrote in his coruscating Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, this,

'In our political as well as individual lives we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gambit of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole'.

Most contemporary intellectuals live in a sterile ivory tower or in "think tanks" disengaged from the real reality of the world around them and incapable, as Orwell said, od "seeing what is in front of their noses'. "Think tanks" merely encourage "group think", the fitting of the facts to the prescriptions of already agreed on creeds.

The dissenting free thinker is becoming rapidly a thing from the past. One problem is the existence of the Internet which encourages "think tankers" to try and psychoanalyse their polemical opponents, the work out their "mindset", as if by so doing those opposing their correct view of the world can be chopped to pieces by cherry picking quotes.

Worse than that are "framing devices" wherby political terminology contains within it implicit assumptions that bury within them an implicit meaning without actually saying what is quite clearly insinuated by the writer or journalist. To be "anti-war" implies not to be "pro-war" and that is clearly a Good Thing as anyone for a war is necessarily evil-except against Hitler.

But in order to frame a cause as Goodthink, all it has been necessary to do when "taking a stance" on Iraq is to use terms which seem implicitly politically correct: "the decent left", "the pro-liberation left" ( i.e those for invading Afghanistan and Iraq ) or else we have terms bandied about like "leftists"

What on earth "leftist" means shows the vacuity of our political culture. It implies a tendency towards the left which might not completely be "left wing" but is generally as good as being thought of as "progressive", as few want to be thought of as "regressive" or even "reactionary", no matter what the person writing is actually saying.

The depressing thing is that those who supported Iraq often claimed Orwell's mantle or, at least, insinuated that they were fearless speaker saying that "liberty if it means anything is telling people what they don't want to hear". Using Orwell like that to justify the Iraq War, as though it was in the same vein as World War Two, is a travesty.

It seems that too many have dipped into Orwell, a man who died at the height of the Cold War, to justify a rather silly crusade against totalitarian despots without understanding that Orwell was a man of his particular time and who cannot be set up as some "authority" or "secular saint". Or such nonsense as Orwell would have supported the Iraq War.

The man died of TB in 1950. It is fruitless to conjecture what "he would have said" because he has been dead for 60 years. But what can be taken from Orwell is his method of scenting out frauds who performed intellectual exercises as "pea and thimble tricks" rather than looking at what was the reality outside polemics flying to and forth.

Near theological disputes over what "leftism" really means or the correct "leftist" or "liberal-left" attitude to the Iraq War and the way it should proceed are embodied in think tanks like Compass headed by Neal Lawson. A Compass is a hady travelling companion to those who just know which way forward is the best no matter the practical obstacles or facts.

As Judt puts it,

'Sadly contemporary intellectuals show little informed interest in the nitty gritty of public policy, preferring to intervene or protest on ethically defined topics where the choices seem clearer. This has left debate on the way we ought to govern ourselves to policy specialists and "think tanks", where unconventional opinions rarely finds a place and the public are excluded'

Bibliography
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents.
George Orwell, Why I Write.
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air.
George Orwell, 1984.

George Orwell, Why I Write.