How Propaganda Works : Nick Cohen and the Syrian Civil War.

Propaganda that appeals to the emotions seems to have become a speciality of those who use rhetorical framing devices to pigeonhole those opposed to a certain position as being less than human and to win arguments cheaply. Using 'humanitarian intervention' as a means to that end has become increasingly common since the 1990s.

One of the worst examples of this trend is Nick Cohen. Unlike certain advocates of the Iraq war as a humanitarian intervention such as the Canadian liberal Michael Ignatieff, who rejected his support for it when it became clear the US and UK invasion of 2003 had unleashed sectarian warfare, Cohen has learnt nothing.

Instead of looking at the facts of the current civil war in Syria, Cohen offers a generalised interpretation of a position he ascribes to all those who think that Foreign Secretary Hague's threat to arm the Sunni insurgents will force President Assad to stand down.

'Sceptics about humanitarian intervention in Syria hit you with what they regard as a killer question: "Where do you stop?" If the "international community", such as it is, tries to halt the massacres in Syria, why doesn't it intervene in North Korea or Somalia?'

This is meant to prove that those with qualms about Hague's recent move to get the EU's arms embargo on Syria lifted, along with the French foreign government, are somehow at one with those are simply pointing elsewhere to what the West is not doing in order to suggest that it should do something about Syria.

Now obviously this is true because there is no civil war in North Korea. Nor are the geopolitical interests of largest Global Powers at stake as Syria as they are in Somalia. For the one evident thing about the Syrian crisis is that it has become a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Britain has consistently supported Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and continues to do so despite Cohen's own attempt to use these corrupt Gulf states corrupt influence on London as a cause for criticism at a domestic level, because it is the lynch pin of Britain and the US's foreign policy in the Middle East.

Given the fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar began to arm the insurgents from early on in the Syrian conflict, using rhetoric devices as 'illiberal intervention' as Cohen does in passing reference to these powers, and omitting the fact that the CIA and MI6 have assisted on the ground, is a form of political lying.

'as for the conscience of the west, when it considers Syria at all, it finds liberal intervention unconscionable – nearly everywhere, that is, except in William Hague's Foreign Office..I accept praising Hague (and by extension David Cameron) in the Observer is akin to praising the pope at an abortion rights rally'.

No intelligent person cares about Mr Cohen's 'position' or what others think about it as it is not that relevant. The facts are more important. Hague supported the insurgents who hijacked the revolution against Assad as soon as they could as soon as the civil war broke out, making it clear that 'Assad Must Go'.

That policy, formulated by the US under the blustering and incompetent Hillary Clinton, was downplayed when it became clear Assad was just not going to 'go' . So Hague's new bluster about forcing Assad to negotiate his way out is clearly not to be praised but best condemned.

On its own terms Cohen has provided absolutely no geopolitical context to the supposed narrative that, thus far, the 'West' has sold out the Syrian 'rebels'. If the UK and US governments were so interested in Syrian civilians why did they not condemn Saudi Arabia's 'illiberal intervention'?

The reason is that Britain's Foreign policy under Hague, no less than that of the US, is shackled to the strategic relationship it has with Saudi Arabia, one criticised by Nick Cohen without him understanding that they do so to preserve the 'balance of power' in the Middle East.

The protection of the flow of Gulf oil and maintaining Saudi Arabian and Qatari interests against Iranian influence, especially when much opposition within the Gulf states has come from Shi'ite Muslims, is the basic strategic reality underlying US and UK foreign policy.

Given that Hague did not 'intervene' from the beginning and 'Radical Islamists have filled the void', the burden of proof lies with Cohen when suggesting that Hague has done or it intends to act in Syria in such a way that could be termed 'humanitarian intervention'.

'It is only from Hague's Foreign Office and the Quai d'Orsay that you find a glimmer of an understanding of the moral and diplomatic questions the Syrian catastrophe raises'

Well, if Hague's policy of threatening to back those radical jihadists who now predominate in Syria's anti-Assad insurgency is as 'humanitarian' as Cohen believes, then more than just 'a glimmer of an understanding' is needed. In fact, Cohen 'needs to start' by looking at reality.

Not least as most international humanitarian organisations have called on Britain not to back the Syrian insurgents with weapons and to use diplomacy to try and bring about a ceasefire. Yet the insurgents want total victory at any cost and not to protect civilian life.

The same is true of Assad who knows that in Libya it was the UK and France who led the way in aiding the insurgents there and that he faces the same primitive form of 'justice' meted out to Colonel Gaddafi if he were to lose.

Hague's policy is essentially to pretend that he tried before the forthcoming Geneva Conference ( if it happens ) all the alternatives to war while, in fact, effectively encouraging the insurgents to believe they will win because realpolitik interests dictate that they must.

For the real endgame of Hague's foreign policy is that same as that of Washington and that is curtailing Iranian ambitions in the Middle East with the growth of its influence in neighbouring Iraq. The irony is that this was a result of the military intervention of 2003.

Those advocates of the Iraq War are still interesting to read now, some more than others. Cohen is interesting if only because he epitomises a certain way of thinking that seemed briefly to be credible during the frantic polemicising within the left over the issue of the Iraq War.

Cohen's credibility is largely exhausted and he has continuously only indulged in an exercise in rhetoric in order to avoid coming to terms with the impact of the Iraq War which was supposed to lead to a domino effect in toppling Syria as well.

This can now be interpreted as necessary because after the Syrian civil war has grown more protracted and savage President Assad is The New Saddam. Just as Saddam Hussein was a 'New Hitler' , Assad is another Saddam and so another Hitler or Stalin.

The conceit, as well as utter banality of this, is instructive in understanding how the polemicising over Iraq actually worked, the sense of unreality connected to it and the indifference to what was really at stake. Cohen is only interested essentially in defending his position as a journalist.

'I accept praising Hague (and by extension David Cameron) in the Observer is akin to praising the pope at an abortion rights rally'

Cohen here attempts to fend off the inevitable criticism in advance by pretending that because he "praises" William Hague that those who presumably damn him can only be doing so because they don't really care about Syrians as he really does.

The idea is to insinuate he 'really' cares while anyone opposed to Hague's stated preparedness to arm the insurgents is morally stunted, malign, pseudo-left or only rigidly obsessed with Britain's national interest, is a crude form of pure propaganda.

Cohen had his brief moment of notoriety as part of the self proclaimed 'decent left' in the years between the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, that is between 2001 and 2003. Since then events have continually confounded him.

The reason for this is that Cohen, along with others who argued far better than he such as Christopher Hitchens, saw Iraq and the conflict with totalitarianism as they saw it as a rerun of the battle against Fascism and Stalinism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Such journalists thought they could see a similarity after 9/11 between European totalitarianism and Al Qaida and, by extension, all secular nationalist tyrannies such as Saddam's Baathist Iraq and Assad's Baathist Syria. No deeper analysis of the history of each nation is necessary.

For even if both Al Qaida and secular totalitarianisms in the Middle East did have a basis in European revolutionary traditions, they were not as one. They did not amount to what Michael Gove called, in his abysmal tract Celsius 7/7, a 'seamless totalitarian threat'.

The reason it is important to understand Cohen's position is not because there is any depth, humanity or clear message in it. It is because the way he sets the propaganda message appeals to humanitarian sentiments without being truly influenced by them.

As with Iraq, the attack on opponents of the Iraq War was based on the desire to destroy all opponents of the war as being 'objectively Saddam' . There was a 'sell out' leftist or liberal left that was pro-dictatorship or those who supported democracy and freedom.

Cohen and others went for that 'position' because they equated realpolitik with what they considered reality and thought of Iraq as an action replay of the 1930s with themselves is inheritors of George Orwell's mantle as opposed to being merely Orwellian.

Now Cohen seems to think the Syrian Civil War is a chance to pose again as someone who believes 'liberty is telling people what they don't want to hear' as Orwell did after his experience of the Spanish Civil War. It's facile rhetoric and ahistorical.

Those like Cohen and Hitchens seem to have fell into the trap of thinking that because a vocal part of the 'anti-war movement' were and are apologists for totalitarian regimes, that this was one reason to back 'good wars' to put one over on them.

Part of that has to be seen as a revulsion against the fact so many intellectuals and journalists had supported the Soviet Union in the 1930s. With the increasing knowledge of Soviet crimes after 1991 and the opening of the archives, many wanted to be 'new Orwells'.

Hitchens was one of these who 'positioned' himself in the tradition of anti-totalitarianism when he wrote Orwell's Victory . At least, that book had some interesting things to say. Cohen saw the possibilities of promoting himself by going along with this trend.

The difference is that Orwell did actually go to fight in Spain as part of an independent militia. Moreover, the situation in Spain in 1936 or Britain in 1939 has little to do with that in 2001 in Afghanistan or Iraq in 2003.
Cohen wants to believe now that Spain in 1936 is similar to Syria in 2013.

Nothing in the decade after the catastrophic war in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands dead, the revived sectarian violence of 2013 nor the prospect of regional sectarian warfare,  has had any impact on Cohen. Some fanatical interventionists have learnt nothing from Iraq, not even from their own ideas back then

For 'interventionists' kept saying about humanitarian intervention that each crisis is different and needs a new response. That true but it does not , in fact, happen and he curious thing about Syria is that most of the siren voices for war in 2001 and 2003 are now silent.

Indeed what do voices such as Brian Brivati , so vocal about Afghanistan and Iraq, have to say about Syria now?. Who remember such people now ? So far such enthusiasts for the Iraq War have not come forth as they once did with such brimming confidence.

Only Cohen has defended these ideas because now there is nothing left for him to lose as he nothing much to say other than salvaging what remains of his credibility. With regards foreign policy his journalism is sloppy, shrill, self important and largely propaganda.

The British Parliamentary Opposition  Does Not Oppose Hague.

Cohen writes in his article,

Douglas Alexander this time, Labour's "progressive" foreign affairs spokesman, breezily maintains that there is no need to help rebels because Syria is already "awash" with weapons. He then contradicts himself by maintaining that if Britain and France were to arm rebels – why would they need to if Syria were already "awash" with weapons? – the rebels would not come to the negotiating table.

The Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander is not actually saying very much other than affecting to suspend his 'judgement' on the idea of helping the insurgents, one that Hague has actually just threatened to do as a means of pretending this is a way of getting Assad to negotiate his way out of power.

The fact is that four of the largest insurgent groups actually doing the fighting tried to scupper negotiations themselves before the Geneva Conference by rejecting the Syrian National Council as representing 'the national will' ( i.e. the will of the people as defined as Syrian and by them alone ).

Hague's threat to send arms to the 'right rebels' does not really change the fact there is no organised 'the opposition' and in conditions of chaos there can be no guarantee they would not 'fall into the wrong hands'. Obviously, nobody knows exactly which groups Hague regards as the 'right' groups.

The phrase about Syria being 'awash with weapons' is a deliberate piece of rhetoric to just create the impression of concern about what Hague is suggesting without spelling out why any decision to back insurgents in Syria is highly dangerous and likely to cause an arms race.

Cohen simply throws in the word progressive as an adjective in scare quotes before Alexander's name because anybody, even a self serving careerist politician, who has the slightest doubt about the merit of backing the insurgents against Assad is merely practising callous realpolitik.

This is why when forensically dissecting the propaganda the language is important. When Cohen writes 'Sceptics about humanitarian intervention' he is seeing it as one solid block of thinking that only cynics could oppose as a shoddy rhetorical trick to win polemical victories.

The same propaganda mechanisms were deployed by journalists and politicians and other opinion formers and framers around the Iraq War. So it is in continuity with that idea of 'humanitarian intervention' deployed by neoconservatives to affect that realpolitik decisions are 'humanitarian' ones.

Though nobody has yet been openly insane enough to call for full scale Western military intervention, the decision to back the insurgents would be a foreign policy similar to the one practised by the US and UK in the 1980s when backing the mujahadeen against the Soviet Union.

With Hague,no less than those such as Cohen, the messianic and Evil Enemy is now Iran instead of the Soviet Union. So proxy wars are one means to roll back dictatorship and get into the business of 'democracy promotion'.

The flaw in that is obvious in that neither Russia nor Iran are, in fact, dictatorships. Moreover, given that the itch to arm the insurgents as a counter move is about supporting Saudi Arabia's proxy war against Iran, it is actually about realpolitik and nothing to do with humanitarian considerations.

The absurdity is that the UK and US militarily in Iraq had to allow Shia ascendency-and ethnic cleansing-as the price of defeating sunni insurgents only to find that the Shia government moved closer to Tehran and it's energy interests in the Middle East.

With the collapse of the Syrian state's power and the rise of sunni fundamentalist insurgents, who displaced the relatively feeble secular opponents of Assad ( presumably the 'right rebels' ), was not created by the 'inaction' of the West but the action of its strategic allies.

No action nor pressure by the US or UK was put on Saudi Arabia or Qatar to stop supporting the 'wrong rebels'. The CIA and MI6 have been already in action funnelling arms and supplies to the insurgents in Syria from Jordan and Turkey to no avail.

It's curious that those screaming about the outrage to the conscience of the free West such as Cohen cannot see or choose not to see the facts as they are as opposed to pretending that they can ride with the tide of history on the right side.

As is evident here,

Hague is impressive because you do not need to tell him what he already knows. He accepts that the world failed Syria and gave Assad the time and space to brutalise the population. He at least is not surprised by reports of massacres.

Well, maybe he does not actually care that much. It's great to know Hague does not need to be told anything because he knows it already. So did Tony Blair when he decided to invade Iraq and who still tries to rationalise the scale of the bloodshed as part of a greater historical plan unfolding now from Iraq to Syria.

Libya, Iraq and Oil.

.... half the dictators in the Middle East always have a warm place in their hearts for George Galloway. I have seen evidence that this familiar anti-democratic leftism has taken hold in parts of the LSE, but my sources are clear that most of those involved with Saif were following the lead set by Tony Blair after he successfully used the invasion of Iraq to force Gaddafi to abandon his arms programme.

Blair deserves no blame for his entente cordiale. Had he not neutralised Gaddafi, the regime would now have weapons of mass destruction to use against the citizens of Benghazi. The fault lies in the British establishment's determined pretence that Libya was no longer a vicious state, a pretence that was very profitable for BP, and the PR companies, lobbyists and academics Saif Gaddafi recruited.

Writes Nick Cohen ( Lord Woolf's conflict of interest at the LSE, The Observer, Sunday 3 April 2011).

The notion here, that Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons programme in 2004 because he was afraid that his was another regime under threat from USA and UK military action, can hardly be used as a pretext to argue that the Iraq War was still a good thing after all.

Blair's rapprochement with Gaddafi in 2004 was necessary because the Iraq War, essentially an oil grab, had plunged the nation into chaos, sectarian warfare and thus led oil prices to soar: that occasioned both Gaddafi's 'fear' that he could be 'next' and the need of Western powers to secure access to Libya's high quality oil.

Nick Cohen perpetuates that dealing with dictatorships is all about oil profits only and not, as David Strahan puts it in The Last Oil Shock that wars such as Iraq were due to "geostrategic desperation". It's this hunger for oil that led to supporting dictators and invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein.

Whether its backing dictatorships and selling arms to them or promoting "regime change" through imposing democracy, the endgame has continually been the race to control oil reserves when faced with accelerating global demand ( esp from China ) and the need for diversification of supplies.

The British establishment never ceased regarding Gaddafi's Libya as a "vicious state": it was prepared to ignore it as the need for Libyan oil, an important source of supply needed for Britain's high octane consumer car and supermarket economy to continue. That had been spelt out by the impact of the Road hauliers strike in 2000.

Ironically, George Galloway stated on Sky News that the current intervention in Libya is about BP's profits and not about the fact many global and regional powers-including Iran- are competing to control oil and gas and using it as a tool of geopolitical influence. Controlling oil is not about price and profit but national power and prosperity.

The fact is that people do not want to hear that war, destruction, anarchy and dictatorship are the necessary consequence of the pathological struggle to control oil and nothing to do with corporate profiteering, a sentiment common amongst anti-capitalists despite the fact living standards in the West depend upon it.

Yet the Stop the War Coalition leaders and those like Milne and Pilger never mention that because they want to profit from the cheap outrage that comes with directing ire at the political classes, as if they alone profited from a car economy, cheap EasyJet flights, and exotic supermarket products.

Cohen too wants to suggest that when BP supports regimes with dictatorships, it is about profits but when the USA and UK invade Iraq it is not about control of oil supplies, something mechanically written off some as a "conspiracy theory" because they portray those emphasising the oil factor as being concerned with oil prices.

Cohen ignores the continuities in British foreign policy to maintain the idea that there is an easy distinction between rationalising the existence of dictatorships and the creed of the "pro-liberationist" left that wants to remove 'rogue regimes' by military force and fight a' war on terror'.

The reality is different: over dependence upon oil necessarily undercuts the promotion of democracy in Arab nations where "the curse of oil" ensures Orwellian doublethink from states wanting access to abundant and cheap oil. As well as to benefit from the inflow of Arab petrol money.

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."

Even if It Wasn't True it Ought to Have Been.

Nick Cohen tries to re-establish his radical credentials by commenting on the greed of society, comparing the fuss of Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney's demand for an increase in pay to city fat cats who give themselves colossal salary rises and the morality of such people,

The rumour in Manchester is that Coleen Rooney wanted an audience with the Pope to ask what she should do about Wayne. It's one of those stories that journalists don't like to check too strenuously because even if it isn't true, it ought to be.

A bit like the idea that the invasion of Iraq was about a "humanitarian intervention" then. As far as Rooney is concerned he's an overpaid oaf and football long ceased to be a merely entertaining game but a crashingly boring form of bread and circuses for the masses.

The destruction of the game by greed and too much money is fairly obvious, rather like the greed for oil that motivated the invasion of Iraq and the debt fuelled financial crash of 2008 that has compounded the decline of the USA and Britain as their colossal deficits expanded.

Just to remember how misjudged Cohen's support for the Iraq War was, it needs to remembered what he wrote in The Times ( The Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war, Jan 14 2003 ).

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi dissidents are an embarrassment to the Left. After enduring misery few of us can imagine, they have discovered that, without foreign intervention, their country won't be freed from a tyrant who matches Stalin in his success in liquidating domestic opponents. Only America can intervene. Therefore an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation.

The first prediction that only the US offered salvation looks perverse now in the light of the Wikileak evidence about the scale of US collusion with the torture imposed by Iraqi state authorities and the napalming of Fallujah in 2004.

The second prediction was the complete reverse of what actually happened.

The Iraqi opposition had a right to expect support. The alternative it offers to Saddam's secular tyranny is not Islamic theocracy. The INC and the London conference of exiles both want a democratic Iraq that gives a voice to the suppressed Shia; a federal Iraq that allows autonomy for the Kurdish minority; and a secular Iraq that can contain the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam.

It seems that much of Cohen's support for Iraq was a faux Orwell stance to establish his credibility as some "decent left" writer who wanted to 'rub the cat's fur backwards' as Orwell did with the pro-Soviet supporting left in the 1930s.

If so, he failed pitifully.

I hear that the peoples of Iraq will slaughter each other if Saddam goes; that any US-sponsored replacement will be worse. They may be right, although the second prediction will be hard to meet. What is repulsive is the sneaking feeling that they want the war to be long and a post-Saddam Iraq to be a bloody disaster. They would rather see millions suffer than be forced to reconsider their prejudices.

It was idiocy for Cohen to project on to all those who opposed the war in Iraq the mental vices of some cranks and trendy poseurs in the anti-war movement, even if it's true that some reflexively opposed the war simply through disliking the USA.

Yet when supporting a war on the scale of Iraq, it was incumbent upon those like Cohen to provide authoritative evidence that the war was being fought for the humanitarian reasons posited and whether it had a realistic chance of a stable outcome.

Cohen did not. One has the sneaking feeling Cohen did not give a fig about millions of Iraqis either but in scoring polemical points over his opponents and who expected to attach himself to the success of the US war to portray them as spineless and craven.

For few really take the Socialist Workers Party seriously. They latched on to the anti-war protests in order to channel them into permanent agitation and created RESPECT which failed to mobilise opinion on any long term basis.