Christopher Hitchens is not Great.

Columnist Henry Porter has pondered upon the nature of courage and bravery in The Observer today. There are numerous people he could have used as exemplars here, often people not in the public eye and who are not vain and self promoting. Instead he chooses to write about,

My chum Christopher Hitchens is an interesting case. He has always cheerfully put himself in the way of physical danger – posing by unexploded bombs in the Middle East and nearly being lynched while lecturing a mob of fundamentalists in Lebanon – but Christopher's mettle is now seen with his reaction to terminal cancer.

He has led his life bravely, causing no end of offence to opponents, as well as dismay to those who made the mistake of assuming he was an ally and whom he then drubbed with fratricidal glee.

I cannot think of anyone who has stirred things up quite as much as Christopher, nor in the process provided so much amusement with his writing, but the important thing is that his fearlessness stimulated people to think for themselves.

It's possible to be a brave and bad man or to be foolhardy and that applies quite obviously to Christopher Hitchens. Now that he is dying, he could be brave enough to admit he was wrong to support the Iraq War and to come very close to rationalising torture in a 2005 edition of Slate magazine.

Hitchens claimed that as the USA could not be bound to the Geneva Conventions in its global "war on terror",

The forces of al-Qaida and its surrogate organizations are not signatory to the conventions and naturally express contempt for them. They have no battle order or uniform and are represented by no authority with which terms can be negotiated.

They are more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers—three categories of people who have in the past been declared outside the protection of any law.

Bear in mind that Hitchens was writing here of what could be called "terrorist suspects". That torture could be used to interrogate them in order to to prevent worse atrocities. That was clear when Hitchens went on to write,

Several detainees released from Guantanamo have reappeared in the Taliban ranks, once again burning and killing and sabotaging. The man whose story of rough interrogation has just been published in Time had planned to board a United Airlines flight and crash it into a skyscraper. I want to know who his friends and contacts were, and so do you, hypocrite lecteur.

As Iraq descended into predictable carnage it was more important to Hitchens to continue offering fallback positions. Iraq was not about WMD. It was an oil grab that was dressed up with a variety of pretexts from weapons Saddam did not have and part of a global war on terror and "Islamofascism".

Those who supported this war such as Michael Ignatieff have now admitted they got it wrong. Hitchens has now offered ex post fact rationalisations for the war, that the Bush administration dithered, that the subsequent sectarian war was proof of the surging threat of theocratic fascism everywhere.

On an edition of Breakfast with David Frost, Hitchens came on sheepishly wearing a Kurdish flag in his lapel instead of the US one he sported before. So the war was worth it despite hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, regional destabilisation, and the US collaborating with Shite death squads because the Kurds are deemed free.

There is nothing brave about failing to admit that the decision to back Bush's war was misinformed. Yet Hitchens never based his support on an assessment of the actual facts. He simply fitted the facts to the liberationist creed in the manner described by Orwell in Inside the Whale.

That is to say, that Hitchens wanted to hitch himself to a great cause in order to have something to fight for, the convince himself he was in the vanguard of historical progress once more and to win polemical battles with anti-war activists who were secretly craving the victory of just any anti-US power.

This obviously had an element of truth with regards many such as the unprincipled demagogue Galloway. Hitchens quip that RESPECT was an anagram of SPECTRE, a sinister group in James Bond who supported any destructive elements in order to profit was funny.

Even so, to suppose that just because most anti-war leaders in Britain were moronic ideologues and hack propagandists like Andrew Murray of the CPGB or Islamist fanatics, does not mean that they were essentially part of some seamless global movement to destroy the west.

True, Galloway works as a proxy for the Iranian regime in Press TV but the invasion of Iraq was hardly going to be an opening blow in defeating Galloway, and sinister double talking British Islamists. A reckless and illegal war would only bolster the credibility of those who detest Western civilisation.

By failing to look at the facts in the Iraq War and what was really at stake, Hitchens destroyed his credibility and ended up then seeing in religion a phenomena that poisoned everything and was responsible for preventing the success of the Iraq War and the Israel-Palestine conflict-indeed all conflicts.

Religion is not the cause of war. That merely offers a form of theological justification from an atheist perspective. Politicised versions of certain religious traditions only ups the ante in what are really struggles over land and resources and conflicts with ethnic dimensions.

Irrespective of Hitchens recent self promoting debate with Blair on religion, both men shared a faith based politics in regard to Iraq, seeing only what they wanted to and being obsessed with glory and a battle of civilisation over barbarism. Not an oil grab an the opening salvo in an epoch of resource wars.

Hitchens will be remembered as a footnote in cultural history and in the same way Sidney Webb is primarily remembered for having supported Stalin so too will Hitchens be remembered for backing Bush in Iraq and being typical of a kind of radical liberal who supported credal wars without scepticism.

Hitchens' polemic God is Not Great will be remembered, if at all, as strong in rhetoric and a weak rehash of atheist arguments used to prop up the facile notion that "religion" is "the cause" of conflict when it will be obvious that the pathological struggle over diminishing oil and gas is the driving force.

George Orwell was a brave man. Hitchens can offer no comparison here despite being lauded by Hitchens in Orwell's Victory. There will be no book in future years after Hitchen's death entitled Hitchen's Victory. Hitchens attempted to emulate Orwell in some ways but failed miserably.
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The reason is obvious: the conflict between Islamists and the West does not replicate anything very similar to that between the Soviet Union and the West that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s and dominated international politics during the Cold War.

By seeing the conflict in messianic terms by transposing the categories inherited from the Cold War on to the emergence after 1989-1990 of the Islamist Threat, Hitchen's willed the belief that by taking on remnant Arab dictatorships, even secular ones, that "Islamofascism" could be defeated.

By not bothering to look at the particular hisory of Iraq or the documented facts showing that Iraq was to be invaded as part of a strategy of controlling oil and using that as part of a gamble for regional and global hegemony, Hitchens showed a lack of courage in facing up to facts.

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One hostile response to this dissection of Hitchen's pose was offered by one blogger thus,

Unfortunately, there are now many people.... who seem to have absorbed uncritically a one-dimensional "economic determinist" narrative of a complex geo-political conflict—and to a degree, I suspect, that would make even the vulgar Marxists of the SWP blush.

However, it would still be wrong for Mr Hitchens to cave in to such morally vacuous, populist formulations and admit that he was wrong about the Iraq war if he doesn't think he was. It my view, if he did destroy his "reputation" with such people in the cause of Kurdish freedom, it was a bargain trade.

The commenter is wrong. I have continually stressed precisely the opposite case to anything resembling "economic determinism". That Iraq was essentially an oil grab does not mean there were not other geopolitical factors at work-using oil as a lever against the Chinese, creating a democratic domino effect etc.

The point about the invasion of Iraq is that it need not have happened and was predictably going to lead to the fragmentation of the state into ethnic and sectarian warfare. The aim of the war was to control oil and not for corporations to make a profit as anti-war SWP types go on about.

The simple fact is that the west is overdependent upon oil in dangerous areas. Anyway this blogger obviously exhibits the usual shoddy line of reasoning of those who think that any mention of the oil as a documented fact in driving the Iraq War is some kind of sinister Marxist-Leninist.

And that this must mean Hitchens was "right" to support the war on the basis of the inherently sinister mindset of those who opposed the war. Again that only reinforces the case I made which is that this is not a logical position to take as it failed to look at what was at stake.

Nor is the one which rationalises the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab Iraqis on the basis that the war has liberated the Kurds in northern Iraq. That could be one benefit, but the question would remain whether the number of Kurds being killed on the eve of the war outnumbered those killed elsewhere since.

Yet to reduce the "moral" case for war to such an ethnically based arithmetic of death would be in line with the way the US has been willing to go against all principles in effectively collaborating with death squads and ethnic cleansing to impose authority and control.

To come back to the issue of Hitchens, it is not very brave to fail to admit that the invasion was a huge mistake and to refuse to see what was at stake was oil. And, moreover, that the West is overdependent upon it and built into the fabric of a supermarket shopping Great Car Economy.

That's something RESPECT anti-war types seldom bring up as they are populists who want to tell people what they want to hear no less than Hitchens and "pro-liberation leftists" actually do. The notion that Iraq was not about corporations enriching themselves but strategic desperation is simply too frightening.

Radical Anti-Imperialists and the Afghanistan War.

The odd thing in our time is how those advocating wars in far off lands of whom we increasingly will know more, if the fanatics supporting messianic creeds get their way, seem oblivious to the consequences of their action. This is indicated by a report carried by the Guardian today.

First of all, there is the fact that there is almost no dissent within ruling political parties in many Western nations about continuing the Afghan War to a successful conclusion,

Thousands of protesters have marched through London against the war in Afghanistan as as Nato leaders agreed a strategy to withdraw their troops from the country.

The demonstration, which organisers said was 10,000-strong, came as the prime minister, David Cameron, said the withdrawal of British combat troops from Afghanistan by 2015 was a "firm deadline" that would be met.

Speaking at a Nato summit in Lisbon, Cameron said Afghan forces would begin taking charge of security from early next year and the security handover would be complete by the end of 2014.

"The commitment we have entered into today to transfer the lead responsibility for security to the Afghan government by the end of 2014 will pave the way for British combat troops to be out of Afghanistan by 2015. This is a firm deadline that we will meet."

First of all, there is the fact that there is almost barely any dissent within ruling political parties in many Western nations about continuing the Afghan War to a successful conclusion. There is almost no debate in Parliament about the aims of the war or whether they are inherently contradictory or whether Afghanistan is really a War worth fighting.

Cameron's oblique language over pledge to withdraw still does not say why mission will be complete by 2015. Indeed, the language implies that commitment to transfer the lead to the Afghan government by the end of 2014 is only said at that point to perhaps "pave the way" for "combat troops" to be out by some stage in 2015. Not all combat troops or just troops.

Not all the security services, of course, nor is there any sense of a real withdrawal as the pledge refers only to the "lead responsibility for security " being withdrawn not whole responsibility. Language matters as much as Orwell knew it did and as those who care for its use know it must.

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Not one Parliamentarian or established politicians has challenged those like Cameron by forensically examining the language, by asking questions in public that would get clarity upon that. Hence it might have been thought that those involved in extra-Parliamentary opposition to war would eschew the language of propaganda and practice of dull ideological orthodoxy.

However, the problem with "anti-war" propagandists is that the agenda is not to outline a free debate about what's at stake in this war but to upgrade the profile of the StWC which held a protest today in which the usual hack propagandists proceeded to churn out the same tedious line.

For a start, there is the propaganda of wanting things both ways. That the war is bad because it kills soldiers ( obviously, which war does not have casualties ) and the fact anti-war radicals have extolled the Taliban or the insurgents or sectarian militias in Iraq as 'the resistance' as if they were all part of something akin to the maquis in France during the Second World War.

This sort of thing has been repeatedly pumped out by those "militant leftists and "anti-imperialists" like Seumas Milne, Tariq Ali, and Andrew Murray, most of whose propaganda these days adds up to a mere projection on to very different places of the terms used during the fight against Hitler.

As bad as Bush II was and as bad as the decision to invade Iraq was, the USA is not somehow exactly equivalent to Nazi Germany.

Yet World War One memories can be just as useful to a propagandist such as Murray as well, not least just over a week past the Remembrance Sunday of 2010,

....the war touches almost everyone in British life – not least, of course, the families waiting for coffins at Wootton Bassett or preparing for life looking after a maimed relative returned from the battlefield.

The question really has to be why does Murray care that much and whether there is not just a cynical attempt to use the grief of the families and the anger of the veterans to ramp up hatred of "the ruling class" whilst at the same time evading the fact that those squaddies chose to join the British Army. And through the idea of serving an "imperial power".

Disillusionment and anger at this futile war is different to total hatred of everything Britain stands for, something borne out by the Orwellian propaganda that follows in trying to link the depression with a rise in militarism as some "escape forwards" into war to stave off crisis ( a tired Leninist trope ).

The slump and the cuts are bringing back economic conscription with a vengeance. While a few years ago, the Ministry of Defence was struggling to recruit, now senior officers boast of being able to pick and choose who to send off to mutilation or death in Afghanistan from an abundance of applicants.

The term "economic conscription" was first used by James Conolly, a republican Irish nationalist, Marxist-Leninist and anti-imperialist who wanted to explain away why proletarians joined the armies of empire against their "common class interests" that linked them globally.

Yet its apparent that logically the same term could be used to explain why Islamist movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Taliban can recruit. Poverty motivates young men to become violent and materialists tend think that placating those wants will mollify the pyschopathological urge.

Murray wants to portray all those suffering from the Afghanistan War in Britain ( which is a very small minority ) with both those Muslims suffering abroad and to weld it to the weird amalgam of Islamism and Marxist-Leninist militancy that animates the main leaders of the StWC.

The reasons for this is not so difficult to grasp.

With the decay of the Soviet Union, those true believers stranded by History in the CPGB had to cast around for any cause that would "objectively" hasten the end of "Western Capitialist-Imperialism". The terms of references sound dated but they reflect a pyschopathological hatred that can be updated.

For the rise of global Islamist movements and myth of the trans-national ummah have thus been seen as revivifying the 'anti-imperialist' cause. Something the nice people on Stop the War marches fail to appreciate. The propaganda and placards are designed to exploit Islamist hatred.

Like most so-called "anti-war" radicals of the StWC type, Andrew Murray proves that merely opposing a war does not necessarily mean that a person either understands what is actually at stake or cares about how many die if it makes for good propaganda. For a start, the Afghan War is not being fought merely to "save face" as he claims.

If anything the consistent line of those like Galloway, Murray and others has been in building up face by establishing their credentials as media commentators of the "I Told You So" variety, that Afghanistan is unwinnable and Iraq a catastrophe. This was hardly unpredictable and the mantra seems to have been the Leninist one of "the worse the better"

As Murray puts it, in a way that proves wars are actually only just so Good if the necessary propaganda makes them seem so,

Perhaps this would all seem a price worth paying were it a war that had a purpose commanding support. But few can now credit the argument that the Taliban need to be fought in Helmand lest they overrun Hampshire.

Not a single terrorist plot launched against this country – nor one thwarted or even alleged – has had any roots in Afghanistan.

Nor does the idea that the occupation is needed to prevent instability find any takers. The war has created a Pakistani Taliban threatening the integrity of that nuclear-armed state, fuelled by every disastrous cross-border killing of Pakistani civilians.

No – the blood and treasure now being wasted in Afghanistan is an investment in nothing more worthy than saving Nato's face. If the myth of Anglo-US military invincibility were to be punctured in Afghanistan, one of the world's least developed countries, where would the world order be?

The world order was hardly shaken by the US withdrawal from Vietnam, a far greater drain on blood and treasure than Afghanistan which was accompanied by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissenger's growing diplomatic friendship with China which was conceived of in order to check the Soviet Union.

But even so the key to Afghanistan's importance lies in geopolitical strategy of maintaining a stake in developments in Central Asia, in particular the control of the oil and gas. The TAPI pipeline has been finalised now and NATO's credibility, if anything, is dependent upon its ability to protect the route from the Taliban.

NATO's role has been ever more explicitly since the Bucharest Summit in 2008 about NATO acting to preserve energy security for the West. It's curious that Murray and Galloway do not mention the most obvious fact about what could be called the "New Imperialism".

Only that "the people" in Britain or the US or in NATO states would have cause to reflect on the fact that their high octane consumer economies are made possible by oil and that therefore Blair and Bush could claim to be acting in the public interest.

Likewise, Afghanistan is part of the competition to control the gas supply from Turkmenistan. The construction of the TAPI pipeline is considered a vital strategical asset that will divert control of gas supplies away from Russia, act to block of Iran's regional ambitions in buiding a IPI pipeline.

If the rival IPI pipeline were constructed, the strategic significance of Afghanistan would be diminished and the West cut out of having a foothold from which to determine the division of the oil and gas wealth from the Caspian.

On that basis, supporters of the Afghanistan War will ask which version of imperialism is to be preferred. But obviously far more than "pride" or "loss of face" as regards pure power is at stake. Controlling Afghanistan is a key to controlling Eurasia and hence the fossil fuels that make consumer lives in the West so cosy.

Unlike NATO China is not hypocritical about human rights. It acts straightforwardly as an imperial power without strings attached. If dictators and kleptocrats grant control over resources it needs, then human rights are not even a factor in the calculation. With the discovery of $3tn of hard mineral resources, China has taken an interest in Afghanistan.

Naturally, the Afghan War is being fought according to double standards, an energy agenda that is never discussed in the mainstream media though most think tanks that deal with Afghanistan make the TAPI pipeline a routine factor in outlining the strategy for Afghanistan.

TAPI is held to be the key to regenerating the economy of Afghanistan, binding the regional powers together under the auspices of the enlightened self interest that animates NATO. The alternative is thought to be ethnic separatism, a failed state and destabilising the neighbouring states.

These facts are ones that writers should at least establish in order to advance public debate. Those such as Timothy Garton Ash laud fact in such works as Facts are Subversive, though he has yet to pay serious attention to his own belief in the power of facts with regards oil in Iraq and gas going through Afghanistan.

As for Murray, the blunt line about "no to imperialist war" is one that would be curiously shared by the far right, that is the BNP led by another petty fuhrer to rival Galloway called Nick Griffin who has also called for withdrawal from Afghanistan but without making the pretence about being bothered about Afghan lives.

Perhaps the real argument against Afghanistan is that it has contradictory objectives and that it is not possible to install democracy by military means, something that along with female emancipation is a part of a Utopian pipedream that such things could be tied to a flourishing market economy along the energy corridor.

The USA never really paid more than lip service to those stated goals. European powers and humanitarian NGO travellers believe it ought to be possible without ever having looked at the geopolitical reality and that gas transit states ( even Georgia ) are notoriously dangerous and prone to greater potential conflict.

The real problem with the pathetic state of discussion about Afghanistan is the level of denial and delusion about the nature of geopolitics. Even Murray cannot mention the gas or energy security. For the harsh reality is that the masses in the West all depend on fossil fuels to enjoy their lifestyles.

That reality hardly impinges on self righteous anti-war protesters who go bananas when faced with these facts, often because they are too boneheaded to make the basic distinction between what "is" and what "ought". The world can't be made better unless one really knows what's at stake.

Focusing on energy alternatives has to be a major part of the way in which dangerous engagement in places such as Afghanistan can be avoided. Yet as those resources are there, it is in no Great Power's interest to allow the other to have it whilst those alternatives are being developed.

Assuming that alternatives to the addiction to fossil fuels are developed with the same sort of urgency that scientists seem capable of with regards developing the A Bomb. It's a pity finding alternatives is not prioritised as being as serious as avoiding future resource wars by the gamble for Western hegemony.

Afghanistan is designed to be a war that will contribute towards that. Clearly it will not succeed. The price of not succeeding is seen to be a decline in the credibility of NATO. Something that some of those who are against the war like Murray crave because they like the idea of the Decline of the West.

On the Use of the Muslim card in Oldham.

When one looks at the utter failure of politics in 2010, one need only look at the grotty little episode concerning the election of the former New Labour MP and Minister of State for Borders and Immigration Phil Woolas.

Woolas was a politician prepared to use his supposed credentials on being "tough on immigration" to portray him as the man during his anticipated re-election in Oldham who would stand up to "Muslim extremists" unlike his Liberal rival in the election.

Such idiotic claims have been rightly condemned. Yet in an article today Inayat Bunglawala can't resist getting this in,

He had already alienated much of the sizeable local Muslim community through a series of patronising comments including dismissing as "a load of crap" a young Muslim woman's concern that the UK's foreign policy in the Middle East was contributing to the radicalisation problem.

There is no evidence offered here as to the extent of the alienation of "the Muslim community's"and given this is supposed to be a defence of democracy against those who avoid clear and open democratic debate through mendacious political propaganda and soundbites, Bunglawala's language needs looking at.

People do not necessary exist in cantons of homogeneous communities like "The Muslim Community". Such language itself was curiously used by both New Labour and Islamists wanting to play on it to upgrade their own political interests and was part of a power game.

Open discussion about the exact nature of the potential threat of terrorism by some alienated Muslims who embrace Islamist ideology deserves rigorous examination. The exact nature of how UK foreign policy has brought into existence the "radicalisation problem" needs looking at.

Politicians like Woolas should not dismiss the concerns of British Muslim citizens or anyone as "a load of crap" and certainly not play on atavistic notions of "Muslim extremists" to unscrupulously gain power at any cost. Woolas was using language vulgar and unbecoming of MPs.

More depressing is the insight into the utter cynicism of the way gaining power must depend on media manipulation,

Fitzpatrick also wrote: "We need to go strong on the militant Moslem angle" and "We need … to explain to the white community how the Asians will take him out … If we don't get the white vote angry he's gone."

Yet Woolas's comments and the penchant for spin and deception are reflected in the language of media savvy Islamists no less. For Woolas did not exactly say there was a death threat against him. Merely that the "Muslim extremists" wanted to "take Phil out".

Unless I'm mistaken, the phrasal verb to "take out" could mean to remove "Phil" from power somehow. No doubt Woolas and his advisers wanted voters to think that could mean "assassination", but such language of insinuation is quite common in politics as what Steven Poole calls "Unspeak".

Unless we get an open democracy once more free from spin and deception, then it is unlikely that the fear of intractable conflicts within Britain will be avoided. What Woolas did was not ordained directly by New Labour from but it was part of the culture of New Labour spin and Orwellian language.

The danger has become one where there is the belief that "The Muslim Community" can be encouraged to exercise power politically as a lobby group in the same way that certain Islamists consider that Zionists do over British foreign policy.

No doubt the Liberal Democrats opposition to the Iraq War made it more appealing to many Muslims but it also did so with many non-Muslims as well who saw it would be a disaster. Woolas wanted to link the Liberal Democrats with "Muslim extremists" to deflect attention from unpopular policies.

Ironically, these include both the Iraq War and mass immigration which the BNP both oppose and which were one reason why Woolas might have thought that conflating the Liberal Democrats with "Muslim extremists" was one way of co-opting such discontent.

How to Spin it that Iran Caused the Catastrophe in Iraq.

Meir Javedanfar has attempted here in today's edition of The Guardian to draw an equivalence between the US and Iran as regards the Wikileaks reports of the reality of the US occupation.

What he writes is interesting but does not bear out exactly his partisan agenda as an Israeli-Iranian nationalist which is to prove that Iran's interests in creating further chaos was one thwarting the US agenda of bringing beneficial regime change.

Iran's concerns are understandable. There are serious allegations that could damage its image abroad, especially with its allies in Iraq and in the Shia world. One such revelation is the report about Iran supplying new forms of suicide vests for al-Qaida.

Al-Qaida is the sworn enemy of Shias in Iraq. It has been involved in the killing of thousands of Shia civilians, among them many pilgrims in holy cities such as Najaf and Karbala. Iranian co-operation with al-Qaida, even if it was aimed at hurting US forces, is not going to go down well in Shia areas of Iraq.

There is also political damage from this. How can Nouri al-Maliki persuade Iraqis, especially his own Shia constituents, that the government of Iran is a true friend?

Other revelations, such as the revolutionary guard's al Quds force training Iraqi Shia militants on Iranian soil, are also damaging. They could make the idea of tougher sanctions against Iran an easier sell to the public in Europe, since countries such as the UK have suffered numerous casualties in southern Iraq.

The evidence, from the Wikileaks that Iran supported Sunni insurgents and Al Qaida after the collapse of Iraq into bloodshed and chaos, has to take into account the status of the source, a US military document in which the filer might have assumed that what was fact was fact. It was a "threat report".

AL-QAIDA REMAINS THE STRONGEST ORGANIZATION AMONG THE INSURGENT GROUPS IN IRAQ AND DIRECTS THE MAJORITY OF ATTACKS THAT TAKE PLACE IN IRAQ, NFI. INSTRUCTORS AT THE ISLAMIC JIHAD CENTER IN TEHRAN ARE TEACHING A NEW TACTIC FOR SVIED DEPLOYMENT.

Until real evidence can be offered that Iran backed Al Qaida this remains simply an assumption whilst Iranian backing for Shia groups in far more obvious as an established part of exerting Iran's influence there, on that the US has also been prepared to collude in to defeat Sunni insurgents.

That this was done by colluding in the practice of allowing torture by Shi-ite death squads, as well as co-opting Baathists of Saddam's secular dictatorship to kill off opposition to the US client state is hardly diminished by the assumptions of the Threat Reports in the Wikileaks.

Reversals of alliances and doublethink are routine in the New great Game where the main ambition in a pathological struggle to control oil and gas and its transit between exporting nations and the overdependent nations of the West that rely on it to keep its life support machine going.

As Iran borders both Iraq and Afghanistan it has an interest in seeking to avoid encirclement by US client states. In Afghanistan, the Taliban was supported by the US between 1994 and 1996 through its allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because the Taliban was anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-Western.

Iran objected to this US policy as the Taliban was fanatically anti-Shia which is why it started to back the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and nearly went to war with Afghanistan after Taliban forces seized the Iranian consulate in Mazari Sharif and executed Iranian diplomats in 1998.

Just as in Iraq, where Iran has backed those forces that will serve its interests, so too has it been prepared to do the same in maintaining links with members of the Northern Alliance and even the Taliban who want to block US interests in Afghanistan, most obviously the construction of the TAPI pipeline.

Without any real mention of the geopolitical context, such an article is essentially propaganda which insinuates that had Iran not meddled, then everything would have proceeded a lot better in Iraq and that this shows Iran is a rogue state ( hence the conflation of support for terror with the nuclear issue ).

The Rferl article linked to makes this quite explicit, ( How WikiLeaks Makes Confrontation With Iran More Likely )

... what is now beyond dispute is that ( Tehran ) clearly sees itself as engaged in a war against the United States and those attempting to forge an independent and democratic Iraq.

Yet the scale of US double standards and cynicism in the Persian Gulf and the fact it bears responsibility for triggering off the collapse of Iraq into anarchy in the first place, is hardly going to be linked to a widespread sense of outrage in Iraq or in the Middle East that Iran bears the blame all along for what happened.

More Hype than Hope-Tariq Ali on President Obama.

Tariq Ali has opined on President Obama ( Obama hope was all hype ),

The hope of 2008 soon morphed into hype. Admirers in the liberal media who had linked Obama vicariously to the civil rights movement sounded increasingly ridiculous; claiming the mantle of Martin Luther King for their man was an extravagance that had to be rapidly discarded.


In one of his last big speeches, a year before he was assassinated, King had argued "that if our nation can spend $35bn a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and $20bn to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth".


What had any of this to do with a seasoned machine politician from Chicago?As a candidate, Obama projected himself as a new Reagan, above narrow party politics. He wanted to please all, but has ended up annoying many.

Contrary to what Ali thinks, and as with his hero Trotsky it is always self serving, Obama is in many ways the embodiment of 1960s identity politics made convenient for the world of corporate capitalism and admass society. Identity politics, economic self interest and public relations can flow seamlessly.

In any case, at what exact stage did "hope" morph into "hype" and who created that ? Partly Obama's political choreographers but also all those people who voted for him for progressive reasons, not least deluded US blacks, a chorus of approval mirrored across the Atlantic here in Britain.

Obviously, Obama is a PR creation , a visual embodiment of "The American Dream" that was meant to rebrand the image of the US against those in more soppily liberal countries that he was some kind of amalgam of Martin Luther King and JFK against the image of "stupid white men" like Bush II.

Obama thus did not project himself as the "new Reagan" at all. Ali assumes that because he has to link the explicit ideology of neoliberal capitalism with the 1980s and not as one outcome of 1960s identity politics with 1980s economics. The political myth of Obama is pure 1960s. And it was kitsch.

Anyway, to get to the nitty gritty, Obama was always going to disappoint on foreign policy because it was not really so different from Bush II's from the outset, a point that Ali at least, unlike numerous others at the time of Obama's election, seems to have been able to grasp.

Obama may have opposed the Iraq War but he did so only because it was a strategic mistake and because Afghanistan should take preference and was always the "war of choice" that represented "The Good War", an opinion shared by his foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Not only did Obama vote in Congress for the Patriot Act and suspending the liberties enshrined in habeas corpus, that Bush initiated as part of the 'war on terror', but he also outlined a foreign policy vision that had many neoconservatives quite content that their legacy would not be reversed.

In April 2007 Obama delivered a speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in which he declared that,

"America must....lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good....We have heard much over the last six years about how America's larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom. I agree".

Yet how imposing democracy and human rights through war and conventional military force on a nation such as Afghanistan has never been clearly outlined by 'liberal imperialists' or 'humanitarian interventionists'. Then again, the war there became evermore clearly about the ensuring the construction of the TAPI pipeline.

Obama made it clear he wanted to increase defence spending and to add 65,000 troops to the Army and recruit 27,000 more Marines so that the US military could"stay on the offence, from Djibouti to Kandahar" as "the ability to put boots on the ground will be critical in eliminating the shadowy terrorist networks we now face."

That was a statement that yet again conflated global terrorism of the Al Qaida variety with rogue states in which the pre-emptive use of force was legitimate, without concerning itself with the UN. As with Iraq, a 'mistake', Obama maintained,

"no president should ever hesitate to use force -- unilaterally if necessary.....to protect ourselves . . . when we are attacked".

When the USA's "vital interests" were "imminently threatened" then it could invade other nations as it deemed fit. And those who know anything about the USA's "vital interests" now that this has been defined at least since the 1980 Carter Doctrine as protecting the USA's oil supply.

With regards Afghanistan, the war now remains centrally concerned with getting the TAPI pipeline built as this will, it is thought, block off the rival IPI pipeline, contribute towards isolating and encircling Iran and integrate the regional economies under US protection and power.

On a lighter note, it is amusing to note all those offering spasms of pseudo-orgasmic ecstasy back in 2008, some of which I could not resist collecting at the time for future reference, if only to show the utter bollocks spouted by columnists whose job it is to genuglect before power instead of offering critical commentary.

First, Niall Stanage offered this tripe It's America's time Monday 1 December 2008,

There was a moment, early on, when I realised he had something special.Back in February, I went to hear Barack Obama speak in Baltimore, Maryland.


I had seen Obama in person plenty of times before, and the rally was, on its face, unexceptional. It took place the day before the Maryland primary, a contest that elicited little media excitement because Obama was expected to win with ease (which he duly did).


That campaign restored a faith in politics that most of us thought we had lost. On an unseasonably mild Chicago night last month, when a disembodied voice announced the next first family of the United States, and Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha Obama strode into the lights, it restored a faith in the United States too.


America was, once again, a place where astounding things could happen.

People get paid to write this.Another piece of idiocy was offered by Michael Paulin who wanted to make the following very clear,

It is unfortunate that this needs to be said but, for the avoidance of doubt: Barack Hussein Obama is black. Yet he is also mixed-race. Perhaps more important, he is a black, mixed-race intellectual.

If that was not idiotic enough, Jonathan Freedman wrote this in a column 'America has not lost its talent for renewal, even redemption'. It was drivel then and it looks no less fundamentally deluded and stupid now,

For the last eight years, it's been hard to keep the flame alive. ...But on Tuesday night I stood in Grant Park and watched a crowd of 200,000 erupt as they saw Barack Obama become America's next president..... From now on, admiration for the US will no longer need to be whispered nor weighed down with a thousand qualifiers....

It was obvious that the emoting was forced, an attempt to try and feel some "change in the air" in opposition to that boring thing called reality. But that was not the best of the worst.

A supreme Obamagasm came from the almost satirical piece written by Johnathan Raban. who chimed in with this,

On Tuesday, dodging the hubbub of election parties, I watched the results come in with two close friends and my teenage daughter. We might have been patients showing up at a hospital for a surgical procedure, nervously joking over the early returns from Vermont (predictably, Barack Obama) and Kentucky (predictably, John McCain).

When, at 8:01pm, Pacific time, CNN called the race for Obama, we collapsed in one another's arms. Even my dry tear ducts did their job, and, for a few moments, the room swam out of focus. The champagne, whose presence in the fridge I had thought to be ominously bad karma, was opened. No toast. Just "Thank God, thank God, thank God", spoken by four devout atheists.

This sounds like the sort of totalitarian political kitsch that could have been offered in favour of Stalin, Mao, Castro and numerous others. Even so, it was unintentionally very amusing.

Yet the scale of the stream of arrant drivel issuing out from the liberal-left commentariat surely came from the banal and witless Polly Toynbee,

There has never been a day like it for Britain's postwar generations. As that inauguration speech echoes out, the globe itself seems to inhale a mighty, collective intake of breath, frighteningly audacious in its hope.A BBC World Service poll shows a tidal wave of optimism about what Obama will do, spread out across a rainbow of nations.

Here is the world's wish list: first save global finance from ruin; next get out of Iraq; then fix the climate and bring peace to the Middle East. Yes he can, is the world's expectation.How does the man's arrival feel here? A day like no other, in a time of multiple crisis like none other.

In Gaza, the horror of so many dead Palestinian children is a monstrous challenge to greet Obama. If ever the world needed saving, it's now.So here comes the man who says he can.

It's an American mystery that this great pool of genius has usually thrown such minnows into the White House. But the monumental present danger has summoned forth a man who promises the intellect, character and power of persuasion to match the hour.

And such windbags often get indignant at why so many people get cynical at politicians and journalists.

An Update on TAPI

The fact that the TAPI is a major strategical aim of the US in Afghanistan and is a rival to the IPI pipeline was further confirmed by a report carried by The International Herald Tribune on October 25 2010

...the cancellation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s visit to Pakistan was in fact a protest against Islamabad’s signing of the Turkmenistan- Afghanistan–Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project which would obviously mean for the Iranians abandoning of the Pakistan-Iran gas project.

Iranian Minister Mostafa Najjar had announced in August that President Ahmedinejad would visit Pakistan soon to see the devastation caused by the recent flooding.

In June, 2010 Islamabad and Tehran finalised the gas pipeline project dubbed as “Peace Pipeline” to start supply of natural gas to Islamabad by 2014. However, Pakistan had to face severe criticism from the US over the deal.

Reports suggested that Islamabad abandoned the project under pressure from the US and Western countries and signed the TAPI agreement.

Well, this should obviously convince those that keep denying the centrality of the TAPI pipeline as a major goal that they are willingly colluding in a denial of the reality. Naturally, Pakistan keeps hedging its bets between all the contending Great Powers vying for control in the region.

Under the gas sale and purchase agreement (GSPA), Pakistan will import about 750 million cubic feet a day (mmcfd) from Turkmenistan with provision to increase it to one billion cubic feet a day (bcfd).The volume of the imported gas will be about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s current gas production and the agreement is for a period of 25 years, renewable for another five years.

Ejaz Chaudhry, Additional Secretary at the ministry of petroleum and natural resources, said it was absolutely incorrect to suggest that Islamabad has shelved the project. “Throw him out of the window whoever has said so,” he said in anger. “The process for the implementation of the project is under way.”

“You cannot abandon international agreements with a single stroke of pen,” Chaudhry said. “It will take about two-and-a-half years to start construction on the project,” he added.

“China may be interested to finance the project,” Chaudhry said when his attention was drawn to the fact that both Pakistan and Iran may be short of funds required for the project. In April 2008 Iran expressed interest in China’s participation in the project.

Delusion about a Middle East "Peace Process" and Oil.

If the liberal illusions of those who supported President Obama as a potential new figure for peace can be understood , they can be encapsulated by Jonathan Freedman who wrote in the Guardian,

A president who was inaugurated amid great hopes – generally and for the Middle East in particular – has seen his stock tumble in the intervening 21 months. Obama won great credit for making Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority on his very first day in office, declaring it a national security interest of the US, and for appointing the elder statesman of the Northern Ireland effort, George Mitchell, as his special envoy. Since then there have been crockery-throwing rows with the Israelis, and a nice speech in Cairo, but little tangible progress. The most Obama has to show for his labours is an opening round of direct talks between the two sides, currently on hold.

Usually when people debate the Israel-Palestine conflict and the "peace process", there will be those prepared to see it as a proxy conflict between "the West" and the "Muslim World" without looking at the bleak reality of the bigger picture ( as if the psychopathogical conflict there was not intractable enough already ).

The reason is that the conflict between Israel and Palestine really is a proxy battleground between those powers who see the Middle East as a struggle for hegemony and influence. The USA backs Israel and the Iranians back Hamas and Hezbollah.

This is determined by the New Great Game for oil and gas, which the USA is ever more dependent upon to maintain its current standard of living no less than Israel is too. Iran backs Hamas and Hezbollah as it ramps up tensions in such a way as to discredit any regime change, most obviously its own.

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has its own long standing enmity, but it has become more intractable by the wider conflicts across the Middle East caused by the US presence in Arab lands like Saudi Arabia, where the rentier elite diverts discontent outwards through funding Islamist charities.

Again that reflects the US foreign policy of being so dependent upon Saudi oil and the hatred that US military bases cause across the region. As well as the fact that most people living under dictatorships do not benefit from that oil wealth. When tied together with Islamist ideology that causes endless problems

Unless the West can find alternatives to oil, the problems in the Middle East have no chance of a solution. Regimes feeling uncertain of quelling domestic discontent will ramp up hatred of Israel in order to gain domestic legitimacy. Israel depends on that to retain support from the US too.

Likewise Hamas has every interest in ratcheting up conflict by rocket attacks in order to get the disproportionate retaliation that will kill Palestinians, force Israel to become more ruthless and thus improve their standing over political rivals. So too Hezbollah.

The continued military presence of the US in the oil rich lands of the Arab states such as Saudi Arabia provides the reason for the resentment that leads to Islamist fanaticism and the cash that fuels it. Just as it did in Afghanistan in the war against the Soviet Union.

The bitter irony is that within Britain, those like George Galloway, a leader of Respect. extol the Palestinian cause and Islamist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and gain great support whilst being fans of Arab nationalists like Colonel Nasser who was a secular nationalist who executed Islamists.

Naturally, Galloway is a dolt. But those supporting an increasingly large constituency of leftists and alienated and politically aware Muslims in Britain fail to realise the underlying conflicts lie mostly in the self interest of the various states in the region.

The USA is one of those along with Israel but so too are states like Iran, whose Press TV funds Galloway to mouth out about Palestine. That makes him merely a "useful idiot" but it points to a wider problem of proxy wars concerned with geopolitics and the West's over dependence upon oil.

The issue of oil dependency never gets much mention in the discussion about the potential to peace in the Middle East. One need only think about Bernard Lewis' "The Crisis of Islam" to realise that that the crisis is thought to be one of Islam more than Western dependency upon oil.

But ultimately the crisis between Israel and Palestine and the Middle East as a whole is based on the crisis between the need of these states to modernise and gain a measure of legitimacy by having control over their own oil wealth and moving towards an Islamic form of democracy.

That cannot be achieved by military invasions of states such as Iraq. But that war reflected the need to control the oil, of geostrategic desperation by the USA and Britain. It can only be achieved by the Western states reducing their dependence upon oil by investing money in R & D on alternatives.

The well intentioned liberal nuances and pieties of those like Freedman will fail to enlighten or gain support unless the nub of what is really at stake is addressed. Suffice it to say that few liberals ever grasp the dilemma because they talk about what the West must, can, should, ought to or must do.

Without first looking at the reality of what is at stake.

Without that we are condemned to perpetual conflict. Obama offers no greater solution because he is the leader of a nation no less dependent upon oil than Western Europe. But is leader of a nation that Europe cravenly hopes will protect it whilst remaining greedy for oil no less.

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it."-Joseph Conrad.

Lifestyle Conversions to Islam and the Attraction of the Political Exotic.

Andrew Brown writes on Lauren Booth's conversion to Islam that,

There is quite a lot that could be said about anyone who converts to Islam in Iran under the impression that it is less inhumane than New Labour, but as a piece of theatre, Lauren Booth's conversion could hardly be beaten.

Conversion....is also always a political and social act, a statement about where you fit into the world. To convert is to announce your allegiance to a new tribe, or a new idea of humanity.

Lauren Booth is not "nutty" but neither is this act of conversion much to do with religion but as more of a lifestyle option. As Booth put it in A Daily Mail interview, after she spoke of her "holy experience” whilst visiting the Fatima al-Masumeh shrine in the city of Qom, something that hit her like a “shot of spiritual morphine”,

‘Now I don’t eat pork and I read the Koran every day. I’m on page 60. I also haven’t had a drink in 45 days, the longest period in 25 years,' she said.

'The strange thing is that since I decided to convert I haven’t wanted to touch alcohol, and I was someone who craved a glass of wine or two at the end of a day.’

The move is partly political and more based on a rejection of what she does not like as opposed to what she does.

Booth converted as part of the usual pathetic quest for some form of identity which Islam obviously offers in a bleak, atomised and deracinated Britain that depends for its consumer lifestyle, it is thought, on the subjugation of Muslims. Its a spiritual quest perverted into self indulgent identity politics.

By conflating all Islamist causes into one global form of revolutionary and emancipatory kitsch, the attraction of middle class women like Booth to Islam is really more to do to with a fetish for the political exotic, the sort that pulled in women to extol Cuba and handsome guerillas as Che Guevara in the 1960s.

Booth was given a Palestinian diplomatic status by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in 2008 claims that she now covers her head with a hijab when she leaves the house and prays five times daily. Booth did not exclude the possibility of wearing a burka, even though its not part of Islam itself.

Booth was already a member of the "political religion" that is the Islamo-Trotskyist hybrid Respect, but with the split with the SWP, Booth has moved more to the more ostensibly Islamist wing as did that other halfwit Yvonne Ridley after being captured by the Taliban back in 2001.

The conversion is due to the usual mixture of careerist motives ( she works as does Galloway for Iran's state network Press TV ) and as an act of repudiating her civilisation and culture more than through any real acceptance of Islam. It makes for good propaganda for Iran, which is what Press TV is about.

Both Ridley and Booth work for Press TV and are prominent in RESPECT. This is the party that Ridley claimed was “Zionist-free” in 2006 and who described Israel as “that disgusting little watchdog of America that is festering in the Middle East”. She could have said satellite or client without using this lurid language.

Ridley opined “If there was any Zionists in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists”.

There is no reason why both US foreign policy and Israel's actions cannot be condemned whilst at the same time condemning the inhumanity of the repressive aspects of Iran's regime. The reason Booth and Ridley do not is due to the mental vice defined by Orwell as "transferred nationalism".

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.

Michael Klare on Oil, Iraq and US Foreign Policy

Today I bought Michael Klare's Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet about the potential for global resource wars over a diminishing supply of oil and gas and the inexorably rising demand from new emerging powers that control large supplies or else have entered the New Great Game to control states that have it.

Here in these videos Klare outlines the case he argued in Blood and Oil about the centrality of oil in the consumer economies of the Global North and its increased over dependence on supplies from unstable nations in the Global South. This accounts for the invasion of Iraq, to control the supply of oil and maintain US hegemony over the Persian Gulf.

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.