A prime minister to answer what?

[helena handbasket]

No I'm not touching the McCann story........

But I have trouble understanding how it can be called shady dealings of all administrations. What would have been Clinton's incentive? The fact that the intelligence was there long before Dubya came into power kind of shoots holes in the theory that this was orchestrated by the scary (and yes they were scary) Bush administration. Clinton waited to act, some say too long, because he was sidetracked by the Lewinsky scandal and trial amongst other things but also didn't have the catalyst that was indeed 911. But to say 911 was just a good excuse is to underestimate the obvious threat the US was then under. If you have recognized the threat for years and then what do you know, you are attacked, kind of elevates the level of threat you feel you are under, don't you think? I think the gloves come off and they did.

Back to the OP, it seems a bit to simple to implicate Tony Blair as an evil puppet in some Bush agenda when it was not a crisis created by Bush. He did not dream up Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction "myth" as a justification for his actions, it was already there in 1998. I sometimes wonder what would have happened differently if 911 had happened on Clinton's watch, given what he knew. I'm a big fan of Clinton, hate Bush, but would it really have gone any differently? Impossible to guess. But what if Blair had made these decisions with Clinton? I think that animosity towards Bush clouds our perceptions of how Blair acted.

I don't know really. But the Bush theories seem too easy.

[DJKillaQueen]

But just what threat was that? Iraq was never concerned with the US. Iraq was mostly concerned with the threat from Iran, her neighbour, that she had been at war with.

As for Clinton, it's impossible to know but one thing that IS known is that Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11.

[Magpie]

I agree it didn't - but 9/11 provided the political will and support from the US people for intervention overseas. Iraq was seen a another enemy of the US, and so although no link existed, a parallel could be drawn between Saddamm and the Taliban.

Bluerevolution - suggest you stop believing in fairy stories

[Bluerevolution]

Ok Magpie. I'll stop reading articles by well respected journalists and start reading The Sun

[Huguenot]

I don't think claims that anyone had SOMETHING or NOTHING to do with anything are helpful.

They assume that political issues are a series of correlated direct cause and effect scenarios. Great for tabloids, but unrelated to the real world.

Sarah Palin didn't give Jared Loughner a loaded Glock with an extended magazine.

There are plenty of psychological studies that demonstrate that 'venting' angry thoughts escalate them rather than giving them a safety valve.

Palin and her ilk created an environment within which confrontational lunatics with death wishes could flourish.

I'd just like to anticipate some of the cretins who will respond to this observation with slack jawed simplistic assertions, that it doesn't mean I want to see Palin in jail. Likewise 9-11 doesn't mean it's an excuse to invade Iraq.

You can either see the wood, or start fiddling amongst the trees. Most people on this thread are arguing about whether it's a birch or a beech.

300 million US citizenry (and 60 million UK citizens) have flourished under an era of cheap oil and cheap commodities based on the impoverishment and slave labour of 6 billion people in the rest of the world. Iraq (and many future situations like it) are created because none of you are going to let that go easily.

[DJKillaQueen]

300 million US citizenry (and 60 million UK citizens) have flourished under an era of cheap oil and cheap commodities based on the impoverishment and slave labour of 6 billion people in the rest of the world. Iraq (and many future situations like it) are created because none of you are going to let that go easily.

That for me nails it. It is absolutely all about continuing the subjegation of these countries to the West.

[taper]

"That for me nails it. It is absolutely all about continuing the subjegation of these countries to the West."

Well it didn't work very well did it!

Whatever you think about the second Iraq war, the "All about Oil" mantra really is a dumb attempt to simplify a historcial event of huge complexity.

The West is less powerful now in global terms than it has been at any time since the end of the Second World War. This trend has accelerated in the last decade and looks set to continue.

[DJKillaQueen]

All of that is true but it won't stop the West from clinging on to what it can...which is H's point.

Note yesterday the annouced agreement between America and China.

[Huguenot]

Sorry, I confused myself...

[mockney piers]

Sorry hugenot, but I think you're only seeing woods and not even acknowledging trees.

Its a nice soundbite, but going to war has specific catalysts, motives and desires. Maintaining a way of life wasn't it, and as taper says, the power of the USA is at a real nadir (though still the most powerful nation in the world, it has cruelly exposed to everyone the limits of that power).

As I've said before I think the drive to expand NATO was its greatest strategic miscalulation in terms of the neocon desire to underline US supremacy, but installing Iran as the preeminent power in the middle east and serving up a semi-client state in the shape of the new Iraq (or at least in future the southern half as DJKQ aslluded to) was all pretty rubbish.

That doesn't mean I don't agree with the wider point about the west's desire to subjagate the rest of the world in order to maintain a status quo that's very good for us (yep, you, me, even snorky), it's just you do that with banks, not troops.

That's why we'll never be able to touch the Assyrians, they are impervious to the winds of globalism!

[Huguenot]

I don't agree Piersy.

I think people are taking a far too focused approach, and like trying to identify an object through a magnified image of an obscure corner, what they're seeing just doesn't make sense.

I think the talk os specific catalysts over simplifies and misrepresents the situation - I've too much experience of people who either search for excuses to justify a course of action to which they're already committed, or else post rationalise to explain away motivations they'd rather not face.

In this case there were certainly catalysts, but in our revisionist approach we consistently overlook the fact that if the same set of events had taken place in a country that doesn't carry huge reserves of critical resources we simply do nothing.

To identify the motivation you strip away catalysts until you find the one that was unique to this scenario. I can see only one - oil.

[mockney piers]

No, you cant have that. You specifically said it was about maintaining our way of life.

We were achieving that anyway. The US was Iraq's biggest customer, and though far from peak production, the oil flowed.

The west continued as it always did. In terms of energy security the west has more to fear from Chinese energy/resource demands and Russian paranoia/instability/energy power madness [delete as appropriate] than it has anything to gain from an iraqi invasion.

Oil is at a record high, the only winners are Amoco, BP, Halliburton etc.

Indeed those trillions would have been better spent on windfarms, the US would be in a much sounder position now.

[taper]

"if the same set of events had taken place in a country that doesn't carry huge reserves of critical resources we simply do nothing. "

Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan?

For interest, see Philip Sands's contemporaneous review of John Kampfner's Blair's Wars here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/28/politicalbooks.politics

Both are on the anti side. But Sands presents what seems to me a balanced appraisal of the motivations at play on this side of the pond:

"The Prime Minister's foreign and military policy, such as it is, is developed on the basis of secretive intelligence, an overarching and passionate commitment to the 'special relationship' with the United States (on the basis of shared values) and an emerging commitment to some vague concept of 'international community' (which presumes to allow a small group of countries to act pre-emptively for the benefit of humankind as a whole).

Whim and hope are added for good measure. And all of this driven by the personality of a Prime Minister described as a combination of 'naivety and hubris' and 'self-confidence and fear', informed by an almost evangelic commitment to right and wrong and a belief in his personal powers of persuasion. This book disabuses us of any sense that there was, in relation to Iraq, some sort of coherent long-term plan"

More damning than I'd be, but it seems to me a fuller and more tenable assessment than others I've seen.

[mockney piers]

valid in terms of Blair's motivation which had some commonality to Clinton's administration.

This philosophy not only lost credence in Bush's, it was practically anathema

[nashoi]

Surely one good reason for examining the specific reasons for going to war, is to see how they may have contributed to the balls up they made of the aftermath. Even though I think the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was necessary and justified given the circumstances in 2003 (and no I'm not talking WMDs), doing the right thing for the wrong reasons could well have contributed significantly to the problems Iraq has since faced.

Rumsfield and Cheney are committed idealogues fighting a religious war, only their religion is about economic liberalism as much as Jesus. It was these two, who after meeting Laffer in the early 70's, started promoting his curve theory to justify tax cuts. In the run up to the invasion Rumsfield privatised huge chunks of the American military machine then spent $1trn on the war most of which never left the states, simply passing from the public purse into the private one. This attitude contributed to far too few troops being used, far too many private contractors and the disastrous split between the defence and state departments.

[mockney piers]

Blimey, discipline your thinking.

Rumsfeld was purely and simply an idiot. Cheney was canny, but hugely wrong in his thinking. If his theories had been borne out by the invasion we'd all be discussing cheney doctrine. Were not. Whoops.

I'm afraid you can't examine reasons for doing something by analysing how wrong it all went afterwards. All you can do is infer that they didn't really think much about it because their goals were simultaneously short term (overthrow sad dam and enjoy the adorationofnthe liberated) and strategic (teach the world a lesson, you don't mess with USA....oh actually you can and then we'll buy you off).

s I've always said, imperialism is always always morally wrong, but don't listen to me, I don't see that much wrong with fur.

[nashoi]

I wasn't trying to infer there was anything sophisticated in their thinking. Simply the extreme right performing an opportunistic smash and grab on the treasury, nothing new or clever there. Nor am I claiming that was the their main motivation, which was stopping Saddam geting control of such a large chunk of the worlds energy supply.

[mockney piers]

Sorry I sounded a bit harsh.

Bombing on though, I have two issues with your assertions.

1) 'smash and grab'? the treasury is far far poorer for another expensive war, that's the problem with modern weapons, they cost a lot.

2) what was saddam threatening to get hold of? The US might have been trying to install a client state in case of 'losing' Saudi arabia the way they did Iran, but saddam was in no way shape or form a threat.

To get a chunk of the worlds supply he'd have to conquer Iran, and, well, he tried that one and several million dead and eight years later, he won the war, but won nothing from it.

[katie1997]

SimonM Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> 2/10

Blimey, I'd say 10/10.

Sorry Tarot, I used to wonder what SeanMcGabhann meant when he used the 'T' word. I think I understand now.

(BP and Amoco are one and the same btw) and its all about the oil.

[Tarot]

:-SSean is never far off the mark.

[nashoi]

mockney piers Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Sorry I sounded a bit harsh.

>

> Bombing on though, I have two issues with your

> assertions.

>

> 1) 'smash and grab'? the treasury is far far

> poorer for another expensive war, that's the

> problem with modern weapons, they cost a lot.

> 2) what was saddam threatening to get hold of? The

> US might have been trying to install a client

> state in case of 'losing' Saudi arabia the way

> they did Iran, but saddam was in no way shape or

> form a threat.

> To get a chunk of the worlds supply he'd have to

> conquer Iran, and, well, he tried that one and

> several million dead and eight years later, he won

> the war, but won nothing from it.

1) Yes the treasury is poorer, but a number of contractors are much richer, this wasn't somekind of twisted keynesianism, just making chums in the newly expanded military industrial complex rich.

2) Having been thwarted by Iran he then turned his attention to Kuwait. Successively invading two of your neighbours, starting within months of taking power, is evidence enough for me of somewhat megalomaniac expansionist ambitions.

Just curious, as I'm quite inexperienced in this whole internet forum business, but is their a Godwin's type law for using the phrase 'military industrial complex'?

[mockney piers]

You get no argument from me that the likes of Boeing, General Dynamics (not to mention Halliburton again...oops) and so on get richer whilst rome burns (or New Orleans sinks, or the coastline gets sticky etc etc).

But I don't see nefarious conspiracies, secret meetings in masonic lodges. I just see the entire make up of the United States since the Second World War. It's a collective lunacy that the US remains rich by being a military empire. That's what got it out of depression and noone has had the political balls to do anything about it.

Of course it likes to dress this up in friendly altruistic terms, protecting the world from the evil empire or those damned turrists, but that's essentially what it is. That's why Vietnam was so, so traumatic, because they got to look through the looking glass, and napalming children wasn't what the good guys did.

That's why the Clinton era is lokoed at as such a disaster in terms of foreign policy, not just by the neocons, but by Americans. There was no real enemy, and being the world policeman seemed to involve unsettling pictures of us soldiers dragged through streets, or watching your jets bomb a serbian bridge nine times in a row. And military cuts coincided with economic difficulties; coincidence? Probably, but try persuading the political classes over there of that.

Regards the megolmania, that's as may be, but those events had been 23 and 13 years previous to the invasion, so there was hardly an urgent imperative to his removal.

And the answer to the new godwin rules is yes, lets call it Nashoi's Law!

[LadyDeliah]

Huguenot Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I'm not saying that we should go to war over trade

> disputes DJKQ, although historically Britain goes

> to war for very few other reasons.

>

> I'm saying that the threat to oil supplies

> threatens the existence of the UK, and this may

> well lead to war on the basis of national

> security. If you think that's nonsense then you

> need to read up on it a bit more.

>

> I'm not saying I agree with the decision either.

> Personally I think the idea of a nation state is a

> tired 17th century concept that's well past it's

> sell-by date.

I would agree with this. All wars are for economic reasons but the need to bring the population on board means that deception is used and excuses from national security, religion, helping the people we invade etc are all used to bring the population along with the invasion.

[minkturtle]

...

[taper]

"All wars are for economic reasons"

No they're not