Tag Archives: Tony Blair

Britain, Foreign Affairs, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Uncategorized, United States

The bloody shambles in Iraq…

IRAQ

Amid the despicable violence and rising tide of horror stories emanating from Iraq, there seems to be little constructive thought emerging from Western politicians on how to solve the political and humanitarian issues that are directly confronting the country.

Politicians have become like panic-stricken rabbits caught in the headlights of an oncoming motor vehicle. What is more, they do not appear to know which way to go.

The one thing that they do know is that something must be done in curbing the barbaric savagery and advances of the Islamic State (IS). Developing a viable and effective strategy, however, against the brutal campaign of the IS has, so far, clearly been beyond their competence.

Many military commentators and strategists will strongly believe that military intervention must be instigated only as a matter of last resort. Many of them did oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the cold-blooded murder of an American photojournalist, James Foley, this week, along with the Islamic State’s continued genocidal attempts to extinguish religious minorities, will have made many to believe that there is now a powerful and practical moral case for intervening against the insurgents of IS.

What the world is witnessing is the terrible and awful consequences of the so-called Arab Spring, so naively celebrated by almost all Western leaders just a few months ago.

Many people who have watched and read news reports from this embattled and disintegrating region will be aghast and mortified as events have unfolded. Intervention must now be given a high political priority to protect the lives of Iraqis and to restrain the rising and rapacious tide of the Islamic State.

Some western interventions in the past have proved highly successful and were no-doubt of an enormous benefit to civilians caught up in war torn countries. For any intervention to succeed there must be clear direction from the politicians. Sadly, though, this is distinctly lacking within Iraq as the West’s leaders seem to stumbling over themselves as they try to configure exactly what they want to achieve.

Given our recent involvement in two bloody and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq we should have grave fears that western politicians do not have a clear idea of what form such military intervention should now take. For it is imperative that before we even consider sending so much as one British soldier back to Iraq, our government strategists must decide with absolute clarity and precision the objective of the mission.

They must commit sufficient resources to ensure the job is done with as little risk as is possible to the lives of those who are sent to a land that is fraught with danger. If our intervention is based on half-thought-through plans and weak intelligence, this risks not only further treasure being plundered in terms of financial resources and human lives expended but could embroil us in another almighty mess of a war.

Any ill-conceived plan would be both dangerous for our already depleted military and, in the longer term, precarious for Britain’s standing on the world stage.

Crucially, any cogent plan must involve our intelligence services providing the information on which highly-targeted and heavy air strikes can be launched. The success of these should mean that few boots will be required on the ground and that our involvement be over in a matter of months.

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As the situation deteriorates in Iraq, the country where the current unravelling of security across the Middle East started with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, we owe it to the Iraqis to halt the advance of extremists and then help to restore peace and order.

Furthermore, our credibility in the West depends on us doing something more than just launching pin-prick air strikes or dropping bags of rice to help the thousands of innocent people caught up in this appalling civil war.

We have faced similar problems before, most notably in Afghanistan in 2001 when the Americans, supported by the British, launched a highly successful campaign against the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group that had ruled the country for five years.

At the time, the Taliban were as brutal and powerful as the Islamic State are today and they, too, wanted to drag the country back to 7th Century-style rule.

But, within just six weeks, the US-led invasion, which had the simple objective to eliminate the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, had been successfully completed.

The strategic key to this successful campaign was that much of the fighting on the ground was not done by Western forces but by Afghans themselves.

The U.S. and UK restricted their military involvement to providing intelligence, air power and Special Forces on the ground, who worked alongside local people.

Unfortunately, military success in toppling the Taliban was not followed up by any coherent plan, and President George W. Bush transferred his attention, along with most military and economic resources, away from Afghanistan to Iraq.

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Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein we must learn from our failings.

In 2007, an insurgency by Sunni extremists threatened to overwhelm the country. Washington realised that the only way to prevent civil war was to gain the support of the country’s Sunni minority by making the Shia-run government include them in Iraq’s political process.

And so, with that bipartisan approach, the U.S. cleverly set about winning the support of the Sunni tribal leaders and helped to arm their militias.

Yet, today’s Western leaders seem unable to learn from that experience nor understand the basic principles that could lead to any kind of stability in Iraq. Unless the Sunnis feel involved in the political process, there will never be peace in the country.

With this in mind, the key to any solution now is for the West to offer military support to the Sunni tribal leaders, who, in return, must dissociate themselves wholesale from the Islamic State. This could well materialise as the majority of Sunnis have been alienated by the organisation’s fundamentalism and extreme brutality.

The fact is that the Islamic State, which is tactically exposed and lacks both sustainability and popular support, is no match for a combination of U.S. intelligence, close combat air support and Special Forces operating on the ground, who would work with local militias.

As we see, the present, albeit somewhat limited, U.S. military intervention is already demonstrating what can be done in the north of Iraq. Not only have the insurgents been halted in their advance towards the Kurdish capital of Irbil but the strategically important Mosul Dam and several villages have now been recaptured by the Kurdish Peshmerga with the help of U.S. air strikes.

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The question for strategists is whether Barack Obama and David Cameron can get their act together by setting clear objectives – and, most crucially promise the Iraqi people that they won’t be abandoned in the same way the Afghans were in 2001. If such objectives can be set then there is every chance that the terrorist organisation running amok in Iraq can be destroyed.

But, we should fear, the signs are not good.

It was, for example, extremely unwise of the prime minister to limit his military options by declaring that he will never have ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq. By saying this, he was excluding the possible involvement of our own Special Forces, who have worked tirelessly and successfully with their U.S. counterparts in similar situations before.

Sadly, also, any combat air support provided by the RAF is likely to be only token, given the disastrous defence cuts that have so significantly reduced the number of combat squadrons.

In any case, military action by itself cannot solve the underlying problems of Iraq.

The election of a new prime minister probably does bode well for Iraq’s future than what it did under his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, who deeply divided the country.

Elsewhere, neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait will universally support the return of the Sunnis to the political arena. They were never comfortable with the idea that the Shias should permanently rule Iraq.

Some of these countries may, indeed, have once backed the Islamic State in the hope that Iraq might one day be ruled by the Sunnis. But as events have shown they now don’t have any proper control of an organisation that has become savagely inhuman in its actions.

Ultimately, it will not be the extremist Islamic State which decides the future of Iraq. That will be for the Iraqi people themselves and for their neighbouring countries.

After the turbulent years following the negligent and wrong decision of George W. Bush and Tony Blair to invade their country, that’s the very least the Iraqis deserve from the two men’s successors in Washington and London.

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Britain, European Union, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, Society, United Nations, United States

Former diplomats lead calls for Tony Blair to be axed as Middle East Peace Envoy…

TONY BLAIR

Intro: An open letter led by ex-diplomats, and signed by thousands more, calls for the former British Prime Minister who went to war on a lie and based on a false prospectus to be axed as Middle East peace envoy

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THREE former UK ambassadors to the Middle East have joined a new demand and are campaigning for Tony Blair to be removed from his role as Middle East ‘peace’ envoy.

Signatories to an open letter, led by Mr Blair’s former ambassador to Iran Sir Richard Dalton, describes his achievements in the region as ‘negligible’, criticising his money-making activities and accuse him of trying to ‘absolve himself’ of responsibility for the crisis in Iraq.

Other former diplomats lending their weight to the letter are Sir Oliver Miles, Britain’s ambassador to Libya when relations were severed after the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, and Christopher Long, ambassador to Egypt between 1992 and 1995. Joining more than 4,000 signatories are human rights barrister Michael Mansfield QC, former London mayor Ken Livingstone and former Conservative prisons minister Crispin Blunt.

The letter has been organised by the makers of Respect MP George Galloway’s film The Killing of Tony Blair. It has been deliberately timed for this week’s seventh anniversary of Mr Blair’s appointment as envoy on the Middle East for the ‘quartet’ of the UN, the EU, Russia and the US, and is addressed to John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and to the EU’s ‘foreign minister’.

It argues that Mr Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq is to blame for the rise of “fundamentalist terrorism in a land where none existed previously” and that he should be removed from his position.

The letter says: “We are appalled by Iraq’s descent into a sectarian conflict that threatens its existence as a nation, as well as the security of its neighbours. We are also dismayed at Tony Blair’s attempts to absolve himself of any responsibility for the current crisis by isolating it from the legacy of the Iraq war.”

It is alleged that Mr Blair ‘misled the British people’ by suggesting Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It adds: ‘It is a cruel irony for the people of Iraq that perhaps the invasion’s most enduring legacy has been the rise of fundamentalist terrorism in a land where none existed previously.

‘We believe Mr Blair, as a vociferous advocate of the invasion, must accept a degree of responsibility for its consequences.’

Criticising the former prime minister’s business interests, the letter alleges that his ‘conduct in his private pursuits also calls into question his suitability for the role’, and accuses him of ‘blurring the lines between his public position as envoy and his private roles at Tony Blair Associates and the investment bank JPMorgan Chase’.

The letter adds to growing calls for Mr Blair to stand down. In the last few days the former foreign secretary Lord Owen criticised Mr Blair for his claims that the 2003 invasion was not a factor in the current unrest in Iraq. “Tony Blair should no longer be allowed to speak for the EU on the Middle East, and someone else found for helping Palestine without his past record and crusading messianic fervour,” he said.

A spokesman for Mr Blair said: ‘These are all people viscerally opposed to Tony Blair with absolutely no credibility in relation to him whatsoever. Their attack is neither surprising nor newsworthy… They include the alliance of hard Right and hard Left views which he has thought against all his political life. Of course he completely disagrees with them over the Middle East.’

People are being urged to support the call for Mr Blair to be removed by signing the petition at www.change.org.

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Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Iraq, Military, National Security, United States

The scandal of the Afghanistan war that no one is to blame…

BRITISH INVOLVEMENT IN AFGHANISTAN

Intro: The futility and waste of British lives in Afghanistan far exceeds that in Iraq. The end of our involvement there is greeted with a mixture of silence and boredom. But these heroic sacrifices require an official inquiry, not least to the memory of the soldiers that died

There is a widespread and justified consensus that we were finagled into a war in Iraq by Tony Blair which has cost Britain dear. On Iraq, there have been several official inquiries, of which the last, chaired by former mandarin Sir John Chilcot, has yet to report. Sir John has been held back in his reporting because the Chilcot inquiry wishes to release information into the public domain not yet seen and whose release is being opposed by the British Government. Of all the inquiries that have been held not one was ever given the terms of reference to examine openly the political machinery used in making the decision that took Britain to war with Iraq.

The war in Afghanistan was, by most measures, an even bigger enterprise. According to the Government, it has cost us £20 billion, though some observers believe it may be as high as £40 billion.

Britain’s engagement in Afghanistan cost the lives of 448 servicemen and women. That’s two and half times the number of fatalities in the Iraq War (179), and getting on for twice the number killed during the Falklands War (258).

Yet, the most extraordinary thing about our involvement in Afghanistan is that neither the political class nor the general public are noticeably worked up about it. Afghanistan has stirred far less debate and controversy than Iraq, and the end of our involvement has been greeted with a mixture of silence and boredom.

Unbelievably, too, there are few, if any, calls for an inquiry into a war which began in early 2006 with the hope expressed by the then Defence Secretary, John Reid, that our troops might soon return ‘without a shot being fired’.

Whilst we may have been duped into the Iraq War by Tony Blair, there were at least dossiers that argued for the case for war, albeit misleadingly, and debates were had in Parliament. In the case of Afghanistan, we shuffled blindfolded into hostilities with no clear plan, no exit strategy, and with virtually no discussion.

Instead of the silence or indifference, there remains an overwhelming case for the most robust analysis of how we drifted into what many analysts believe has been a futile war that has achieved very little.

Our involvement in Afghanistan began after the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001. The decision to topple the Taliban regime by President George W Bush – which he believed harboured Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the outrages committed against America – was supported by Mr Blair, who said: ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.’

It was not until the spring of 2006 that British troops were despatched in any numbers to bring order to Helmand. Here, the Taliban were strong and resurgent, but the magnitude of the task was massively underestimated by Mr Blair’s government.

The justification was, and remained, that British streets would be safer as a result of our direct intervention. This was always a very doubtful proposition. For one thing, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have since strengthened enormously in other countries such as Yemen and Somalia. There have also been numerous planned attacks thwarted by our security and intelligence services, none of which have revealed any links to Afghanistan.

An inquiry on Afghanistan is needed so that Blair and Reid, and indeed David Cameron, who endlessly repeats the mantra that our servicemen have been dying to keep us safe, answer the clarion call as to where the evidence is to support this assertion?

These politicians should also be questioned about their failure to bring opium cultivation under control, which back in 2006 was offered by Tony Blair as a major reason for sending troops to Afghanistan. Production of the drug has soared, and hundreds of millions of pounds of aid has been wasted in uselessly attempting to curb it.

Members of Blair’s government, along with senior civil servants at the Ministry of Defence, should also be asked to explain why they sent young men and women to Afghanistan in Land Rovers that offered poor protection against hidden roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices. Dozens of troops have died in these vehicles which might otherwise have been saved if the politicians had bothered to give any prior thought to what they were doing. These are serious matters which should not be brushed aside.

Servicemen join up believing, even hoping, that someday they will be asked to fight. They have a right, though, to assume that their lives will be risked in a reasonable cause with an expectation of success, and that they will be given adequate weaponry and protection.

It seems incredible that there has been no proper official inquiry, although there have been parliamentary investigations which have lacked the clout or scope to be taken seriously.

The purpose of an inquiry is partly to try to make sure that mistakes are not repeated – that we do not go to war again on an agenda of shifting objectives, none of which is ever realised. And it’s partly to restore people’s faith in our political system as people have become inured to the idea of a government’s ineptitude and deviousness.

The British Government will declare a job well done in Helmand, yet people will look at rising opium production and know that the job was far from complete. Much of Helmand province, where our soldiers risked and gave their lives, is as lawless as it was eight years ago.

On Sunday, the Afghan presidential elections will be held. None of the candidates seems at all alluring. One is a Uzbek warlord once described by his running mate as a ‘known killer’.

Many doubt that the victor will be an improvement on the outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, who has presided over the world’s most corrupt government.

It was Karzai who recently suggested with mind-boggling ingratitude that the presence of British and other Western troops in his country had made things worse.

An official inquiry is the very least that should be offered to the memory of the soldiers who sacrificed their lives, and to their grieving families. Much blood and treasure has been squandered in an enterprise far more deluded than events which transpired in Iraq.

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