Iraq

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Chilcot Inquiry is a pointless endeavour. Tony Blair’s critics will never be satisfied.

I never really saw the point of the Chilcot Inquiry and nothing that has happened in the years since it first sat has persuaded me I was wrong to think it liable to prove a waste of time, effort and money. Dear old Peter Oborne pops up in today’s Telegraph to confirm the good sense of these suspicions. Chilcot, you see, is most unlikely to satisfy Tony Blair’s critics, far less provide the “smoking gun” proving that the Iraq War was a stitched-up, born-again conspiracy promoted by George W Bush and eagerly, even slavishly, supported by Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. This is not an argument about truth. If Chilcot fails

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Rehabilitation of George W Bush: A Sisyphean Task

Freddy Gray is quite correct: the drive to rehabilitate George W Bush is suspicious. It is also a dog that won’t hunt. It is true that recent opinion polls have reported that Dubya is more popular than when he left office but this is surely chiefly a consequence of the public forgetfulness. Returning to the spotlight can only be bad news for Bush’s reputation. It will remind people why they were so pleased to be rid of him in the first place. Because, in the end, an administration bookended by the worst terrorist attack in American history and the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression can’t be spun as

Wednesday

Steven Mcgregor

Fobbit by David Abrams – review

Fobbit, by David Abrams, is an attempt at describing a wartime tour from different perspectives, including soldiers and support personnel. Chapter by chapter our viewpoint rotates within this cast of characters.  Indeed, for every three infantrymen, five soldiers are required in forward deployed locations to cook, care for wounded, file paperwork, et cetera. Abrams himself performed such a support role as a public affairs officer deployed to Baghdad in 2005. Spending most of his time on Forward Operating Bases or FOBs, Abrams was one of many Fobbits, a kind of GWOT technocrat, fighting the war from behind a desk. Two characters feature in the narrative, the Fobbit Staff Sergeant Chance

Wednesday

Damien Lewis

Zero Six Bravo proves that too much secrecy over Special Forces is a bad thing

Zero Six Bravo tells of 60 Special Forces operators forced to remain silent in the face of accusations of ‘cowardice’ and ‘running away from the Iraqis’ in the 2003 war. In the face of such savage media criticism, and being branded as ‘incompetent cowards’ who ran an ‘operation cluster f___’ in Iraq, the men who served in this epic mission had no way to tell their own side of the story and clear their names. Why? For two main reasons. First, because the MOD operates a policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’ anything regarding UK Special Forces. This extends to neither confirming nor denying the very existence of such elite

Thursday

Steerpike

The spy who went into the fold?

What are the Times trying to say about noted Spectator fan and new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby? They have delved into his past. It turns out to have been rather eventful; but they’ve left unexplained the connections between the many interesting dots in Welby’s life. The Thunderer exposé reveals that Welby and his wife ‘volunteered as a young couple to brave the secret police of communist Europe by smuggling Bibles’, adding, intriguingly: ‘The newlyweds were provided with a camper van by the Dutch-based East European Bible Mission for their trips to Czechoslovakia and Romania. Secret compartments and a false floor hid the biblical contraband. The Welbys were taught to

Kate Chisholm

After Saddam

‘The problem is why,’ said the health project officer of a British charity working in the marshlands of southern Iraq close to Basra. ‘No one answers why?’ He was talking to the BBC journalist Hugh Sykes about the state of Iraq, ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He agreed that the Americans and British had done ‘a good job’ in getting rid of the dictator but said that this had changed nothing in Basra, whose economy had been destroyed by Saddam as he drained the marshes, turning a landscape that was vivid green into burnt ochre. We also heard from the farmers who in the hours after Saddam’s

Tuesday

Martin Bright

The Iraq fury still burns, fuelled by unanswered questions

I was fascinated to read the reaction to Nick Cohen’s article expressing his view that after 10 years he still believed the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do. The heart of Nick’s argument is this: ‘I regret much: the disbanding of the Iraqi army; a de-Ba’athification programme that became a sectarian purge of Iraq’s Sunnis; the torture of Abu Ghraib; and a failure to impose security that allowed murderous sectarian gangs to kill tens of thousands.For all that, I say, I would not restore the Ba’ath if I had the power to rewind history. To do so would be to betray people who wanted something better after

Wednesday

Lesley Fabian

Craig Raine: Fiction is franker

Issue 39 of Areté starts with the words “MEMOIR ISSUE” on the front cover. It is dedicated to writing which remembers its author. Hence we get essays on Proust; Art Spiegelman’s MAUS; Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir Joseph Anton; and a terrific account of the monomania of bored US soldiers in Iraq, by an ex-US airborne ranger, among others. Craig Raine – Areté’s founder and editor – disguises his editorial line artfully. On p42 Candia McWilliam asks the question: ‘What have biography and fiction to give one another?’ Questions like this occur throughout Areté. They serve to frame Raine’s long, crux essay

Friday

Lloyd Evans

15 February 2003: What Do They Want? Victory for Saddam

Ten years ago today, Lloyd Evans joined the anti-Iraq war march in London. Evans had an open mind about the war, until he joined the peace movement and met Bianca Jagger. Here is the piece in full from our archive. I’m bursting with excitement. I can hardly get the words down fast enough. There was an amazing occurrence in Hackney last week at a meeting of the Stop the War coalition. I swear this happened. A protester said something perceptive. You don’t believe me? No, really, I was there. He was an old guy with white hair and a lovely crinkly face. ‘The bigger the march,’ he said ruefully. ‘The

Fraser Nelson

What if the stop the war protesters had got their way?

It’s the 10th anniversary of the Stop the War protest today, which led me to think about a point Christopher Hitchens once made: how the world would look if the ‘stop the war’ protests – in their various forms – had their way? Saddam Hussein would be lord and master of the annexed Kuwait, his terrorised citizens living in a country once described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below it. The Kurds may not have held out against him, the Shi’ite south still brutally repressed. Slobodan Milosevic would be a European dictator, having made Bosnia part of a Greater Serbia and ethnically cleansed Kosovo. Afghanistan

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Iraq War’s Real Victims? Laurie Penny and the Narcissistic Left

Don’t take my word for it. Ask the redoubtable Ms Penny herself. Contemplating the “lesson” of the anti-war protests a decade ago, she writes: Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain into the Americans’ war in Iraq was an immediate, material calamity for millions of people in the Middle East. I’m writing here, though, about the effect of that decision on the generation in the west who were children then and are adults now. For us, the sense of betrayal was life-changing. We had thought that millions of people making their voices heard would be enough and we were wrong. Poor lambs. Of course there were millions of people around the

Monday

Steven Mcgregor

War is not to be envied

Donald Anderson is a former US Air Force Colonel and current professor of English Literature at the US Air Force Academy. His new book, Gathering Noise from my Life: A Camouflaged Memoir, is a controlled crash, like all landings. It skips and judders, the wheels skidding across the tarmac, until finally the plane is at rest. One line aphorisms such as, ‘William Burroughs was for thieving and against paraphrasing altogether,’ are followed by paragraphs which, every so often, glide into anecdotes mingling observations of war with memories of a small town upbringing in Butte, Montana. Given a setting in which rugged individualism is a generational mantle, it is not surprising

Tuesday

Alex Massie

If Barack Obama is an isolationist then isolationism no longer has any meaning – Spectator Blogs

Con Coughlin suggests Barack Obama has “given up” fighting al-Qaeda which, frankly, is a curious assessment given the ongoing drone war (and other operations) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Roger Kimball, however, makes Coughlin look like a piker since, according to Kimball, Obama’s inauguration speech yesterday contained shades of Neville Chamberlain. Yes, really. These may be extreme reactions but there is evidently a widespread sense that Obama is some form of “neo-isolationist” hellbent on retreating from a big, bad and dangerous world so he may instead concentrate upon our old chum “nation-building at home”. If by this you mean Obama is unlikely, as matters presently stand, to send 250,000 American troops

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Cabinet row over imprisoned SAS soldier

A lunchtime spat has broken out over Sergeant Danny Nightingale, the SAS serviceman who was sentenced to 18 months in prison by a court martial after pleading guilty to possession of a prohibited firearm (a 9mm Glock pistol) and ammunition. Sgt Nightingale’s case has attracted wide public support. His friends and family said that the pistol, which was a ‘war gift’ from Iraqi soldiers he mentored in 2007, had not been packed by him, and added that a brain injury had made him forget that it was among his possessions. Supporters say that, owing to these facts, the sentence is unduly harsh. The government’s hand has been forced. The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond,

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Annals of Neoconservative Delusion: Leaving Iraq Edition – Spectator Blogs

Douglas Murray’s latest post is a rum ‘un indeed. He asks us to believe that Barack Obama’s “foreign policy boasts” are unraveling now that the American election is usefully out the way. I must say that the evidence for this is thin, not least since it seems to rely upon 1. A reported Iranian attack on a US drone, 2. General Petraeus having an affair, 3. The existence of long-planned Congressional hearings on the Benghazi nonsense and 4. The Iraqi government’s decision to release from gaol a suspected Hezbollah operative responsible for an ambush in which five American troops were killed. If this amounts to “unraveling” then I guess the

Douglas Murray

Barack Obama’s foreign policy boast unravels after election

What a lot of things President Obama seems to have been holding back until after his re-election. Each day brings something new. There has been the news of an attack by Iran on a US drone in the Persian Gulf. Then there is the Petraeus affair – known about for months, but only leading to the CIA chief’s resignation immediately after Obama’s re-election. The Benghazi hearings are yet to come. And now another surprise. It transpires that the Iraqi government, a body which is only in power because of the sacrifice of thousands of American, British and other allied troops, is releasing from custody a senior Hezbollah terrorist who was

Saturday

James Forsyth

David Petraeus quits as CIA director over affair

Few people have been more important in America’s recent wars than David Petraeus. Petraeus led the surge of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and redefined the US approach to counter-insurgency warfare. He was the most influential military figure of the post-war era and successful enough for some of those close to Obama to hold deep concerns about the prospect of Petraeus running against Obama. 14 months ago, he was put in charge of the CIA by President Obama. There he expanded Predator strikes to Yemen and pushed for a larger drone fleet. But yesterday, Petraeus resigned over an extra-marital affair with his biographer. It is a sad end to

Friday

Tim Marshall

‘Arab Spring’ is a misnomer

What do you do when confronted with a prejudice so strong it takes your breath away? In my case, I did what was immediately necessary. I took a deep breath to replenish lost oxygen, and moved on. It wasn’t the time or place to take on this particularly ugly example of intolerance; but it is an intolerance which needs to recognised. I was giving a lecture at a charity that trains journalists from around the world. Some are already making their way in the industry and are expected to do well. I was talking about my theory that the term ‘Arab Spring’ actually clouds our understanding of what has been

Thursday

Sunder Katwala

How should we mark the Great War’s centenary?

It seems strange now to recall that, it was not so many years ago, around the time of the millennium, that some in Whitehall were talking about how to scale down Remembrance Sunday. One theory was that marking the centenaries of the start and end of the Great War could also mark an appropriate moment to bring the solemn Cenotaph ceremonials to a gentle end. The assumption was that Remembrance would gradually lose its resonance and relevance once the generations who fought the Great War had all passed on. Such thinking did also reflect the mistaken New Labour view of the Dome era: that Britain would be able to face

Monday

Rod Liddle

Iraq and the BBC revisited

Just finished reading a book by Kevin Marsh, the editor of the Today programme at the time of the whole Gilligan-Campbell-Kelly business which saw the director general of the BBC kicked out of the corporation. It hasn’t aroused very much interest, largely because it contains no new information which would either exonerate the programme or the government. And because stylistically it is not an untrammelled pleasure. I think Stephen Robinson, in the Sunday Times, got it about right: “It takes a particular type of journalistic incompetence to cede the moral high ground on the Iraq war to Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair, but this book…….confirms that the BBC and Marsh