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This article by Alastair Crooke was published in Asia Times on line. Crooke is founder and director of Conflicts Forum and is a former adviser to the former EU Foreign Policy Chief, Javier Solana, from 1997-2003.

Syria: Straining credulity?
By Alastair Crooke

The UN Secretary General was reported on March 3 saying that he had received "grisly reports" that Syrian government forces were arbitrarily executing, imprisoning and torturing people in Homs after retaking control of the Baba Amr district from insurgents. Did he really believe this; or was he just "saying it"?

"One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims" the US officer assigned to the Deputy Chief of Staff (Intelligence), charged with defining the future of warfare, wrote in the US Army War College Quarterly in 1997.

"But fear not", he writes later in the article, for "we are already masters of information warfare ... Hollywood is 'preparing the battlefield' ... Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you [possibly] counterattack the information [warfare] others have turned upon you? [1]

"Our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures ... Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating."

This information warfare will not be couched in the rationale of geopolitics, the author suggests, but will be "spawned" - like any Hollywood drama - out of raw emotions. "Hatred, jealousy, and greed - emotions, rather than strategy - will set the terms of [information warfare] struggles".

Not only the US army, but it seems mainstream Western media insist that the struggle in Syria must be scripted in emotional image and moralistic statements that always - as the War College article rightly asserts - trump rational analysis.

The UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry condemns the Syrian government of crimes against humanity, but only on the basis of what the opposition says, and without having investigated evidence of opposition "crimes": and then proceeds to "charge" the Syrian government with this process based simply on "reasonable suspicion": Do they really believe what they have written, or is it just a part of "writing the script"? [2]

Having quite forgotten what US Marines did to Falluja in 2004 (6,000 dead and 60% of the city destroyed) when armed insurgents there also sought to establish a Salafist "Emirate" - the Western media focus on Homs gives vent to the indignant cry that "something must be done" to save the people of Homs from "massacre". The question of what effect exactly that something - whether external military intervention or providing heavier weapons for the insurgents - might be, and what its wider consequences might entail, meanwhile recedes entirely from view. Those with the temerity to get in the way of "this narrative" by arguing that external intervention would be disastrous, are roundly condemned as complicit in President Assad's crimes against humanity.

This school of journalism - the Guardian and Channel Four are good examples of this "I-was-there" reporting - that emphasizes the reporter as participant, and indeed victim, a co-sufferer amid the charged, heart-tugging emotional sufferings of war, uses emotive images precisely to underline that "something must be done". By focussing on mutilated bodies and weeping bereaved women they assert and determine that the conflict must be viewed as being of utmost moral simplicity - one of victims and aggressors.

"In Baba Amr. Sickening. Cannot understand how the world can stand by. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel: doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless". [3]

Those who try to argue that Western intervention can only exacerbate the crisis, are confronted by this unanswerable riposte of dead babies - literally. As the War College article so rightly states: how can you counter attack this manner of "information warfare" unleashed against the Syrian government who are on the receiving end of those "writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties"?

I too, saw such terrible sights in Afghanistan in the 1980s: It does of course create an emotional abyss into which the helpless spectator slips; but do these reporters really believe that innocents and children are not always the victims of conflict? Do they believe their personal distress to be somehow so primary that it must set aside all complexities, and all potential possibilities? Is more conflict the answer to the awful death of an infant?

This reductionist, emotional ardor is but a form of concealed political advocacy - little different to that of an information "warrior" such as AVAAZ, who help write and produce those info-war videos. [4] And while nobody openly endorses such "journalism of participation", this approach seems to have triumphed in certain journalistic quarters. And indeed it is creeping further: increasingly we see even certain Western diplomats acting as though they are "activists" and participants in the internal struggles of the states to which they are posted. What sort of reporting must their governments be getting?

Are we now to understand that the armed opposition, who originally brought Western journalists to Homs - and then insisted to exfiltrate them perilously, and at the cost of many lives, via Lebanon, rather than through the good offices of the Red Crescent to the nearest airport, were not motivated by a desire to advocate, and impel the argument for externally-imposed humanitarian corridors to be opened to Homs? In other words, were not witness to the construction of une piece de theatre in favor of a type of external intervention? Will a Kosovo-type solution will make things better in Syria?

What has become so striking is that, whilst this "information warfare" may have been almost irreversibly effective in demonizing President Assad in the West, it has also had the effect of "unanchoring" European and American foreign policy. It has become cast adrift from any real geo-strategic mooring. This has led to a situation in which European policy has become wholly suggestible to such "advocacy reporting", and the need to respond to it, moment-by- moment, in emotive, moralistic blasts of sound-bites accusing President Assad of having "blood on its hands".

In one sense the West inevitably has fallen hostage to its own information warfare: it has locked itself into a single understanding, stuck to a "singleness" of meaning: a simplistic victims-and-aggressor meme, which demands only the toppling of the aggressor. Europe, in this manner, effectively is cutting itself off from other options - precisely because the humanitarian theme, which policy-makers may have thought would suffice to see Assad easily deposed, now impedes any shift towards other options - such as a peaceful negotiated outcome.

But does anyone really believe American and European objectives in Syria were ever purely humanitarian? Is it not the case - given that the turnout of events in the Middle East are taking such an ominous and dangerous turn - that it has now becoming somewhat awkward openly to admit that their info-war was never primarily about reforming Syria, but about "regime change", and that it was that even from before the first protest erupted in Dera'a?

In his recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, [5] given in advance of President Obama's American Israel Public Affairs Committee speech, the president, inter alia, was questioned about Syria. His response was very clear:

GOLDBERG: Can you just talk about Syria as a strategic issue? Talk about it as a humanitarian issue, as well; but it would seem to me that one way to weaken and further isolate Iran is to remove or help remove Iran's only Arab ally.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Absolutely.

Do these Western interventionist proselytizers really believe that the onslaught on Syria is only about democracy and reform? Obama said it plainly. It was always about Iran. And, as Europe and America increasingly become bystanders to a Qatari and Saudi frenzy to overthrow a fellow Arab leader by any means it takes, do these "apostles" truly think that these absolute Arab monarchies simply share the Guardian's or Channel Four's nice humanitarian aspirations for Syria's future? Do these reporters really believe that the armed insurgents that Gulf states are financing and arming are nothing more than well-intentioned reformists, who have simply been driven to violence through Assad's incalcitrance? Some perhaps do, but others perhaps are simply "saying these things" to prepare the battlefield?

Notes:
1. Constant Conflict, Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14.
2. The United Nations Accuses Syria of "Crimes against Humanity",
3. The danger of reporters becoming 'crusaders', spiked-online.com, Feb 27, 2012.

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4. See 'How Avaaz Is Sponsoring Fake War Propaganda From Syria', March 3, 2012.
5. Obama to Iran and Israel: 'As President of the United States, I Don't Bluff'

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This seems to me a very clear description of the situation with respect to Syria and the Middle East in general. The purpose of the US occupation of Iraq was to ensure that they had a preponderant military force in the region over the next half century. But writing the script proved to be not sufficient. After winning the battle of Baghdad the US lost the war in Iraq and now they, and their Arabian friends, are confronted by an Iran that is now freed from the thread from Saddam Hussein and developing into a local big power. Its economic and military strength will dwarf that of all its neighbors except Turkey. Nuclear weapons wouldn't add anything to that so they will not be developed.
Syria, as friend of Iran, has now been selected for destruction as Libya has been destroyed but the realization proves to be difficult. The Assad regime is winning the "civil war".

130 ' terrorists surrender'

Reports say 130 people linked to terrorist groups in Syria have surrendered. If true it could be provide the Syrian government with useful information and evidence about these groups.

Not sure if this is an unconfirmed rumour or just someone jumping the gun or what, but the French wire service AFP has been reporting that the Israeli Security Cabinet voted 8-6 yesterday to authorize action against Iran; previously,

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in Israel had reported the same (in Hebrew). I'm not a particular fan of AFP (or any of the other major newswires, for a variety of reasons), but the fact that one of the Big 3 Newswires is in fact reporting this - whatever it really is - makes it at least noteworthy, if not entirely credible:

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, AFP, Ahram Online, Thursday, 15 March, 2012:

8 out of 6 members of Israel's security cabinet are in favour of a strike against Iran, says influential columnist

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The author of the report is Ben Caspit of NRG's Maariv Daily. More at the link.

In other, more verifiable (but similarly cheery) news (though not ME-related), see

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; don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Mohamed ElBaradei has written a book about his time as leader of IAEA - The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times
A review is published by Asia Times on line:

BOOK REVIEW
Compelling case for Iraq war crime tribunal


The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times by Mohamed ElBaradei

Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi

This book, eloquently written by a former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is a must read, both for the wealth of information it provides on the contentious issues of global nuclear diplomacy as well as for the passionate and compelling case that it presents for a war crime tribunal to prosecute United States and British leaders who instigated the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction.

In blunt yet sincere language steeped in international law, ElBaradei writes that in light of the US's complete "disdain for international norms" in its invasion of Iraq, the United Nations should request an opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as to the legality of the Iraq war.

Convinced that the overwhelming weight of evidence favors a negative verdict if the ICJ ever braved such an initiative, ElBaradei then makes a case for the International Criminal Tribunal to "investigate whether this constitutes a war crime". (pg 87)

Irrespective, ElBaradei is so morally outraged by the blatant pulverization of a sovereign Middle East country by a Western superpower and its allies that he also advises the Iraqis to demand war reparations - that is sure to amount to tens of billions of dollars.

If for nothing else, this book's value - in putting self-righteous Western powers on the defensive and depicting them as essentially rogue states that have caused a new global anarchy by their willful exercise of power without much regard for the rights of others - is indispensable.

Divided into 12 chapters with a useful conclusion on the future of nuclear diplomacy, the book covers nearly three decades of the author's involvement with various cases, ie, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Iran, the notorious "nuclear bazaar of Abdul Qadeer Khan" in Pakistan, as well as nuclear asymmetry and the hypocrisy and double standard, not to mention outright deceptions, marking the behavior of US and other Western countries (along the familiar North-South divide).

In the chapters on Iraq, ElBaradei defends the cherished record of his agency in refusing to act as a sounding board for post 9/11 warmongering US policies, which earned him the occasional venom of US media that questioned his integrity. In fact, ElBaradei is equally critical of the compliant Western media that often act as indirect apparatuses of state despite their wild claims of neutrality and objectivity.

Although much of what ElBaradei writes about the US-British deceptions to go to war in Iraq is already well-known, it is instructive to revisit those "grotesque distortions" - as he puts it - from a reputable source who for years was caught in the maelstrom of contesting politics of non-proliferation.

With respect to the British role under premier Tony Blair, whom he accuses of a false alarm on Iraq's chemical weapon capability, ElBaradei actually underestimates the degree to which London influenced Washington on Iraq, characterizing this instead as a "one-way street" with the British "acting as apologists for US". (pg 67).

But, ElBaradei is not a foreign policy expert and his shortcoming, in detecting the American foreign policy elite's vulnerability with respect to British political influence, is forgivable. This is a minor defect in a solid contribution that sheds much light on how the US manipulated the UN atomic agency as "bit players" in its scheme to invade Iraq.

It shows the Pandora's box opened by the IAEA when it agreed to receive foreign intelligence from member states spying on others, thus opening the door to calibrated disinformation often beyond the ability of the agency and its meager resources to authenticate.

As a result, today the IAEA has turned into a de facto ''nuclear detective agency" that constantly receives tips from Western clients targeting specific countries. Sooner or later, either this unhealthy situation is rectified or we must expect more gaping holes in the agency's credibility.

With respect to North Korea, which has exited the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and proliferated nuclear weapons without much international backlash, ElBaradei blames the US's failure to live up to its agreed commitment and the fallacy of "attempts to contain proliferation ambitions through confrontation, sanctions, and isolation". (Pg 109)

He also writes about Libya's voluntary disarmament in 2004, a decision that the late Muammar Gaddafi now regrets in his grave, given the likelihood that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have thought twice about attacking Libya under the guise of "responsibility to protect", thus making a mockery of the UN, if Tripoli had retained a nuclear shield.

For sure, this issue must loom large on the mind of many developing nations that have clashing interests with the (increasingly bullying) Western powers.

ElBaradei has devoted a whole chapter to the subject of nuclear double standards that discusses, for instance, how South Korea's clear evidence of non-compliance was shoved under the rug by the US in 2004 simply because it is a US allay.

The US and other privileged nuclear-have nations have been derelict in their NPT obligations to move toward nuclear disarmament, some, like France and Britain, modernizing their arsenals, while at the same time having the audacity of taking the moral high ground against countries suspected of clandestine proliferation.

ElBaradei writes that in the Middle East, "The greatest source of frustration and anxiety was the regional asymmetry of military power symbolized by Israel's arsenal." (pg 223) And yet, Israel, which since its bombardment of Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981 has been mandated by the UN Security Council to place its nuclear facilities under the IAEA inspections, has evaded this obligation with impunity.

Regarding Iran, extensively dealt with in four chapters, ElBaradei seeks to present a balanced account that pinpoints the chronology of events, interactions and negotiations that are still ongoing as of this date, thus making the book an indispensable tool for those who follow the developments in the Iran nuclear crisis.

Since his retirement from the IAEA, ElBaradei has repeatedly gone on record to state that during his tenure at the agency he never saw any evidence that Iran was proliferating nuclear weapons.

What is more, he informs readers that after the 2007 US intelligence report that confirmed that Iran's program had been peaceful since 2003, "I received a follow-up briefing by US intelligence. They did not show the supposed evidence that had let them to confirm the existence of a past Iranian nuclear weapon program, other than to refer to the same unverified set of allegations about weaponization studies that had already been discussed with the agency." (pg 269)

He also writes, "The Americans did acknowledge - as in most previous intelligence briefings - that there was no indication that Iran had undeclared nuclear material." (pg 262) Indeed, this is important information, given that in more than a dozen reports on Iran the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed the absence of any evidence of military diversion of "declared nuclear material".

In Chapter 11, on the "squandered opportunities" with Iran, the author writes about Iran-IAEA cooperation through a workplan that resulted in the successful resolution of the "six outstanding" issues that had led to the IAEA's referral of Iran's file to the UN Security Council.

Missing in this book is any mention of that workplan's concluding paragraph that stipulated the agency's treatment of Iran's nuclear file as "routine" once those issues were resolved. That this did not, and as of today has not, happened is solely due to the US-led disinformation campaign that burdened the IAEA with new data coming from a stolen Iranian lap top, even though ElBaradei readily admits that "the problem was, no one knew if any of these was real". (pg 281).

He discretely blames his deputy, Ollie Heinnonen, now turned into a valuable US asset from his recruitment by Harvard University, of buying "into the US accusations" (pg 281), and laments the fact that on a number of occasions the US scuttled meaningful negotiation with Iran by "refusing to take yes for an answer".

Questioning the US's negotiation strategy toward Iran, in a memorable passage that rings relevant to today's context of new multilateral talks with Iran, ElBaradei writes: "It was naive to ask Iran to give up everything before the start of the talks and expect a positive response. But the problem was familiar, nothing would satisfy, short of Iran coming to the table completely undressed." (pg 313)

In a clue to the direct relevance of this book to the Iran nuclear talks this weekend in Istanbul, where the US has put its foot down by demanding Iran's suspension of its 20% uranium enrichment, ElBaradei readily admits that under the NPT, Iran has the right to possess a nuclear fuel cycle, like "roughly a dozen countries" around the world. Moreover, he reminds us of the absence of a legal basis for the US's demand, in light of the fact that "many research reactors worldwide also use 90% enriched uranium fuel for peaceful purposes, such as to produce medial radioisotopes". (pg 14)

As he puts it in the final chapter, on the quest for human security, this cannot be a selective, or rather elitist, process that benefits some while depriving others. In today's increasingly interdependent world, the idea that the threat of nuclear proliferation can be contained while the asymmetrical nuclear-have nations hold onto their prized possessions and even use them to threaten the non-nuclear nations, is simply a chimerical dream that has a decent chance of turning into a nightmare. This is the core message of ElBaradei's timely book that cannot be possibly ignored.



The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times by Mohamed ElBaradei. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2011. ISBN-10: 0805093508. Price US$27, 322 pages with index 340 pages.



Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. He is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for rights at Harvard. His latest book is UN Management Reform: Selected Articles and Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace (November 12, 2011).

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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This book seems to be published at an interesting time.

delft said:

Mohamed ElBaradei has written a book about his time as leader of IAEA - The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times
A review is published by Asia Times on line:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

This book seems to be published at an interesting time.

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Ok thats his opinion and then compare that withthe opinions of C Hitchens who at first opposed but later supported the war.



A War to Be Proud Of
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
Sep 5, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 47 • By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
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LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?

I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War liberal Utopia had actually lasted. Whether you chose to date its inception from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or the death of Nicolae Ceausescu in late December of the same year, or the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, or the referendum defeat suffered by Augusto Pinochet (or indeed from the publication of Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of history" and the unarguable triumph of market liberal pluralism), it was an epoch that in retrospect was over before it began. By the middle of 1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian ideology. Proving the same point in another way, and within approximately the same period, the theocratic dictator of Iran had publicly claimed the right to offer money in his own name for the suborning of the murder of a novelist living in London, and the génocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation.

One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares as a random or unsorted list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to compensate for the humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled to sign with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss, of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very same war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into national socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States.

The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if it is to be seriously drawn up, must also involve a confrontation with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United States did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton administration prudent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the U.N. resolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of the U.N. forces in Rwanda?

I know hardly anybody who comes out of this examination with complete credit. There were neoconservatives who jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who couldn't see the point when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992. There were leftist humanitarians and radicals who rallied to Rushdie and called for solidarity with Bosnia, but who--perhaps because of a bad conscience about Palestine--couldn't face a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even when he annexed a neighbor state that was a full member of the Arab League and of the U.N. (I suppose I have to admit that I was for a time a member of that second group.) But there were consistencies, too. French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force



Childishness is one thing--those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less charming. "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire." I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and calculating one.)

There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.

It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.

Antaeus was able to draw strength from the earth every time an antagonist wrestled him to the ground. A reverse mythology has been permitted to take hold in the present case, where bad news is deemed to be bad news only for regime-change. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three decades of war and fascism (and the "divide-and-rule" tactics by which Saddam maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni minority in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.

At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.

Two pieces of good fortune still attend those of us who go out on the road for this urgent and worthy cause. The first is contingent: There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side. So that's easy enough.

The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a huge number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism. The more temperate anti-warriors, such as Mark Danner and Harold Meyerson, like to employ the term "a war of choice." One should have no problem in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam Hussein no matter what. To whom, then, should the "choice" of time and place have fallen? The clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I may so dub them--is that this decision should have been left up to Saddam Hussein. As so often before . . .

DOES THE PRESIDENT deserve the benefit of the reserve of fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves. But a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.

(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.

(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.

The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic after the Kosovo intervention, he warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American "poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insisting on the importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas.

Notwithstanding this prescience and principle on his part, one still cannot read the journals of the 2000/2001 millennium without the feeling that one is revisiting a hopelessly somnambulist relative in a neglected home. I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)


The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam's crumbling roof.

One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N. resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole operation for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked aggression. How can this possibly be?

THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki's short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults who don't credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:

"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground.

bladerunner said:

Ok thats his opinion and then compare that withthe opinions of C Hitchens who at first opposed but later supported the war.

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I have often found the opinions of the late Christopher Hitchins decidedly odd and this is a good example. I think they must have been formed on the basis of a well cultivated ignorance. Ba'athism was developed as a form of Arabic nationalism in Iraq and Syria. The main bearers in both countries are minorities, Sunni's in Iraq, Alawites, that is Shiites, in Syria, but in both countries non-members of these minorities, including Christians, belong(ed) to this party. The opposition between the Ba'athists in Iraq and Syria was caused by differences in the interests of the countries, not by differences in religion. The Jihadi's are inspired/sponsored/armed by Saudi Arabia (see what is now happening in Syria ) and to see a coalition of Ba'athists and Jihadi's is simply idiotic.
The remained of the article is of the same quality.

Btw, I, too, am an admirer of Saki.

delft said:

The Jihadi's are inspired/sponsored/armed by Saudi Arabia (see what is now happening in Syria ) and to see a coalition of Ba'athists and Jihadi's is simply idiotic.
The remained of the article is of the same quality.

Btw, I, too, am an admirer of Saki.

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Jihadists and baathists were basing themselves in Syria to carry on the fight against the Americans, so perhaps there was some co-operation for convenience sake. However Hitchens uses the term "bin Ladenists". Aren't they a group of their own?
Whether Saddam remained a threat after GW1 may be debateable, but Im not shedding a tear after his and his sons removal.

bladerunner said:

Jihadists and baathists were basing themselves in Syria to carry on the fight against the Americans, so perhaps there was some co-operation for convenience sake. However Hitchens uses the term "bin Ladenists". Aren't they a group of their own?
Whether Saddam remained a threat after GW1 may be debateable, but Im not shedding a tear after his and his sons removal.

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Hitchens suggested cooperation between Iraq and the Jihadi's before the US invasion. That was plain daft.

Very few countries are rich enough to set up a surveillance operation as expensive and extensive as the Department of Homeland Security. If Syria had done that it would have been bothered by the Saudi sponsored "rebels". Jihadi's and Baathists could have operated within Syria without needing to cooperate.

The purpose of Bin Laden was a Jihad against infidels, especially those who trained him to fight the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and then betrayed him.

Saddam Hussain was the Defender of the Civilized World against the godless Iranians during the '80's, then was a Monster when he tried to compensate himself for the costs of that unsuccessful war by taking over Kuwait. After being forced out of Kuwait Iraq was forced to pay a huge amount of money, $146b, and was in addition subject to sanctions and bombings. This weakened the opposition to Saddam more than it weakened Saddam. Then came the occupation in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations - no interference in the internal affairs of another country - which was defended with allegations of the possession of weapons of mass destruction that were recognized as lies by, for example, the Dutch military intelligence service. ( The Dutch government preferred to believe the lies by Tony Blair! ).
I was never an admirer of Saddam but to describe him as a greater monster than the king of Bahrain is ridiculous.

in 1991 the coalition should have got ride of Saddam but they didnt, US said after the war that they deliberatly left around 30-40% of Iraqs military intact, just enough to counter-weight Iran but weak enough so Saddam cant invade another country

if they didnt finish the job in 1991 then they should have left it, what happened in 2003 was a human tragedy, over 1 million Iraqis have died and the chaos and destruction of a very old country with a great past

Bush and Blair should be brought to international court of justice and convicted of war crimes, both are responsible for the mess they created in middleast today, we are going to be picking up the peices of their crimes for many many years to come

i dont like Saddam and dont hate him, he was just another pawn used by the West at the time for their own personal interest, Donald Rumsfeld anyone>?

asif iqbal said:

what happened in 2003 was a human tragedy, over 1 million Iraqis have died and the chaos and destruction of a very old country with a great past

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Thats a totally exaggerated amount of deaths due to violence as a result of G.W.2. In fact more have died under SAddams hand.Pierre Tristram in his article criticising the Americans for G.W.2 says


"Today the Iraqi Ministry of Health produced its latest casualty count of Iraqis killed as a direct result of violence--not by survey, not by estimates, but by verifiable deaths and proven causes: At least 87,215 killed since 2005, and more than 110,000 since 2003, or 0.38% of the Iraqi population".




Casualty counts in Iraq have generated a war of their own.

Iraq Casualties, 1980-2009: From Saddam Hussein to George Bush
900,000 Iraqis Killed in Three Decades of Repression and War

Five years ago, a research team at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Lancet, a British journal, published a study that estimated that in the 18 months following the American invasion in 2003, "100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred." The study sparked a controversy over methodology. It wasn't adding up body counts from bombs and bullets but surveying households about births and deaths that had occurred since 2002, verifying the cause of death through certificates only when possible. Which wasn't often. The findings were published in The Lancet, a British journa.

When the same team updated its study in 2006, the death toll was up to 654,965, with 91.8 percent "caused by violence." Conservative organs like The Wall Street Journal went nuts, charging that, because the study was funded by the liberal activist George Soros, it was not credible. (Where the Journal's editorial page gets its logic is one of the great enigmas of the age).

Iraq Body Count

The well documented Iraq Body Count site was putting the figure at one-sixth that of the Johns Hopkins study, though it was relying exclusively on verifiable press, government or non-governmental organizations' reports. There comes a point though when casualty figures reach such a level that debating higher or lower numbers becomes an exercise in churlishness. Of course there's a difference between 700,000 and 100,000 dead. But is that to say that a war that's caused 100,000 dead is somehow, in any possible way, less horrific or more justifiable?

[B]Today the Iraqi Ministry of Health produced its latest casualty count of Iraqis killed as a direct result of violence--not by survey, not by estimates, but by verifiable deaths and proven causes: At least 87,215 killed since 2005, and more than 110,000 since 2003, or 0.38% of the Iraqi population.[/B]

One of the Journal's strange and utterly meaningless comparisons in its 2006 editorial discrediting the Johns Hopkins count was that "fewer Americans died in the Civil War, our bloodiest conflict."

Iraq's Death Count Equivalent in the United Statesl
Here's a more telling comparison. The proportion of Iraqis directly killed in the war would amount to 1.14 million deaths in a country with a population the size of the United States'--a proportional figure that would exceed any conflict this country has ever known. In fact, it would be almost equivalent to the sum total of all American war casualties since the War of Independence.

But even that approach understates the extent of suffering of the Iraqi population, because it only looks at the last six years. What of the death toll under Saddam Hussein?

23 Years of Slaughter Under Saddam Hussein

"In the end," the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning John Burns wrote in The Times a few weeks before the invasion, "if an American-led invasion ousts Mr. Hussein, and especially if an attack is launched without convincing proof that Iraq is still harboring forbidden arms, history may judge that the stronger case was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors.

Burns proceeded to estimate the arithmetic of Saddam's brutality:

The largest number of deaths during his reign is attributable to the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Iraq claims to have lost 500,000 people during that war.
The 1990 occupation of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War caused 100,000 deaths, by Iraq's reckoning--probably an exaggeration, but not by much: the 40-day bombardment of Iraq before the three-day ground war, and the massacre of escaping Iraqi troops on the "highway of death" make the estimate more credible than not.
"Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate," Burns wrote. "Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqis and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have 'disappeared' into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000."

Add it up, and in three decades, about 900,000 Iraqis have died from violence, or well over 3% of the Iraqi population--the equivalent of more than 9 million people in a nation with a population as large as that of the United States. That's what Iraq will have to recover from over the next decades--not just the death toll of the last six years, but that of the last 30.

Staring at the Abyss

As if this writing, the combined combat and non-combat deaths of American and Coalition soldiers in Iraq, since 2003, total 4,595--a devastating toll from the western perspective, but one that must be multiplied 200 times to begin to understand the extent of the devastation of Iraq's own death toll.

Analyzed that way (since the cause of the violent deaths is not, to the dead and their survivors, nearly as relevant as the fact of the deaths themselves) even the Johns Hopkins figures become less relevant as a point of dispute, since, by focusing only on the last six years, they underestimate the breadth of the carnage. If the Johns Hopkins methodology were applied, the death toll would climb well above 1 million.

One last question bears asking. Assuming that 800,000 Iraqis lost their lives during the Saddam Hussein years, does even that justify killing an additional 100,000, supposedly to be rid of Saddam? "He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself," Nietzche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil. "And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you."

Nowhere has that been more true, in this young and morally stunted century, than with America's monstrous battle in Iraq.

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delft said:

I was never an admirer of Saddam but to describe him as a greater monster than the king of Bahrain is ridiculous.

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Im not familiar with the context/circumstances which prompted Hitchens to suggest an alliance of the Baathist and Jihadis. Perhaps Hitchens had remarkable foresight. Some guys do have that gut feeling how things could play out.

I have no doubt that the rulers of Bahrain are despotic and also have blood on their hands, but on par with Saddam? can you enlighten please.
meanwhile IMO ElBaradei is just looking for payback after feeling affronted with his work at the IAEA being sidelinedby Bush/Blair