British xenophobia over top EU posts
While it’s great crack if you’re an anorak, the frantic speculation about the top Euro jobs doesn’t show off my old colleagues in the Westminster lobby at their best. Some are helping to keep Tony Blair’s candidacy for the presidency alive, others are floating David Miliband as “ foreign minister” while the Indy in Sunday thinks it sees a dark plot in it all to make Mandy the Labour leader. It’s all so parochial . At times, it even touches racism. Take Ian Hislop on Have I Got News For You, who publishes samizdat material and more doubtful goss in Private Eye. He scorned Blair, fine, but then got down to mocking rival candidates just for their funny foreign names, like “Jean Claude.” Candidates like..
Wolfgang Schlüssel, the centre-right former Austrian chancellor, might be gaining ground, while Balkenende was also being talked up by EU sources. Other names still in the race are Luxembourg’s prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, and former Belgian leader Guy Verhofstadt.
That sort of stuff had gone out with the Ark I thought. So no Tony and nobody else either. That’s not satire. it’s nihilism. And what’s with all this stuff about the whole system being completely unaccountable? Would you really want to have to chose between, say, Junkcer and Verhofstadt?. The heads of government who take the decisions are pretty well immune from British media pressure – and that’s hacking off Her Majesty’s press, I’m sorry to say, so they lash out. At least those same leaders are democratically accountable, which means the presidency is too, at least indirectly. We can expect accountability to improve over time, if the Conservatives and the other few diehards permit. From now on at least, let’s not hark back to the old British chauvinism of the “ fog in Channel; continent cut off” variety.
“Alan Greenspan said the Iraq war was primarily about securing future oil supplies first . Everything else including ‘democracy’ was dry filling ! As we can see from Afghanistan the ‘dry filling’ of Karzai’s election will not be botched this time by having to open ‘unstuffed ’ ballot boxes
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Assuming he did say it and his comments are not taken out of context I dont see how this proves or disproves anything. If a US politician or public figure provides or provided an alternative justification you would reject it but you seize on the one comment that fits in with your thesis.
Many opponents of the war say that is was a misguided response to, or revenge for, 9/11 and how is this primary motivation consistent with securing of oil supplies. Furthermore the US could easily have adopted a realist foreign policy and dealt with the Saddam regime to get oil (or obtained its oil from all the other oil rich states apart from Iraq, many of which the US enjoys good/adequate relations).
We had a totalitarian genocidal regime which was in the Cambodia class (not just a nasty authoritairn dictatorship which are ten a penny) which had attacked Iran, Kuwait and more symbolically Israel, and which had used chemical weapons and funded islamist terrorist in Israel and which was led by a ruling clique of spectacularly lunatic brutality. This regime appeared to all reasonable observers to be building up and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and it is quite easy to construct an alternative history where a Saddam left to his own devices would have obtained a nuclear capacity and /or strongly helped Islamist terrorists (against a mutual enemy). Considered against this backgrond, I do not think that humanitarian concerns (ie the needs and will of the Iraqi people) were a principal motivator for the US government (let alone promotion of democracy). I think that the wider security / stability concerns for the middle east and knock on effect on global security and the threat of terrorism were.
The doctrine of liberal or humanitarian interventionism, linked to the duty to protect, and set out by Blair in his 1999 Chicago speech was never about justifying invasion because of a lack of democracy or in order to “impose” any system of democracy.
Brit,
“WR – just more inconsequential whataboutery and irrelevant point scoring.
I do not accept that most (let alone all) deaths in Iraq since 1990 were ‘caused’ by Anglo-American forces, either in the sense of direct promximate cause or on the basis of sole or principal moral responsibility”
Then you are merely displaying your ignorance of history, both the direct in your face killings via the Clinton bombing campaign, which killed half a million children alone, the conventional war, and the covert strategies involving false flag attacks such as those carried out against mosques, and the so-called suicide attacks by those directed to drive from one police station to another after their car had been tampered with. These strategies led to the sectarian killing fields. And that doesn’t include the assassination of many of the countries intelligentsia that has led most professionals to flee the country.
“We had a totalitarian genocidal regime which was in the Cambodia class (not just a nasty authoritairn dictatorship which are ten a penny) which had attacked Iran,”
And attacked Iran with the support of which countries? Jesus tapdancing Christ, I can’t believe you’re using Iran as an example. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were here in another thread calling for the whole country to be nuked from orbit as part of some ‘humanitarian aid.’
“it is quite easy to construct an alternative history where a Saddam left to his own devices would have obtained a nuclear capacity and /or strongly helped Islamist terrorists (against a mutual enemy)”
Perhaps it is easy to construct such a scenario in your head, but those with any knowledge of the region would conclude the regime in Iraq was despised by the fundamentalists.
“The doctrine of liberal or humanitarian interventionism, linked to the duty to protect, and set out by Blair in his 1999 Chicago speech was never about justifying invasion because of a lack of democracy or in order to “impose” any system of democracy.”
I think I prefer the original form of imperialism without all the hypocritical trappings.
Your figures are inaccurate and not relevant to the second Iraq war.
So you think that sectarian conflict was engineered by the US and the Brits WR?? Why would they want to do that? Did they engineer the long standing domination of sunni over shia and the latters desire for revenge. Did they engineer the Sunni desire to hold on to its privilege and to protect itself. Did they force Iran to support, direct and fund Shia militants. Did they beg AQ operatives from other countries. Did they plant the suicide bombs. You are a delusional conspiracy theorist prepared to turn the truth on its head so long as you can blame the great imperialist America.
Yes we all know the received wisdom about Iraq being a paradigm of secular government and gender equality. The truth is that Iraq’s regime funded Palestinian Islamist suicide bombers and would happily have helped AQ types in actions against mutual enemies. Saddam also increasing tried to portray himself as a Muslim and defender of Islamic values in the run up to the war.
If you think Sierra Leone and Kosovo, for example, were imperialist I’d like to know what definition you are using. Just as anti-semitism was the “socialism of fools” your simplistic antiWestern knee jerk politics is the anti-imperialism of fools
Brit,
“So you think that sectarian conflict was engineered by the US and the Brits WR?? Why would they want to do that?”
Divide and conquer. Not terribly new, but still effective. Blowing up mosques is a new phenomenon in the Muslim world – you remember the two Laurence of Arabia characters caught in Basra, don’t you?
The objective was to remove Saddam and the Ba’athist regime not to conquer. The idea that the bloody conflict in Iraq was deliberate intention of the allies is totally ridiculous.