Department of the Bleeding Obvious

Even more sensiblism from the Observer. You might think it too obvious to need saying that ordinary Iraqis are not in mourning for a man who dedicated himself to butchering them. But of course there are those for whom it is anything but obvious. So due credit to Jason Burke for saying so (via), and pointing out:

'Unless we lapse into ugly prejudices about Muslims being inherently fanatic, this should not surprise us.'

Clinton the stopper?

Did Bill Clinton say, as the Independent’s Rupert Cornwell claims, that ‘the war in Iraq was "a big mistake"’. Yes and no, it seems, but more no than yes. The AP report quotes him as saying ‘The mistake that they made is that when they kicked out Saddam, they decided to dismantle the whole authority structure of Iraq’. Nothing in the report suggests that he condemned the invasion per se.

Did he say anything remotely resembling ‘the sooner American troops leave the better’? No, that is Mr Cornwell’s view, echoing the comments of a congressman whom, I am wiling to bet, not one Indie reader in a thousand has ever heard of. What Clinton did say was ‘We never sent enough troops and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders.’ Which doesn’t exactly make him a ‘stopper’. But clearly if you want an eye-catching headline Congressman John Murtha doesn’t quite do the business. So ‘Clinton: The big mistake of the Iraq war - Ex-President leads the critics’ it is.

Is the Independent even trying to be a newspaper of record these days?

The benefits of hindsight

‘Had we intervened in Rwanda in 1994, for instance, we might have stopped the genocide that killed nearly a million innocent civilians.’

The LA Times, for a change, but the suggestion is no stranger to the British papers that lead anti-Iraq war opinion.

What’s interesting is that the assertion draws its force from the fact that it didn’t happen.

Imagine that Clinton had sent troops in and (a more athletic stretch of the imagination) they had been spectacularly successful in stopping the bloodshed. Would he have gone down in left-liberal opinion as:

(a) a great humanitarian who saved hundreds of thousands of lives

or

(b) a cynical imperialist who must have got wind of Rwanda’s previously unknown oil reserves?

Torture in Iraq - not fit for the Grauniad to print

Dear Editor,

Whilst naturally you are right to condemn the use of torture by Iraqi government forces, you would do well to remember the principles underlying your enthusiasm for the admission of Turkey into the EU, notwithstanding the ongoing human rights abuses in that country. Iraq is a profoundly brutalized and traumatized nation and is not going to turn into a model democracy overnight. However, a popularly endorsed democratic constitution creates a space for improvement that would never have existed under Saddam Hussain – and one does not need to have been a supporter of the invasion (I was not) to acknowledge this.

Yours faithfully...

Respect, Dave

Meanwhile, the organ of the imperialist bourgeoisie has this from the running-dog Aaronovitch. I suppose he thinks he's very clever.

SteeleWatch: that al-Qaida letter

As a pendant to his rubbishing of the Iraqi referendum, al-Grauniad's Jonathan Steele turns to the letter supposedly sent by al-Qaida's 'moderate' second-in-command to the boys in Iraq.

Says Jonathan: 'Whether the letter is fake or not, the targeting issue certainly resonates in Iraq.'

Let's have that once again: 'the targeting issue certainly resonates in Iraq.' There's a phrase for you to savour over the weekend.

Al-Grauniad latest

Today's haul is a mixture of the predictable and the bizarre.

There is naturally deep concern over whether poor Saddam will get a fair trial. People who should know better have been going around calling him a murderer.

And if found guilty he faces a death penalty. Well, I'm an abolitionist myself. Did you know that China executes around 2,000 people every year? Just thought I'd mention it.

Now for the bizarre. Reading Craig Murray's piece, I conclude that the long march through the institutions has not spared the diplomatic service. But are we not rather scraping the barrel here, Seumas? The government thinks it's banning a dangerous terrorist organization, Craig and Seumas think it's banning an organization that doesn't exist. So everybody's happy, right? Or is the point that if the Islamic Jihad Union did exist, we would want to make sure it was legal so we could commission an occasional column from it?

Iraq, Osama, etc., etc.

So, 24 kids blown up in Baghdad. That'll teach them to accept sweets from strangers, eh? Let's see how the moral equivalence brigade in the Guardian and Indie process this one.

I particularly appreciated the way yesterday's Independent enabled Daw'ud Abdullah Mannion of Sheffield to present Al-Qa'ida's surrender terms to its readers:-

Osama bin Laden is very clear in his demands: remove western support for these evil tyrants in the Muslim world, withdraw the occupying troops and the attacks on the west will stop. It really is that simple. Muslims around the world are rightfully angry with the west, including Britain, and whilst our unjust foreign
policy continues, some of that anger will boil over into evil acts such as those seen in London on Thursday.

Is there still a crime of treason on the statute book, or did it get abolished as inappropriate to a multi-cultural society? I'm against capital punishment, but, as somebody recently remarked to me, they hanged Lord Haw-Haw.

Probably legal, or Two and a half cheers for David Aaronovitch

So the Grauniad has managed to purge one of its leading revisionist traitors. Mr Grumpy has identified strongly with his growing realization that there is at least as much illiberalism on his left as on his right, and has enjoyed watching him wind the comrades up. He has done sterling work patrolling the creepy interface between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, from which Sue Blackwell has emerged with her academic boycott of Bad Jews. His sign-off column is powerful stuff. OK, now we can read him in the Times, but it’s the Guardian that really needs him.

But Dave, why oh why have you dug yourself into such a hole on the Iraq question?

On 1 May we find David A defending Tony Blair against charges of lying, thus: “To spin the advice, as many journalists have done, as showing that Goldsmith was saying that war 'could be illegal' is disingenuousness worthy of the slickest weasel. The advice shows, crucially, that the Attorney General thought that UN Resolution 1441 probably was permissive of military action against Iraq, without further decision of the Security Council.”

Now I have no more regard than David A for the less sentient members of the anti-war lobby. But even those with a couple of brain cells to rub together are not likely to be impressed by the distinction between fighting a war that is probably legal and fighting one that is possibly illegal.

Don’t get me wrong. I rejoice that Saddam is behind bars, in or out of his underpants. I hope and pray that Iraq’s first elected government can establish its authority. And I think we are duty-bound to help it do so, if only because the alternative is so appalling. But looking at how we got to where we are now, I am more than ever convinced that Robin Cook got it spot on. Would even George Bush have taken the decision to invade if he had been able to foresee how it would turn out?

Sorry Dave, but probably legal just wasn’t good enough.

Dummies and Galloway

How could we have got Saddam out without going to war with him? The following appeared in a letter in yesterday's Independent:-

"In 2000 the Muslim Peace Fellowship suggested a five-point plan involving support for Iraqi civil society, a general Middle Eastern arms embargo, and wider reforms. In the US, Sojourner magazine outlined at least two blueprints for largely nonviolent strategic campaigns. None of these strategies could have guaranteed perfection, but their outcomes could hardly have been worse than the catastrophe which actually transpired."

Er, what civil society? The free press? The opposition political parties? The independent judiciary? The basic precondition for the existence of a civil society was fulfilled when Saddam was overthrown. As in the case of Hitler's Germany.

A general arms embargo against Saddam would have been a fine idea, and perhaps the Muslim Peace Fellowship has some ideas as to how Russia and China could have been persuaded to take part.

And perhaps we could have campaigned for Saddam's secret police to show greater courtesy towards the public.

Sorry, but absolute moral positions such as pacifism can only be held honestly by those prepared to admit that they will stick to them regardless of the consequences. Invading Iraq has had good and bad consequences. Not invading would have had good and bad consequences, chief among the latter being that Saddam would probably have remained in power for the rest of his life, and that if the majority of Iraqis had ever risen up against him the resulting civil war would have made the present situation look like a picnic. If we want to take sides we have to take responsibility for the bad with the good.

PS A good one, too, from Jonathan Steele in yesterday's Guardian. Basically the American troops should pull out of Iraq because they're doing such a terrible job, and the British troops should pull out because they're doing such a good job that they're not needed. "Pulling foreign troops out would almost certainly improve Iraq's security, since much of the violence is directed against the occupation" says Jonathan. So let's not worry too much about the hundreds of Iraqis who have lost their lives in the last few weeks because they supported the wrong party, worshipped at the wrong kind of mosque, attended the wrong person's funeral, or wanted to serve the country's first ever elected government as police officers. Just get those Yanks out, and the insurgents will show us what warm and wonderful human beings they were all along.