The Economist and Media Bias

I’ve read The Economist every week for years now, and every so often an article comes along which reminds me never to underestimate the newspaper’s ability to infuriate me with its incredible reserve of pro-Western war mongering. The July 22^nd-28^th issue featured a front cover with ‘Can Iran Be Stopped?’ plastered across it, the name of the main leader in the paper this week. It also contained a 3 page briefing on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The Economist has a proven track record at advocating every intervention and Western war our elites cook up, including the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and intervention in Libya and Syria. The language it regularly uses about the need to ‘punish’ nations which ‘misbehave’ economically or politically often has more than a slight undertone of good-old British imperialism. This week’s leading story was another case study in the art of omission and distortion that the newspaper has mastered.

The main leader started with an effort to claim that the West should disregard the recent victory of Hassan Rohani in the Iranian presidential elections; Rohani was considered the moderate in the contest. We shouldn’t laud the new President’s calls for serious negotiation with the West according to the paper, as apparently ‘Iran’s regional assertiveness and its nuclear capacity mean that it is a more dangerous place than it ever was before’. By ‘regional’ they mean the Middle East, and a glance at Arab public opinion, the majority of citizens in the Middle East, shows that they actually consider the United States to be the biggest threat in the region, not Iran. According to a study by the Wilson Center and the United States Institute of Peace carried out in 2011, ‘Iran remained far behind… the United States: 59 percent identified the United States, and 18 percent identified Iran as one of the two greatest threats’ in the region. Other studies show similar, or even more pronounced results. Of course, The Economist has little regard for the ignorant opinions of the natives. That they consider the US to possess far more ‘regional assertiveness’ than Iran is irrelevant. That Israel is the only country with ‘nuclear capacity’- actually nuclear weapons- is also presumably irrelevant. Note also the construction of Iran as a ‘dangerous place’, not merely a dangerous state or government. The portrayal of enemies and far-away lands as mysterious and dangerous has a long tradition in Western journalism and writing.

The paper notes with implicit approval that Western-imposed sanctions have inflicted ‘severe economic pain… on Iran’s people’, ‘with 40% of Iranians thought to be living below the poverty line’; there is no comment on the fact that our actions are seriously harming the lives of millions of innocent Iranians.

It then provides a sober analysis of Obama’s recent decision to arm the rebels in Syria: ‘many believe the greater reason was [Obama’s] reluctance to see Mr Assad hold on to power as a client of Iran’s’. This cynical ‘real politic’ is actually applauded by the paper, which claims that a major reason to not only arm the rebels but to establish a no-fly zone over Syria is to ‘stem the rise of Persian power’. Apparently it is ‘not in the West’s interest that a state that sponsors terrorism and rejects Israel’s right to exist should become the regional hegemon’. That one of the West’s major allies in the region (Saudi Arabia) is probably a far greater sponsor of terrorism than Iran is of little importance to the paper. So presumably is the fact that Israel and the US have carried out terrorist assassinations of civilian scientists in Iran and sponsored exiled Iranian terrorist groups like MEK, something I wrote about briefly here. The historical context is utterly stripped from the article, and Iran is portrayed as the aggressive would-be hegemon in the region, a fantasy which ignores the elementary facts available to anyone who cares to look: namely that the US and Britain have sought to control the Middle East for their own interests, often with extreme aggression and terrorism, for decades. The piece ends with the battle cry: ‘When Persian power is on the rise, it is not the time to back away from the Middle East’; suggesting that there is some voluntary retreat from the Middle East by the Western powers, a fabrication unsurprisingly not elaborated on by the paper.

The briefing on Iran’s nuclear programme is somewhat more subtle, revealing in what it excludes rather than what it asserts. It follows the tradition of nearly every Western politician and journalist of the last decade and a half in hysterically asserting that the time is near when Iran will be able to acquire nuclear weapons- maybe true, but the humble reminder that people have been making that charge- falsely- for years, is again unsurprisingly missing from the paper’s piece. It presents Iran as making an ‘impossible demand’ in negotiations, ignoring the US role in scuppering potential deals and negotiations, something I wrote about here. It claims that ‘British and American intelligence sources think [Iran] is about a year away from having enough fissile material to make a bomb’, ignoring that it is the intelligence agency’s assessments (and the IAEA’s) that Iran hasn’t made the decision to attempt to get a bomb. Jacques Hymans wrote in Foreign Affairs the other month that ‘at the end of January, Israeli intelligence officials quietly indicated that they have downgraded their assessments of Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb… Now, Israel believes that Iran will not have its first nuclear device before 2015 or 2016.’ That will probably be pushed back even further in the future.

It quotes a researcher at the highly establishment RAND Corporation, Greg Jones, and a more respectable source, David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, to back up its arguments. It also references the oft-mentioned 2011 IAEA report that I discussed here. Left out of the picture are those such as former Director of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team, Robert Kelly, who argues that the report proves nothing, and former head of the IAEA, Hans Blix, who has claimed that the hysteria about Iran is over-hyped. Even Jack Straw has come out recently to say that there isn’t sufficient evidence to prove Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapon- far from it.

Ultimately, thankfully, the paper doesn’t advocate a military attack on Iran, though for strictly practical reasons, as is the usual in the media. The (il)legality, or the (im)morality of a strike, isn’t even discussed. They do have the sense to recognise the danger that an attack upon Iran could end with a ‘full-scale invasion’ of the country, something even The Economist doesn’t want.

This is an example of the endless systemic bias inherent in the media, often represented most clearly in liberal papers like The Economist. A source of information they may be, but one needs to know how to read the media: a task I am still learning. 

A Few Words on Barack Obama

It’s been a while, but exams are now over for me (bar the unfortunate fact that I have to retype my world politics exam because my handwriting is so terrible), and so regular blog posts will now return. To get back into it, and kick off the summer, a few comments on President Obama.

Barack Obama remains surprisingly popular among Europeans in general, particularly young Europeans. At Warwick’s election night event last year, cheers rang through the building every time Obama won a state, and choruses of boos were to be heard whenever Mitt Romney’s face appeared on the big screen. I’ve long found this bizarre- I could perhaps understand why the casual observer may have once been taken in by the sweeping rhetoric of the first black President, but it seemed to me that anyone who took even a passing dispassionate look at policies and practice, rather than just rhetoric, would see the sharp continuities between the hated Bush administration and the adored Obama successor.

Reading through a 2010 article by Pakistani-English writer Tariq Ali, I was struck by the comparison he drew between Obama and Woodrow Wilson, ‘whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia, and his treaties handed one colony after another to his partners in war’ (‘President of Cant’, New Left Review, 2010, 61, p.116). It seems an apt comparison indeed, since for all the fine words from Obama, his administration has more or less carried on the major policies of the Bush administration, and in some instances even upped the intensity.

Drone strikes are an obvious example. Obama has increased their frequency by around 6 times that of Bush, including expanding their use in Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen. I won’t deal with this topic here- it will be saved for a later blog post- but suffice to say this represents a massive expansion of an unregulated, most probably illegal (Professor David Luban of Georgetown University said in a lecture at Warwick earlier this year that the memo justifying the strikes was ‘terrible legal reasoning’), global assassination campaign, waged in any country Obama and his advisors deem to be housing enemies of the US. The destabilising effects in Pakistan are well known; those in Yemen less so, revealed most fully by excellent independent journalist Jeremy Scahill in his new book about US foreign policy ‘Dirty Wars’.See this short documentary by him here for a window into the impact on Yemen.

Connected to this is Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan.  His ‘surge’ in Afghanistan has probably left the US in a worse military shape than before, with the Afghani troops the US army is training turning their weapons on their mentors more often than in any other US war in history (so-called green-on-blue violence). The Afghan population has seemingly turned completely against the US, Afghanistan is now constantly in the top two worst places in the world to be a woman (along with the DRC), Afghanistan is the number one source of refugees in the world (over 2.5 million), unknown 10’s of 1000’s of civilians are dead, the CIA is fuelling corruption by funnelling millions of dollars of ‘ghost money’ into the Afghani leadership… and so on.

Recently it has been revealed that the global kidnapping campaign started by the Bush administration (often referred to as ‘rendition’) has actually carried on under Obama. So-called ‘black sites’, legal black holes that the CIA set up after 9/11 to imprison and torture people they didn’t like without any semblance of due process (given a relatively easy ride in the Hollywood blockbuster ‘Zero Dark Thirty’) have carried on under Obama, at the least in Somalia. Scahill, the afore-mentioned independent journalist who also revealed the Somalian black site, has documented the continuation of and increase in so-called ‘Special Operations’: secret operations carried out all over the globe with no transparency or legitimacy, little oversight, no public knowledge, and often murky consequences.

I’ve written about how the Obama administration has continued the absurd Bush policies (and policies of more or less every President of the US) towards Iran, and we can only hope that Obama doesn’t make his Presidency remembered for starting a disastrous war with Iran before 2016.

That doesn’t even scratch the surface of foreign policy- domestically, on civil liberties in particular, he has been no better.

The Bush administration was notorious for hauling people into off-shore prisons like Guantanamo Bay, without the possibility of a trial or release. However under Obama, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 has actually made it legal for the government to detain any US citizen or foreign national indefinitely without charge or trial, if the executive branch deems them ‘suspected of terrorism’. Signed in to law quietly on New Year’s Day 2012, it marked the codification of what Bush had always done anyway and damn the law: the destruction of the right to a fair and speedy trial, habeas corpus. The act is currently under challenge in court by a group of academics, activists and journalists- the part of the act relating to indefinite detention was struck down, but the Obama administration has appealed (the case continues). Most interestingly, the administration refused in court to promise that the plaintiffs in the case (such as Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky) wouldn’t ever find themselves being held indefinitely under the NDAA for their work.

Another aspect of Obama’s attack on civil liberties is the ‘War on Whistleblowers’. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson passed the Espionage Act, designed to put foreign spies in prison (and almost certainly crush dissent domestically) during WW1. Obama has blown the dust off the act and charged more people under it than all other post-war Presidents combined. The people charged include Bradley Manning, who leaked the ‘collateral murder’ video of a US helicopter opening fire on unarmed civilians, and thousands of low-level classified diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. He was kept for over 1,000 days without trial in conditions the UN’s special rapporteur on torture described as amounting to ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was also charged. There is some evidence to suggest that a secret indictment has been issued under the Espionage Act to charge Wikileaks founder and head Julian Assange.

Lastly for this blog is the vast domestic surveillance that has carried on under Obama. In the last week or so it has come out that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring between 150 - 300 million American's phone calls, and the ‘PRISM’ programme taking mass amounts of data on users from internet service providers like Google and Facebook. Those who follow these issues closely would have been more or less aware that this kind of thing was going on already, and whistleblowers like William Binney had revealed it long before the latest story. However this time we have documents fully confirming it, leaked by (now former) NSA official Edward Snowden, who has now fled to Hong Kong. The Snowden leak has also revealed a glimpse into the Obama administration’s plans to wage global offensive cyber war- but that’s for another blog. Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists at the Guardian who received the documents from Snowden, has hinted that far more devastating revelations will follow in the near-future.

This blog has barely touched on the ways Obama has not been the ‘change we can believe in’. Tariq Ali pointed out in the article I quoted earlier that disenchanted former Obama-supporters tend ‘to blame structural constraints rather than the incumbent himself’, seemingly unwilling to accept that Obama is little different to George Bush in the face of his apparently progressive and inspiring speeches. But one’s elocution is no measure of one's moral fibre; we should assess Obama without reference to his speeches, skin colour, looks or charms. Policies are what matters. It is true that there are deep power structures in the US which prevent any President from enacting real change, and the fundamentals of US Empire go far deeper than any one man. But the gusto with which he has furthered the cause of US hegemony overseas and domestic state control should give us all strong pause for thought when cheering on the next tall, handsome, ‘liberal’ Democrat. 

UPDATE: A day or two after writing this, Mehdi Hasan at the Huffington Post wrote a good new piece arguing the same thing: worth a read here.

An Elementary Thought Experiment

A short summation of the 4-piece series on Iran, from the perspective of an alternative world:

Imagine, if you will, that in 1953 Iran overthrew the elected government of the United States and installed a puppet dictator who would rule for 26 years, keeping US natural resources firmly under the control of Iranian companies. Imagine that in 1979 this Iranian-backed ruler was overthrown in a popular revolution, and US national independence restored. In time, Iran would invade both Mexico and Canada, building at least 42 military bases in the surrounding region, replete with a naval fleet to patrol the Gulf of Mexico. Iran then utilises politically distorted intelligence estimates to demand that the US surrender its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium, in return for a vague promise not to pursue ‘regime change’ in the US. Any pretence of negotiations is undermined by the threat of an attack upon the US, in violation of the UN Charter. Imagine American scientists are assassinated, infrastructure decimated by ‘cyber-bugs’, and devastating sanctions imposed, causing a pharmaceutical crisis for the US people. Iran’s major regional ally, Venezuela, works with US Christian terrorist groups who seek to overthrow the US government. A conference on establishing a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in the Americas, to be attended by the US, is whimsically cancelled by Iran to ensure that their ally Venezuela be allowed to unilaterally retain the only nuclear weapons in the region.

Rhetorical musings aside, everything written here has manifested itself in reality, with one key difference: the official ‘enemy’ is not the perpetrator of the crimes. We are.

The Bloody Formula

Having previously been an avid Formula 1 watcher, I find myself compelled to write a piece on one of the factors that contributed to my stopping watching the sport I love a couple of years ago: namely, the utter disregard for the political implications of the sport’s refusal to cancel the Grand Prix in Bahrain. The sport has collectively contributed to legitimising the regime in Bahrain, despite a vast human rights crisis in the country. The reasons are not hard to find.  

The Bahrain Grand Prix takes place this weekend. Since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 Bahrain has been largely off the news agenda and off the lips of Western officials, but the importance of the small Sheikdom is not negligible. Located in the most important strategic energy location in the world, the Gulf Peninsula, it forms a vital part of the system of global energy supplies. All 6 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, are ruled as dictatorships with severe levels of repression, and if one were to fall to democracy, the others could follow.

Bahrain has seen the most unrest of the GCC states since 2011, as the Shia majority has attempted to rise up against the minority Sunni rulers. Around 90 protesters have been shot dead in the streets. Incarceration without trial and torture is rampant, as confirmed in an official report set up by the Bahraini government as part of a ‘reform’ process. The report even stated that the torture and repression ‘could not have happened without the knowledge of higher echelons of the command structure’. The Bahraini government then went on a tour de force to whitewash its record, employing Western PR firms to use an array of techniques to make it seem like a progressive, reformist regime. The ostensive reform-agenda has failed to fool human rights groups, who have continued to document how doctors have been trialled for helping wounded protesters, activists have been taken from their homes in raids, and objectors to brutal police treatment have been thrown in prison.

In March 2011 Saudi Arabia ‘intervened’ in Bahrain (at the ‘request’ of the Bahraini government) to help put down the uprising, with little Western protest. Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote how a senior Western diplomat at the UN assured him that Hillary Clinton (then-US Secretary of State) gave an explicit green light to Saudi Arabia to carry out the invasion in return for Saudi support at the Arab League for the Western intervention in Libya. These claims were also reportedly given to the Asia Times Online which claims that ‘two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group’ stated that this US-Saudi deal had been struck. It is impossible to confirm these claims, but they seem plausible given the interests the US has in Bahrain, the close relationship between the Saudi’s and the US, and similar US actions in the past (more on that in later weeks).

Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and along with the other Gulf states, buys millions of dollars (and pounds) worth of military equipment off the US and UK every year. The Saudi National Guard, which was the main force used to crush the protests in Bahrain, has long been trained by British forces, including in ‘public order and sniper training’. In September 2011, the US moved to sell ‘armored vehicles and optically-tracked wire-guided missiles to Bahrain for an estimated cost of $53 million’. In 2012, ‘licenses were granted for £2.2m-worth of UK weapons to be exported’ to Bahrain. Bahrain is designated by the US as a ‘major non-NATO ally’.

A report by the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, headed by the now-US Secretary of State John Kerry, explicitly states why the US has made no effort to help the democracy protesters in Bahrain. The major goals for the US in the region, it explains, are for ‘The United States [to] carefully shape its military presence so as not to create a popular backlash, while retaining the capability to protect the free flow of critical natural resources and to provide a counterbalance to Iran’ (page 4). A passing mention to democracy is made, with no real recommendations on how this is to be achieved. The main focus for the US and UK is on preserving the dictatorial, bloody regime in Bahrain, a compliant, pro-Western government that does its best to serve Western interests and keep the population subdued.

Against this backdrop, Formula 1 has done its best to keep in line with elite opinion in the West. After the race was called off for a while in 2011, it has gone ahead the following two years despite mass protests by the Bahraini people calling for it to be cancelled. The wilful ignorance amongst the F1 elite is astounding- racing legend Jackie Stewart claimed that the unrest was ‘no different to the Glasgow Rangers and the Glasgow Celtics’, and that Bahrain has ‘already started a move towards democracy’. The ever-principled Bernie Ecclestone (head of F1) has compared the protests to those at Thatcher’s funeral in Britain, and last year called all controversy ‘a lot of nonsense’. He claimed he wanted an earthquake to occur so the media would start writing about that instead. In 2012, three-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel felt that it was ‘all a lot of hype’, and wished it would blow over so ‘then we can start worrying about the stuff that really matters like tyre temperatures, cars’. Clearly tear gas being fired at protesters, ITN film crew being forced to leave the country for filming protests, and detention of leading activists is of little concern to teams, drivers, and Formula 1 bosses.  

Conservative MP David Davis last year called it an ‘example of where big money is over-ruling serious ethical concerns’, and his analysis is surely partly correct. To F1, the money is far more important than the principle. However, the race acts not only as a large source of revenue for F1 and the Bahraini government, but it also helps legitimise the ruling class in Bahrain, the favoured Western allies. That there should be little concern for human rights and democracy is of little surprise, when the people who run F1 are no doubt immersed in the norms and values of the elite class to which they belong. Commercial incentives are important, but not necessarily the entire story. As Robert Fisk pointed out last year, would Bernie Ecclestone host a race in Iran or Syria, Western enemies, even if they were prepared to pay $40m to do so? The answer is likely no- F1 will host races in countries which are ruled by governments the West likes, no matter how oppressive they are. But when the government is an ‘official enemy’ of the West, suddenly the human rights issues, and the legitimacy which the race would lend the ‘enemy’ government, become important (China is a special case). That is why the Western client-regime of Bahrain will continue to be allowed to host races as it guns down and tortures its citizens- and why we won’t be hearing about the Tehran Grand Prix any time soon. 

Another post on Bahrain and the Gulf states will follow in the coming weeks.

The Boston Bombings

On the 15^th April two bombs exploded at Boston marathon killing at least 3 people and injuring over 100. On the same day, around 30 were killed in Iraq in bomb blasts and 160 wounded. On the same day, at least 16 workers were killed in Ghana in a mine collapse. The week before, 15 people were killed and nearly 50 injured in a bomb blast in Syria. Today, an earthquake hit the Iranian- Pakistani border killing at least 13 people, injuring around 20 and destroying ‘hundreds of houses’.

The media coverage of the above events couldn’t have been more distorted. The Boston bombing, which in terms of numbers was probably the least severe of the events, dominated the news. The mine collapse appeared to be barely news-worthy in the UK, despite over 5 times as many people dying- I only read about it on international news sites. One can understand why domestic events may be at the forefront of British news, given that in a world of strictly divided nation-states, events that happen within ‘British’ borders are likely to affect ‘British’ people politically, socially and culturally in a more immediate way than those events which happen overseas. Clearly, however, such arguments don’t apply in this case. Proximity fails to function as a reason too; as was pointed out to me, Syria is around 1,000 miles closer to the UK than Boston, Iraq 500 miles closer, and Ghana is roughly the same distance away.

The Boston bombing has led to some predictable and laughable reactions. One Fox News contributor reacted by claiming that all Muslims are ‘evil’ and that we should ‘kill them all’. Despite the obvious genocidal nature to the tweet it also ignores the fact that no one knows who carried out the bombing: statistically, more attacks are carried out in the US by right-wing terrorists than by Islamic ones. One blog records a few of the more extreme reactions from US citizens on Twitter- one of my personal favourites was this gem: ‘I swear to god I’ll murder the Korean moms, kids, dogs, dads, elders, everyone’.  Another blog points out that some have chosen to blame Jews or even the US government itself (happily, these are offset by some fine responses from Glenn Greenwald and Stephen Walt, amongst others).

More concerning is the way the mainstream British media is placing so much emphasis on the event over everything else. Taking a quick survey of the main media’s internet front pages this morning, the Guardian’s looked like this, and was fairly representative of all British outlets-

The ‘latest’ updates from the FBI on the bombing were considered more important news than an earthquake which has killed far more people. The Telegraph and BBC were much the same. The Independent had 7 stories listed on the Boston bombing before the earthquake was even mentioned.

This apparent devaluing of the lives of those of different colour, or perhaps culture, is made even more concerning when one considers the fact that ‘we’ are responsible for creating the conditions which led to the wave of bombings in Iraq yesterday. Furthermore, I came across another blog pointing out that 175 children killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan and beyond is barely treated as news in the US or UK, despite the bombings being comparable to the Boston attack (for those doubting that statement, I will give a detailed post on drones and why they constitute terrorism in the future).  

So why the focus on Boston and the neglect of every other tragic story, horrendous as they all are?  Is it racism? Cultural affinity? Pandering to readers who are more interested in America than Africa and the Middle East? Or a manifestation of the fact that much of our culture, politics, and media landscape is shaped in the image of the US, and naturally follows US events far more closely than that of ‘less important’ countries? The truth probably contains all those elements. For you and I though, we should extend the sense of compassion we feel for the 8-year boy killed in Boston to the Yemeni child killed in a US attack, the Ghanaian miner crushed to death, the family losing their house in an earthquake in Iran, and all those killed as bombs rip through crowds of innocent people in Iraq. 

Update

The blog has been going far better than expected: now clocking over 1,500 views in total, with the most recent post on Iraq by far the most popular. I have found it far more enjoyable than working on maths or economics, probably to the detriment of my grades. I have to apologise for the length of posts but given the subject matter I find it hard to get them down to a reasonable word count; furthermore, as I said in the introductory post, the blog is as much a place for me to record my thoughts as an audience-seeking enterprise. The blog also seems to be riling some people up, since I received an email from Google saying I was subject to an attack located in the US. 

Coming up I have arranged for a guest blog post from fellow course member Jamie Sims, who writes a blog (http://annoyingpeasant.blogspot.co.uk/) on political issues from gay marriage to atheism to libertarian socialism. It’s far more nicely laid out than mine and a good read; I believe he will write something to be put on here about domestic issues or economics, to give a balance to the dense international relations that characterises the majority of my own writing. In return I will contribute a post to his blog about international politics, most probably something on West Papua. Also in the pipeline for the near-future are posts on the current crisis on the Korean Peninsula and drone warfare.  

For anyone interested, another friend of mine writes a blog on European and British issues: he wrote a post ‘In Thatcher’s Defense’ (http://europeandfriends.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/in-thatchers-defense/), which was followed by an amusing 11-comment exchange between the two of us on the legacy of the late-Thatcher. 

Iraq 10 Years On

The 10 year anniversary of the Iraq War past us by last month, replete with a reasonably large media discussion. This blog will look at the results of the war, the motives behind it, and give a little analysis of the media discussion. Apologies again for the length, but this is an issue so central to the international post-war perception of Britain that it needs a thorough treatment.

The Legacy

Civilian deaths are hard to ascertain (General Tommy Franks claimed that ‘we don’t do body counts’) and vary widely, but are at least 111,903 according to the Iraq Body Count. Opinion Research Business put it at 1,033,000, and Just Foreign Policy estimates 1,455,590. One of the most respected studies comes from Lancet, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which put the total number of deaths at around 650,000 in 2006. Iraq is the second largest source of refugees in the world (second only to Afghanistan), with nearly 1.5 million even today. In 2007, the UNHCR estimated there were over 4 million externally and internally displaced Iraqis. Nearly 5,000 coalition troops have died. A U.S military veteran commits suicide every 65 minutes, many from Iraq. The war was the deadliest of any war in history for journalists: Al Jazeera’s headquarters were bombed by the US military, despite the fact that they ‘supplied the Pentagon with their headquarter’s coordinates in Baghdad in February 2003’, and two Reuters journalists were infamously mown down by a US gunship in 2007 (a family who tried to help the victims were then open fired upon, killing the father and injuring his two children), revealed in a video given to Wikileaks by Bradley Manning.

The BBC, perhaps trying to atone for its poor reporting in the run up to the war, has done some good work on Iraq recently. A joint BBC Arabic- Guardian documentary revealed how the US appointed a man who headed Reagan’s near-genocidal wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Colonel James Steele, to fund and recruit Shia death squads in the early years of the Iraq War. It partly blames this US counter-insurgency policy for starting the civil war which left 3,000 dead bodies a month on the streets of Iraq at its height in 2006-7. Hugh Sykes returned to Iraq for the BBC World Service to interview Iraqis. Their feelings were clear: as one put it in a message to George Bush, ‘on judgement day, Jesus will be on my side, not yours’. Another was asked if Iraq would have been better off without the invasion, to which she replied: ‘I don’t care about Saddam, I care about my family. Without the invasion I wouldn’t have lost my family’.  

The city of Fallujah was assaulted twice by the US for being a hub for insurgents. Depleted uranium and white phosphorus were used, contrary to international law. The results have been almost too much for one to emotionally contemplate- the legacy of the chemical warfare was described by one study as ‘worse than Hiroshima’. One of the authors claimed it was ‘the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied’. It recorded a ‘38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer’, and ‘infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait’. There is little doubt that this is the result of the US assaults. Recent court cases have revealed that the practice of torture, which we know to have been institutionalised by the US, was almost as wide-spread and as systematised in UK forces.

Today, Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Prime Minister, is widely considered dictatorial, and has been slammed by groups like Amnesty and Human Right Watch for running a state responsible for ‘rape, executions and torture’. Saddam-era prisons operate as torture cells much as they did under the US-UK occupation, and Iraq now executes more people than it has for almost a decade, according to Amnesty. Waves of bombings from groups which didn’t exist in Iraq prior to 2003 (such as Al Qaeda in Iraq) still regularly hit the country, and some fear a return to full-blown sectarian warfare. According to the Economist, ‘less than 40% of Iraqi adults have a job, and… a quarter of families live below the World Bank’s poverty line’. It is well understood that the war increased the threat of terrorism hugely, through the fomentation of hatred towards the West. Finally, Nobel Prize winner in Economics Joseph Stiglitz has put the cost of the war at over $3 trillion dollars.

Why?

It barely needs pointing out that the reasons for the war had no correlation to their professed aims, which were to dismantle Iraq’s (imaginary) Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and to bring democracy to Iraq. No one except the most deluded thinks it was for any noble reason; as Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve said, ‘the Iraq war [was] largely about oil’. As noted in an earlier blog of mine, the objective wasn’t access, rather control. They could achieve access if they wanted, but control requires a puppet regime, something Saddam was too unreliable to be. In the 80’s when he was fighting against the enemy (Iran) and using chemical weapons ‘on his own people’, the US and UK was happy to arm and support him (interestingly, the late Baroness Thatcher’s government lost £1 billion of tax-payer money funding Saddam at the time).

Tony Blair has since admitted that he would have invaded Iraq even without the reason of WMD. He explained how ‘obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat’. Secret intelligence briefings were leaked days ago which revealed how Blair was told in 2002 that ‘Iraq had no nuclear weapons and any actual WMD would be “very, very small” and would fit on to the “back of a petrol lorry”’. But after his famous visit to Bush in 2002, ‘Blair appeared to be a changed man’, and started pressuring the intelligence services to find evidence that showed Iraq had WMD. An excellent documentary by Panorama shows the intelligence officers who peddled the lies in the lead up to the war and the willingness of top officials to hear the faulty intelligence. For instance, it reveals how Saddam’s Foreign Minister and intelligence chief approached French intelligence services and the CIA six months prior to the war to tell them that Saddam had no WMD- but this intelligence was completely ignored. Informants who were assessed as ‘fabricators’ by the CIA and MI6 were used as vital sources of information, and evidently-forged documents were used as authentic. What is clear is that these apparent intelligence failings weren’t mistakes as such, but an intentional bending of the truth, or outright lies.

Top-secret documents have allegedly been given to the Chilcot Inquiry showing that Blair and Bush made a pact in 2002 to go to war with Iraq no matter what; this is contrary to claims by the pair that they were waiting until the last minute to see if Iraq would ‘disarm’, and wanted to go through the UN, as international law requires. It is clear that they were set on invading, with or without the UN and with or without WMD. British combat troops started operations in Iraq before the House of Commons even voted for war, apparently showing that they were prepared to invade even with or without parliament. Sir William Ehrman, a senior member of the Foreign Office, told the Chilcot Inquiry that they were receiving intelligence ‘in the very final days before military action’ that WMD had been dismantled in Iraq.

Oil-industry executives and government ministers met in the run up to the war to discuss the future of Iraq’s oil, which was described as ‘vital’ to British interests in documents from the inter-departmental Oil Sector Liaison Group, an arm of the British state. The oil industry was considered the ‘first main target’ in Iraq. The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War has been repeatedly delayed as the Coalition government has sought to delay the release of documents from the New Labour era (this is partly to cover up from their establishment friends, in the same way that Obama refuses to prosecute any Bush or CIA officials for torture, and partly because of the Conservatives’ overwhelming support for the war). History will judge this in the same way it does nearly every other war- as a criminal act of aggression launched on the back of lies spread by self-serving elites.

Media Coverage

One of the most interesting contributions to the debate has been from John Bolton, former Ambassador to the UN for George W Bush, who explained in the Guardian how ‘the issue was never about making life better for Iraqis’, and that ‘while President George W Bush and others sought to justify military action… as helping to spread democracy, such arguments played no measurable role in the decision to end Saddam's regime…that was not the motive, should not have been, and will not be in future interventions’. During his incredible piece of propaganda, the former senior Bush official inadvertently accused his old boss of making up the reasons for going into Iraq. His analysis of the ‘mistakes’ is that what the US should’ve done was overthrow Saddam in 1991, and then have moved to overthrow the Iranian and Syrian governments in 2003. Only a depraved individual like Bolton, who thinks the afore-mentioned Bradley Manning should be put to death, could draw the conclusion from the Iraq disaster that what was really needed was more war, earlier, and in more countries. It certainly reveals something about the mentality of members of the Bush administration.

A no-less revealing contribution from a far more respectable source came in the form of a Financial Times editorial on the ‘lessons from Iraq’. According to the newspaper, which is the major business publication in the country, the main negative consequence of the war is that Western governments now adhere to an ‘unofficial rule that military intervention requires UN Security Council backing’. Last time I checked there was a well-established official rule that military intervention requires UNSC backing- it’s called international law. Furthermore the FT laments that the ‘reticence to intervene’ has prevented the West from arming rebels in Syria; in the FT’s eyes, the real issue with Iraq is that is has caused Western governments to become less war-like. Lastly, the war has left ‘western publics too sceptical about intelligence’- namely, they are less likely to swallow the lies next time around. That the worst results of the Iraq War are considered to be these, and not the destruction of an entire country, tells you something about the media.

An article in Foreign Policy explains how ‘the war in Iraq is regarded by most Americans as a costly mistake’: this constant emphasis on the ‘mistake’ clouds the truth about what the war was: a calculated crime that should be punished through existing institutions like the International Criminal Court (which the US refuses to sign up to, for obvious reasons; the UK on the other hand, is part of the court). The parameters of debate are often bounded between those who think that the war was too costly and unwinnable, and those who think that it was winnable and a correct choice. The large part of the public who think the war was wrong (as in immoral) aren’t represented in the debate. Polls show 22-37% of the population think Blair should be tried as a war criminal- that side of the debate certainly doesn’t get a fair hearing in the media. There are exceptions- the highly-respected Desmond Tutu recently refused to meet with Blair on principled grounds, and coverage is far better than it was at the time of Vietnam- but the debate is still far too narrowly framed (for a more in-depth analysis of the media’s role in the Iraq War, I can’t recommend John Pilger’s documentary ‘The War You Don’t See’ highly enough).

Britain is yet to come to terms with the ruin it has left in Iraq- the public seems not to fully appreciate the misery and damage that has been caused by our government. Iraq is a country of similar size to Britain, and has been utterly decimated by the invasion, on the basis of lies. Until we as a nation fully realise what we have wrought in Iraq, we have little chance of stopping this from happening again.