Iraq - The Issue That Just Won't Go Away For Blair, Bush

As Blair starts to see all his spin over Iraq turn around to bite him, I bet Bush is wondering when the US voters will catch on.

Well, it seems that Bush and his Pentagon are trying to be clever with words again.

The New York Times, that well known bastion of liberal media bias, reports that "The concentration of American troops and weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan limits the Pentagon's ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts."

The NY Times was given a copy of a classified report to Congress by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In it, he cited reduced stockpiles of precision weapons, which were depleted during the invasion of Iraq, and the stress on reserve units, which fulfill the bulk of combat support duties in Iraq, as among the factors that would limit the Pentagon's ability to prevail as quickly as war planners once predicted in other potential conflicts.

The report seems at odds with Bush's words during last week's news conference:
Mr. Bush said he had asked General Myers, "Do you feel that we've limited our capacity to deal with other problems because of our troop levels in Iraq?"
"And the answer is no, he didn't feel a bit limited," Mr. Bush said. "It feels like we got plenty of capacity."
Late Monday, a Pentagon official dismissed any serious contradiction between the president and the general. "The two comments are consistent in that no one in the military feels at all limited in the ability to respond to any contingency," the official said. "What the risk assessment discusses is the nature of the response."

So yes, the Pentagon thinks it can win any war it is called upon to wage. That is being defined as "not limited in capacity". However no, the Pentagon doesn't feel that it could wage any other war as successfully, without much higher US casualties, while troops and resources are tied down in Iraq. That is being defined as "limited in the nature of response".

Can you run that one by me again? Is that like the difference between "torture" and "abuse"? One of those distinctions that you have to be a doublespeak expert to get?

As usual, their weasel words are designed to fool the American public, not foreign powers.

Whereas Blair is probably wishing he hadn't tried to be so clever at missing out words.

The Uk General Election is now less than 48 hours away, and Iraq has become the issue that won't go away. Reuters has a report that the families of 10 slain soldiers are to take Prime Minister Tony Blair to court for "lying" over the reasons he gave for taking the country to war.

Two days before the election, the families delivered a letter to Downing Street office demanding the Prime Minister order a full, independent public inquiry within 14 days or warning they would begin legal action.
"These families are seriously concerned that their loved ones died in circumstances where the war was illegal," said Phil Shiner, the lawyer representing the group Military Families Against the War which is taking the legal action.
"They are entitled to know why their loved ones died."
Shiner said if Blair failed to hold an inquiry, they would immediately apply to the courts for a judicial review under the European Convention of Human Rights. He said legal experts reckoned they had "at least a 50 percent" chance of success.

As I predicted, documents that prove Blair mislead his cabinet over the legality of the war and others which show that Blair and Bush created the causes for the invasion will be the main exhibits before any enquiry. At a press conference on Tuesday, families of the dead soldiers vowed to pursue Blair "in or out of office" - not only via the public judicial review but also via private criminal charges.

My prediction is that Blair's Labour Party will win the election, more despite him than because of him. The latest poll from the London Times puts Labour at least 13% ahead of their rivals. However, the party will then move quickly to bring in Blair's heir apparent, Gordon Brown, who does not seem to have been directly tarred by lies over Iraq in the same way as, say, Jack Straw and who is widely credited with Labour's poll lead because of his economic policies. Blair could have gone into the history books as the man who made modernised Labour and made them electable again - instead he will likely be remembered as a liar who took the country into a needless war of aggression.

If Blair is found culpable, then the last vestiges of the sham will have dropped from around the current White House leadership, as they certainly knew what Blair did. At that point, the way would be open for actions by the families of US war dead and by soldiers crippled by the war in Iraq. It's going to be a hairy time for Bush and his cabinet, as if the review goes ahead it will simply begin demanding further documents be released, and the UK has a rather different approach. Nothing is going to be redacted or hidden on grounds of "national security" if the Law Lords say they want to see it and make it public. If the review goes ahead, expect more incriminating revelations from across the pond.

Perhaps in revenge for the slanted report on the death of an Italian agent, an Italian computer specialist has discovered that censorship on an American report on the strength of the Iraqi insurgency was easy to remove. The report thus revealed gave official Pentagon figures showing there were 15,527 attacks on coalition forces, largely American, from July 2004 to late March 2005. Some 2,404 attacks took place in Baghdad from 1 November to 12 March.

The picture painted by the uncensored military report is in sharp contrast to the more optimistic views given by the Pentagon to the US media. As The Independent puts it:

The bombings in the past week underline that the insurgents have lost none of their ability to carry out attacks, almost always without regard for civilian casualties, all over Iraq. In the three months since the elections on 30 January there was a drop in American losses which led to official optimism that the guerrilla war was on the wane.

As we have seen before, the official optimism is always echoed by Rightwing bloggers, only to have a deafening silence fall when attacks resume at old rates. Even worse, those who only get their news from the Right's echo chambers seem to think the "waning war" lie is actually true.

Finally, from the Economist, a warning that "exporting democracy" is failing if the aim was to curb Islamic extremism - for the Islamists are eagerly embracing democracy as a way to parlay their popular support into actual political power.

if America truly wants Arabs to democratise as a foil to extremism, it must expect results that may not be entirely to its liking. This message is not new. Arab governments have long excused the curbs they impose on political freedom by raising the spectre of Islamism.

But the political strength of Islamism has grown increasingly plain, not only in Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, religious parties are the strongest to have emerged among both Sunnis and Shias. When Palestinians vote in a new legislature this summer, the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are both expected to make gains against secular parties. The Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest of Islamist parties, remains the most credible opposition group in Egypt and Jordan. It is even making a slow comeback in Syria, where it was nearly hounded to extinction during the 1980s. In faraway Morocco, two Islamist parties, one “loyalist” regarding the monarchy, the other dissident, have made headway against the once dominant socialists and liberals.

What unites these groups is not simply a commitment to defend Islamist values. Compared with other movements in the very broad Muslim political spectrum, many of the emerging forces are relatively progressive. They have gained from the Arab public's frustration with their own governments' failure to deliver better living standards as well as from anger at perceived western belligerence against Islam. But they have also largely adopted “western” values, such as democracy and constitutional limits to executive power.

Worth reading.