Little Men Dressed Up in Clothes of Dead Titans
Robert Fisk, The Independent(UK).

It is the march of folly. In 1914, the British, French, and Germans though
they would be home by Christmas. On April 9, 2003, Cpl. David Breeze of the
3rd Battalion, 4th US Marine Regiment - the very first American to enter
Baghdad - borrowed my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. "Hi you
guys, I'm in Baghdad," he told his mother. "I'm ringing to say 'Hi, I love
you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys.' The war will be over in a few days.
I'll see you all soon." They were tough, those Marines, big-boned men with
muck on their faces and ferocity in their eyes - they had been fighting for
days without sleep - but they too were on the same lonely journey of despair
that the Old Contemptables and the French poilus and the Bavarian infantry
embarked upon almost a century ago.
Was this because we no longer have leaders who have experienced war at first
hand? When I grew up, Churchill and MacMillan were prime ministers, men who
fought in the World War I and who led us through World War II. Eden had been
in the wartime Cabinet with Churchill. Tito had been wounded by German
shellfire in Yugoslavia, Jack Kennedy had commanded a torpedo boat in the
Pacific, de Gaulle fought in the Great War, and later helped to liberate
France from the Nazis, but Blair has no such distinction; nor Bush, who
dodged Vietnam; nor Cheney, who also dodged Vietnam; nor Gordon Brown, nor
Condoleezza Rice; nor John Howard of Australia. Colin Powell was in Vietnam;
but he has gone, trailing his ignominious February 2003 UN performance on
weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, the little men dressed up in the clothes of dead titans. Bush and
Blair thought they were Churchills or Roosevelts. They flaunted themselves
along with Aznar of Spain as the Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and
Stalin. They claimed that Saddam was the Hitler of Baghdad. 
They were the quick-fix men, the instant statesmen, the guys who had handle
on war. Postwar control and reconstruction? Forget it, the Iraqis will do as
we tell them after they have greeted us with roses and songs. 
Winston Churchill set up a British Cabinet committee to organize the
administration of postwar occupied Germany in 1941: four years before the
end of World War II, and at a time when we still expected a Wehrmacht
invasion of Britain. The Churchill frauds had not even bothered to create
such a committee for days before their invasion of Iraq. For this was to be
an ideological war. From its creation by the loonies of the American right -
as a pro-Israeli policy to aid Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu - and
then foisted on Bush, to the hell-disaster that Iraq now represents, the
real war had to be turned into myth; nightmares into dreams; destruction
into hope; terrible truths into profound mendacity.
Even today the occupation powers tell awesome lies. Democracy is taking hold
when the "Iraqi" government controls only a few acres of Baghdad greensward.
The insurgency is being crushed when 40,000 armed Iraqis are ripping into
the greatest army on Earth; freedom is taking hold when thousands of Iraqis
are dying each month. "Operation Swarmer" is now supposedly targeting those
who want a civil war in Iraq. Some of the men who are trying to provoke
civil war however, work for the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
For the truth, we should turn to a well-known analyst who warned us that in
Iraq, the British have been "led into a trap from which it shall be hard to
escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady
withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere,
incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told.
Our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows ... We
are today not far from a disaster." This is the most concise and accurate
account I have yet read of our present folly.
It was written about the British occupation of Iraq in 1920 by Lawrence of
Arabia. In the long nights of 2003, when the dangers of each day under US
bombardment were replaced by the insomnia of bomb-blasts in the Baghdad
darkness outside. I would curl up like an animal in my bed and thumb through
the predictions of this present folly.
I read a fearful prophecy by the evangelical preacher Pat Buchanan written
five months before we illegally invaded Iraq. "This invasion will not be the
cakewalk neoconservatives predict," he said. "Terrorist attacks in liberated
Iraq seem as certain as in liberated Afghanistan. For a militant Islam ...
will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...
Pax Americana will reach apogee but then the tide recedes; for the one
endeavor at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by
terror and guerrilla warfare." There were the dreary precedents. Muslims
drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden; the French out of Algeria; the
Russians out of Afghanistan; the Americans out of Somalia; and Beirut, the
Israelis out of Lebanon. As Buchanan wrote, "we have started up the road to
empire, and over the next hill we will meet those who went before." However,
we shall not count the bodies.
What was it Bush told us a few weeks ago? That 30,000 Iraqis had been killed
since the invasion, his very words a racist admission; for what he actually
said was: "30,000 more or less." More or less, give or take a few hundred.
Would he have dared to say that US casualties were "2,000 more or less"? Of
course not. Our dead are precious; they are individuals with widows and
children. The Iraqis? Well, they are lesser beings whose casualties cannot
be revealed to us by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, on orders from the
Americans and British; creatures whose suffering, far greater than our own,
must be submerged in the democracy and freedom in which we are drowning
them; whose casualties "More or less" are probably nearer to 150,000. 
Civil war? There never was a civil war? It is a tribal, not a sectarian
society. Some organization wants a civil war; oddly, it was an occupation
force's spokesman, a certain Dan Senor, who first warned of civil war in
Iraq at an Anglo-American press conference in 2003. Why? We talk of civil
war far more than the Iraqis do. Why? Repeatedly, we are told that Iraqis
and Westerners are kidnapped by "Men wearing police uniforms" or by "Men
wearing army uniforms."
What is this nonsense? Are we really to believe that there is a vast
warehouse in Fallujah containing 8,000 made-to-measure police uniforms for
potential insurgents? No! The truth is that many of the policemen and
soldiers of Iraq, upon whose loyalty and courage our retreat, according to
Bush, depends, are themselves insurgents. So deeply have the
nationalists/Islamists forces infiltrated these men that the Bush-Blair
promises of withdrawal are the very opposite of the truth. We are on our
own. The reality is that our armed presence in Iraq is destroying an entire
people.
So we proceed down the crumbling staircase. Let us forget the weapons of
mass destruction; the 45-minute warning; the links between Saddam and Sept.
11, 2001; the dossiers; and the lies; and our torture - yes, torture, at Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay; and the ever-widening chasm between Blair's
tomfoolery and the truth. Bush has told us that "More sacrifices will be
required." You bet they will be if we continue this march of folly.

Time Running Out for Blair
Steve Richards, The Independent

Politics is viewed increasingly through two prisms. One is marked "Blair
must go, for the sake of the Labour Party and the country". The other is
marked "Blair must stay, for the sake of the party and the country." Not
since the final days of Margaret Thatcher have the same events and
personalities been seen from such intense and conflicting perspectives.
Not surprisingly, Tony Blair and his entourage view the situation through
the latter prism. He and they are more convinced than ever of the prime
minister's indispensability. As far as they are concerned, bad personal poll
ratings are a form of vindication, a sign that tough decisions are being
taken. Once popularity was almost an end in itself. Now unpopularity is seen
as a triumph of sorts.
The frenzy over party funding obscured an extraordinary speech by Tony Blair
delivered in Sedgefield last Thursday, the day after his Schools Bill won a
majority with Conservative support. The speech was planned as part of a new
Downing Street offensive, the next stage of the unrelenting crusade. As it
happened, the crusade faced the unexpected obstacle of a fuming party
treasurer complaining about loans that he had known nothing about.
Even so, the speech was much more significant than the row over party
funding. In it, Blair signaled a new Clause IV-type campaign in which he
would seek to persuade the Labour Party that his "reforms" were necessary.
Once more he erected a false juxtaposition, suggesting that the only
dividing lines were between his reforms and the Conservatives' plans that
would benefit the wealthy. This took some chutzpah on the day after the
Conservatives had kept his show on the road by supporting the Schools Bill.
The speech was the latest product from those convinced of the need for the
prime minister to stay on for at least 18 months. They hold this view with a
determined intensity that should not be underestimated. This is a group that
regards the education reforms as the equivalent of Labour's attempts to
reform the trade unions in the late 1960s. Labour failed then. It must
succeed now, or it is doomed. More widely, the party must be seen to be on
the side of "reform", or their interpretation of reform. Patronizingly - and
ignoring his record for more than a decade - they are suspicious of Gordon
Brown's willingness to reform.
As a result, they seek to shape other looming decisions. Before Blair goes,
they want to ensure that his successor is trapped on to their agenda for
years to come. Blair must stay to save the party and the country.
There are obvious and well-rehearsed flaws in this view of politics, but
they are partly irrelevant. What makes this prism increasingly unfocused is
the opposite one. While the Blairite revolutionaries prepare for the next
stage of their crusade, they face a significant number of people and media
organizations that are convinced he should go. We should not overestimate
the significance of the newspapers. They are capable of making editorial
judgments almost randomly. Even so, the sense of turbulence is conveyed when
The Economist and The Guardian declare for different reasons that Blair
should resign this year.
The latest frenzy over party funding is viewed largely through this prism.
Before long the story heads for concluding lines about the terminal nature
of Blair's leadership. In this case, the focus on Blair is unfair. He had an
election to fight and Labour needed additional cash to challenge a
reinvigorated Conservative Party attracting loans as if they were going out
of fashion. He would have been slaughtered if Labour had fought an
amateurish campaign because it did not have enough money.
Blair was not preparing for a meaningless BBC seminar, but a campaign for
power against a party suddenly awash with cash. More broadly, Blair had made
party donations transparent. Even more broadly, we need well-funded parties,
and not cash-strapped ones. Once more in the pious anti-Blair hysteria
democracy itself is under threat. They're all corrupt! Who needs parties?
But the prism "Blair must go" is in place. None of the alternative arguments
is heard, and therefore they do not matter very much. It is Blair's flaws
that are noticed alone.
The flaws are part of a tragic irony. On the day he was elected Prime
Minister in 1997, Blair declared defensively that "We were elected as New
Labour and will govern as New Labour." From the beginning, he sought to
reassure. He would be new. He would not be old Labour. Old Labour was seen
as anti-American. New Labour would be so pro-American it would support a
dangerous and ill-thought-through war. Old Labour was seen as anti-business.
New Labour would be pro-business to the point where big gifts or loans were
regarded with pride.
Old Labour destroyed itself partly because bodies such as the National
Executive Committee wielded too much power. New Labour would undermine such
bodies to the point where its own treasurer did not know what was going on.
Blair's antennae would be alert to any liaisons with the trade unions, but
the past offered no guidance in relation to business leaders. Like a
character in a film noir, Blair sought to avoid the traps of the past and
fell into some equally nightmarish ones of his own making.
There comes a point when an unflattering perception of a leader overwhelms
all other consideration. If you have a spare moment - a very spare moment -
take a look at the photos of William Hague in a baseball cap, shortly after
becoming Conservative leader in 1997. He does not look too bad in the cap.
Admittedly he would not get a contract as a male model, but he looks cool
enough. At the time, the photos were viewed through the prism "This leader
is a buffoon". Therefore in the photo we saw only a buffoon. Listen
carefully to Michael Howard talking with a genuinely good-humored charm. He
did so when he was a leader too. It did not matter. He was viewed through a
prism marked "Something of the night about him". If Howard had
single-handedly brought peace to the Middle East it would have been regarded
as a sinister act.
The prism marked "Blair must go" is also partly a distortion. No one can
accuse him of hiding his appetite for public service reforms, or to be more
precise his version of reform. He is less culpable in terms of party funding
than Conservative leaders. Yet this is not heard. The din is too loud. It
started with Iraq, when Blair's authority was diminished deservedly. Now he
is a leader at odds with much of his party, determined to stay in place when
most of the media have lost patience. Those who view events through the
prism marked "Blair must stay" underestimate the degree to which his time is
running out.





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