Dave mentions Iraq
Yes he does, in elegiac mode. "How the hell did this all get so fucked up? Certainly looks as if somebody screwed up big time. Wonder who that was?" appears to be the Aaro line, with a small helping of "Am I sorry? I am not sorry that we got rid of Saddam" (c) Tony Blair, via Normblog.
There is a lot of semi-interesting historical colour on Iraq, albeit nothing that you can't get anywhere else and in my opinion the role of the US and UK is rather played down in order to make France and Russia look bad (the fact is that the UK does not manufacture a rifle as good as the Kalashnikov and we would certainly have been a big supplier to Saddam if we did. Worth remembering from the Matrix Churchill affair that we were conniving to break an embargo and provide him with the wherewithal to take potshots at Israel!).
But the key message is "the vulnerability, the fallibility", sometimes you just have a war and kill 600,000 people and it's basically nobody's fault. For who is to say that it might not have been even worse if we did things the other way?
Realpolitik, its many current fans should realise, no more guarantees you a quiet life than does interventionism. But at least the latter puts the tyrant in the dock.
I could bang on about "excess deaths" in the Lancet study (a concept Dave actually makes use of in the context of a Unicef report which was later withdrawn). But I don't think one needs to bring out the statistical heavy guns here. Just to note that Dave's conclusion basically amounts to:
"See those guys who couldn't handle a simple embargo without fucking it up? Why not give them a bit of political cover to launch a war?"
There is a lot of semi-interesting historical colour on Iraq, albeit nothing that you can't get anywhere else and in my opinion the role of the US and UK is rather played down in order to make France and Russia look bad (the fact is that the UK does not manufacture a rifle as good as the Kalashnikov and we would certainly have been a big supplier to Saddam if we did. Worth remembering from the Matrix Churchill affair that we were conniving to break an embargo and provide him with the wherewithal to take potshots at Israel!).
But the key message is "the vulnerability, the fallibility", sometimes you just have a war and kill 600,000 people and it's basically nobody's fault. For who is to say that it might not have been even worse if we did things the other way?
Realpolitik, its many current fans should realise, no more guarantees you a quiet life than does interventionism. But at least the latter puts the tyrant in the dock.
I could bang on about "excess deaths" in the Lancet study (a concept Dave actually makes use of in the context of a Unicef report which was later withdrawn). But I don't think one needs to bring out the statistical heavy guns here. Just to note that Dave's conclusion basically amounts to:
"See those guys who couldn't handle a simple embargo without fucking it up? Why not give them a bit of political cover to launch a war?"
posted by The Rioja Kid at 11/08/2006 07:56:00 AM
2 Comments:
Aaro is arguing in his piece that it was right to invade Iraq in 2003 because of things that happened in 1988, while at the same time avoiding any harsh words directed at Thatcher and Wyatt (who appear to be the guilty parties in his piece). Shouldn't Aaro be campaigning for Thatcher's statue to be broken up and thrown in the Thames? Shouldn't Aaro be campaigning against Western arms' sales? (The West supported Iraq against Iran from 1981 to 1988 because the West had supplied the Shah with enormous quantities of arms that had then fallen into the hands of the post-1979 Iranian regime, and were frightened about how they would be used.) Perhaps that would not go down very well with Times' readers?
Why do they still persist? Even Richard Perle has come out against the invasion – although in his case there is a sneaky suspicion that he wanted to invade Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia first.
Saw Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent a few weeks back saying he was wrong, but it was written in such an overblown, sarcastic fashion that he most probably believes deep down he was right.
Flat Earthers the lot of them except the Flat Earth society doesn't lead to more than 600,000 deaths, a million refugees, the dismemberment of a country and political reordering of the Middle East exactly in the fashion they didn't want.
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