http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2008/03/tuesday_25_march_2008_1.html

It reports that much of the presentation given by Colin Powell to the UN was in fact discredited evidence which the CIA and MI6 had said was fabricated. The evidence was supplied by an agent named Curveball and in fact it wasn’t true.

Curveball alledged that:

Iraq had mobile chemical weapons factories – this was a lie.

Iraq had an agent in London – apparently it turns out this was a reference to a 16 year old boy doing GCSE’s.

Powell claimed this agent was an eywitness to an accident in Iraq when in fact the agent wasn’t even in Iraq at the time and thus couldn’t have been an eyewitness.

MI6 said that the testimony from this German Agent bore the signs of someone who was fabricating. This advice was ignored.

Powell presented the evidence without proper checks and despite cautionary notes and cals by some within the CIA to remove it from his speech.

In addition what is emerging is that the nuclear claim was obtained using torture.

The whole evidence used to get support for the war was in fact based upon lies and where Intelligance Agencies questioned the evidence this was ignored to the point that Bliar said no agency in the world believed Iraq wasn’t producing WMD’s – again not true as his own Intelligence Agency doubted the evidence.

The simple fact is the world was lied to in order to take the West into a premeditated war. Bliar ignored the caution of his own intelligence agency which had deemed the agent a fabricator.

Thus in fact democracy itself was undermined by leaders bent on deceiving people to go to war. How on earth can anyone defend these people or the war?

It is indeed a sad fact that news reporting has been dumbed down to such an extent in the USA and is starting to happen in the UK that those who question the aims of the right are called unpatriotic.

Yet lying and causing massive civilian deaths and untold suffering is rewarding as being patriotic and spreading democracy. Thus stand Bliar and Bushy who have hoodwinked so many to believe the falsehoods.

I wonder if people are truely proud of going to war based on a lie.

http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2008/03/harrys-hatesite.html

I was going to let this go, but I can’t:

And you too have played your part.

Thanks, thank you very much. I sincerely believe that this forum is a force for good. We might disagree with each other sometimes, but we do seem to have mutual respect. Which is something we should all be aiming for, I think.

It is maybe worth saying that the likes of Sonia Ali and Sunny Hundal would definitely get my vote, these days. I’m not so sure they would have, say three years ago. Call me a late enlightened twit, but I have nothing but respect for folk that can hold an arguement together. Which is not something you see a lot of. And that they do, IMVHO.

But coming back to Brownie, I am with you – hate the sin not the sinner.

Quite. He seems to me to be unable to rise above his juvenile and irresponsible attitude. Perhaps, after a wash and a shave, he could become a Pickled Politics commentator?

Too much to hope for…

Your comments to Brownie are to be commended.

I believe HP as a comrade of PP has long passed its sell by date, it was painful to see many worthier friends dropped over the last couple of years and find the diversionary HP still here. I just wasn’t very clear. Sorry.

But coming back to Brownie, I am with you – hate the sin not the sinner.

This site now has both a backbone and quite a lot of brains too. It is evolving into something quite interesting. This child is growing into an adult. Who will not be pushed around.

I’m not sure, exactly, what it is, but as long as it keeps the wide range of commentators that it has, it will go, IMVHO, from strength to strength.

You can actually watch commentators mature. They are influenced by what is said on here. No, I am not going to name names. They know who they are. And they are all good, decent people.

So I’ll leave you with this.

I was not lying to Brownie, when I said what I said at 86. I was semi-convinced that they had a case. When you eventually realise that you’ve been sold snake oil, you do tend to react badly.

I think Brownie is a ‘decent’ human being, who, unfortunately, seems able to deny death toll figures that even Norman Geras found deplorable.

Brownie is, allegedly a citizen, planet Earth?

No, he is just another denialist. He denies whatever it suits him to deny, that second, that minute, that hour, that day.

Frankly, if I didn’t think there was a decent person inside that husk, I’d have given up on him long ago.

We will all know when its fully developed – and it will be there for all to see.

I hoped that the occupation would be a success, but after 5 years and no discernable improvement in everyday life for Iraqis it has failed. No security, no electricity and rather bizarrely no petrol. If the US/UK actually took reconstruction seriously they would not have the clusterfuck that exists today.

Glad to hear that Refresh

Well I think the fact that the country was invaded was the prime cause of all the violence, no? And yes, I do like to point out the fact that the invasion was illegal whenever I can, because it was. The UN however massively flawed it is as an institution given the primary role of dictatorships like China, along with international law, is meant, however ineffectually, to prevent, or at least dissuade certain groups of countries taking it upon themselves to invade/blow up other countries when not under immediate threat. Are you suggesting we just dump the pretence of the UN and international law altogether?

…and actually, I do think the fact that Iraq was invaded in defiance of the international community might well have boosted, at least, foreign jihadi recruitment.

The stuff about the polls is interesting — and I could only give the abcnews link a brief look. Personally I’m happy about the (small) increase in optimism among Iraqis that the polls, if accurate, purport to show — after how many deaths and how many millions displaced?

And even if 49% according to the poll think the invasion was right – 51% are still against it (95% of Sunnis), which I suppose is a kind of success for those who supported the war: gradually decreasing the majority of people against the invasion which you carried out to liberate them. (Altho, who knows what’ll happen to that figure if the effects of the surge — due in large part to our cosying up to nasty sectarian fundamentalist militias with hairy faces and lots of weapons — prove to be unsustainable).

Also the poll shows that 42% support attacks on US forces, which is a lot of people — again a kind of success only 42% (62% of Sunnis), which is a few million I guess, of the population you set to liberate think it’s OK to attack you, you have to take your succour where you can.

And of course it’s unwise to think of Iraqis as a single monolithic block given we’ve done so much to create civil strife, both ‘unintentionally’ and as part of a strategy of divide conquer, so it’s probably more important than ever to break down these polls in terms of the opinions of the winners and losers — which sadly means pro-war pillocks have even less mileage from the poll given the overwhelmingly negative opinions of the sunni population, now a beleaguered minority. That is again if we take the poll as accurate.

Thanks for the nice words,sid, douglas, zz. Sorry to
see you’re shutting down your blog because of the trouble you’ve been getting, Zinzin. Hope it starts up again soon.

Experimentally, weighting these results to 30 or even 25 percent Sunni Arab would change numbers on which Sunni Arab and Shiite divisions are greatest, but the average change across all questions would be one or 1.5 percentage points (depending on the weight used), and none of the differences would alter any of the fundamental conclusions in our analysis.

That explains why it is a lot easier to measure common things, like opinions (everyone has at least one), than relatively rare things like violent deaths. A subtle systematic bias that affects 20 out of 2000 samples makes an insignificant difference in one case, and multiplies the number by 10 in another.

That’s why Iraqi opinion polls generally give similar results, but the various mortality surveys give very different ones.

To an extent, that is obviously true: supposedly, the actual legality of the war comes down to the exact position of a comma in one of the UN resolutions. Move the comma in either direction, and nothing much changes: thoughtful legal scholars will still say the wars legitimacy is ‘questionable’, SWP-equivalent ones will call it simply ‘illegal’, government-affiliated ones the opposite. The media and audience will repeat whichever reinforces what they think for other reasons.

The thing that actually matters is perception, and the consequences of that perception: legitimacy.

If the war had been widely perceived as the world uniting to rid itself of a dangerous tyrant who had just gone too far, for too long, it is quite likely the Iraqi army would have surrendered en-masse early on, and cooperated as a whole in setting up a successor regime. By now, the biggest news might be occasional riots by those not sharing in the booming economy.

On the other hand, look at exactly the same events as a foreign invasion by the USA (with a few lackeys), going underground and cooperating with al Qaeda to kick off an insurgency starts to look like an appropriate plan. Which is how we got to where we are.

At the risk of pissing-off everyone simultaneously, here’s my view:

Bush’s key mistake, worse than a crime, directly parallels that of Arafat. Both were faced with an unjust situation, where the successful use of force would be justified on both liberal and humanitarian grounds. Both epically fucked it up, at the military and political levels. They failed to maintain a united front (Hamas : France), failed to maintain the moral high ground (torture : terrorism), failed in strategy (withdrawal in 2004 : Oslo). The justice of their cause was used not as an asset, but as spending money, as an excuse for their failure and corruption. This allowed them to continue on, making more and bigger mistakes until the well of legitimacy finally ran dry.

Compare with either Blair/Serbia, or, in particular, Mandela/South Africa. If you focus solely on abstract, universalised definitions, ‘imperialist’ or ‘criminal’, then you can’t avoid being obviously wrong about one of the four cases. Politics, life, is more complicated than that. You can’t switch off any part of your brain, use any less than your full facilities, disregard any inconvenient facts, and have any hope of being in the right.

hmmm. You could be right. Please point me to where you get that weighting from.

Anyway, I found this from the time of the election.

There are concerns the Sunni Arab population — about 20 percent of Iraq’s estimated 25 million people — will look upon the results as illegitimate. Two influential Sunni groups did not participate in the elections.

Seems to me then that, on face value, there is a 50% overstatement of the Sunni position in the BBC/ABC poll. Why would that be?

There are grounds for calling the ABC/BBC opinion poll a fraud, but it is quite clear that they did poll across the provinces and not just within the Green Zone.

It would be somewhat amazing, would it not, if Kurds thought things were worse, than under Saddam? So you could expect a high positive – from a Harry’s Place viewpoint – vote there.

Which is exactly what the BBC tells us. Here is an extract from them:

Iraq’s sectarian divide is clearly reflected within the polling – with Sunnis noticeably less happy than their Shia countrymen. For example, when asked if their life is good, 62% of Shias say yes, up 12% on last year.

Thirty-three per cent of Sunnis say their lives are good, which is a 21% increase on last August, yet a majority of Sunnis are unhappy with their situation in contrast to the majority of Shias.

And the Kurds are the happiest of all, with 73% saying life is good.

That Kurdish vote is what I think Brownie relies on, it skews the figures.

It is also not correct to claim the sample size was inadequate, it is, in fact quite adequate.

What is not at all clear is on what basis the correspondents were supposed to answer. Was it a harking back to the days of Saddam, or was it last year? That is not at all clear in their methodology. Correct me if I am wrong.

I hope you are still reading this thread, although I doubt it. You and your chums on Harry’s Place had me pretty well convinced that what we were doing in Iraq was the equivalent of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. A just and reasonable proposition.

But one that turned out to be dust, Brownie, dust. And you are still pushing the same line. I said at the time that the death toll was now unacceptable, that nothing justified the half million or so folk that had died.

You, coming back with justification on behalf of those that are still alive is pretty sickening.

The death toll is now around the million mark. It just gets worse the longer it goes on, and it frankly does you a dis-service as a human being to be on that side of the arguement.

Dead people can’t vote in your stupid polls.