[…] Before the furore over the British government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ in February, in truth I hadn’t been really paying much too attention to the then impending assault on Iraq. (1) It seemed obvious that the US, with its faithful British sidekick, was going to attack Iraq whatever the UN inspectors did or didn’t find. In […]
[…] whom? The oppressed, or the companies that might see their competitors getting a bigger slice of the action? But sanctions can cut both ways. After the 2003 Iraq war, the U.S. was accused of drawing up a blacklist of foreign companies which under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 would not be allowed to […]
[…] the strength of the Euro and will do all it can to maintain a divided EU. Branding itself the only super power is defensive, albeit clever, PR. Iraq In Iraq, the US executive has inadvertently offered similar case-studies in ‘boomerang PR’. The most obvious examples are its self-defeating, despicable demonisation of the Shia branch […]
Advertising In 1960s Iraq, the children of the poor carried their most treasured possessions to school in much coveted, branded soap-powder packets. When these eventually disintegrated, what remained was stuck up on the classroom wall. As a result, children could pick out the words ‘Tide’ or ‘Omo’. Praised by their teacher for doing so, […]
Back to the future: the USA, the UK and Iraq The US threatens to attack Iraq and is backed by the UK. There are objections in the UN Security Council from Russia and France. A large task force is assembled. Guess what happens next? Not a lot. There is a diplomatic crisis temporarily resolved […]
[…] MI5 launch a campaign to attract those from various ethnic groups living in Britain to sign up to Her Majesty’s secret services…..(23) Spook PR and War with Iraq Nowhere has Whitehall’s Cold War (and macho) PR-machine been more in evidence than in its handling of Iraq. Take, for example, the map of Iraq invariably […]
[…] place as well as the ones that remain concealed.(1) At the time of writing (October 2004), the deluge of media coverage on the false justifications for the Iraq war now understandably giving way to greater anxieties about the well-being of British troops has led to widespread public recognition of intelligence failure, without […]
[…] in 1973. He fell victim a year later to a Ba’athist dictat that barred professors married to foreigners. After refusing to spy on foreign companies operating in Iraq, Al-Ani voyaged in 1980 with his young family to Finland. Though strongly opposed to the Ba’athists, Al-Ani wondered how any Iraqi in the 1980s and 1990s […]
It is impossible to ignore the continuing Iraq story but difficult to decide to what, of the mountain of information we are being presented with, we should pay attention. The general drift of the British state’s policy has been clear: concede a little; maintain what’s left of the cover-up; concede a little more; maintain […]
I’m still interested in the origins of the invasion of Iraq, the why and the when. At one level this is banal. We know, originally from CBS reporter David Martin, that within hours of the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeldt was ‘telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though […]
