[PDF file]: […] insuperable difficulties.28 Determination that Britain had not only to remain ‘Great’ but have the capacity to show this to the world also explains the catastrophic intervention in Iraq, done in the teeth of massive public opposition, and the willingness to join Washington in a new Cold War aimed largely against what is seen as […]
[PDF file]: […] rather than reciprocating steam engines. Encouraged by the government in London, oil corporations established themselves in Persia and Mesopotamia (then part of the Ottoman Empire and now Iraq). The largest of these (with 51 per cent of the shares purchased by the British State), was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP). The defeat of […]
[PDF file]: […] of them despising and eschewing politics to this day. Meantime, and in accordance with the British government’s new policy of courting Saddam Hussein, the SIS’s interest in Iraq was scaled down. Holistic knowledge of the country, at one time second to none, plummeted: what is taught in a dictator’s secondary schools defines the capabilities […]
[PDF file]: […] those to Malta. But Ashton also puts that into political context by reminding us that in the 1980s, when Iran enjoyed US support during its war with Iraq, Libya was clearly targeted by the Reagan Administration. The shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 encouraged Thatcher to become the only European leader to allow […]
[PDF file]: […] is: Tell them what they want to hear, you’ll earn more money. With the codicil: Let your imagination be unconfined! (Who could forget Curveball’s role in the Iraq debacle?) And Somersett certainly let his imagination run wild. So, Adams goes out looking for Milteer, eventually finds him, and puts to him the five questions […]
[PDF file]: […] immediately after he quit being Prime Minister in June 2007 by the MidEast Quartet (the EU, Russia, the UN and the USA). The man who had invaded Iraq and who, in his memoirs, regretted that they had not gone on to replace the regimes in Syria and Iran, was silent during the 2009 assault […]
[…] specific events in the Thatcher period. Some are familiar – the miners’ strike; nukes civil and military; the deaths of Hilda Murrell and Willie McRae; arms for Iraq. These later chapters are less error-strewn (though no better sourced) than his account of the 1974-79 period, perhaps because the material is less complex. When he […]
[PDF file]: […] leader. Marshall-Andrews’ own particular concerns are with New Labour’s colonial wars and its assault on civil liberties. Blair told barefaced lies to secure British participation in the Iraq War. Marshall-Andrews makes the interesting point that if he had told the truth then he would never have got a Commons majority in favour of war. […]
[…] Europe by the USA, the EU and NATO was accompanied by a hubristic liberal-capitalist triumphalism which poisoned and destabilised the international environment. The recent history of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria provides clear evidence of a dialectical process in which Western intervention has fuelled political instability and led to blowback in the form of […]
[PDF file]: […] and steal to enrich their masters on our behalf. This Orwellian (and even Heinleinian) reality was obvious from the first moments 9/11 turned into an invasion of Iraq, but it has been in the cards constantly in my lifetime: the Congressional oversight in the 70s led only to an October Surprise in 1980 and […]
