[…] the figleaf of ‘international support’ for the US while the rest of the EU snigger behind their cocktails? Yes, sir. Send Tornado pilots to their death in Iraq on suicidal low-level bombing missions? Yes sir, if that’s all we have to offer (especially, as Urban tells us, when large procurement programs hang on the […]
[…] of recent Acts of Parliament (1987 onwards). Plans to publish Acts of Parliament in full from 1996 onwards. Newsgroups alt.desert-storm Subjects include chemical/ biological weapons used in Iraq, depleted uranium, Iraq sanctions, Gulf War Syndrome, birth defects in babies born to Gulf War veterans, US export of CBW-related materials to Iraq. alt.politics.org.cia Mena – […]
[…] magisterial, perhaps – than the historical overviews that preceded them. It’s partly that current affairs is a moving target. In the case of why the Americans attacked Iraq, for example, our knowledge of the actual decision-making process is growing by the week as the military and intelligence bureaucracies leak in the great game of […]
[…] – of pounds of bribes and general ripping-off of the public purse could be done on the quiet. Hence Malaysia and the Pergau dam fiasco; hence arming Iraq, Iran, Saudia Arabia, Indonesia and who knows which other scum-bag regimes; hence the huge subsidies of the arms industry by the British state. In the Public […]
Empires Apart: America And Russia From The Vikings To Iraq Brian Landers Hove: Picnic Publishing, 2009, £15, p/b Is America an empire? Tsarist Russia and its Soviet successor were certainly seen as such through western eyes. That America is not showing the heavily ideologised world through which we frame history. In a bold […]
Books Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq John W. Dower New York: W.W. Norton, 2010, $29.95 (US), around £20 (UK), h/b Simon Matthews John Dower is a retired Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on USJapanese relations. His book compares Al Qaeda’s surprise […]
[…] Unfortunately it doesn’t look as if 2002-3 was a great period for underreported news. There are a few truly scandalous stories here (‘US illegally removes pages from Iraq UN report’; ‘US implicated in Taliban massacre’; ‘Rums-feld’s plan to provoke terrorists’; the so-called P2OG) but many of the 25 are neither surprising nor particularly new […]
[…] a domestic person, mother and wife. Indeed, the book is actually described as being about ‘a family on a journey.’ This is how she deals with the Iraq War, for example. Supporting Blair’s stand was, she writes, ‘my job as his wife’, a strange position for someone who still claims to be a feminist. […]
[…] The problem of oil is, however, central to the Iranian situation. Iran has the second largest reserves of oil of any nation. The supply of oil from Iraq, which presumably the 2003 invasion was meant to secure, has been reduced by the continual sabotage by those resisting the US-led occupation, and all the while […]
[…] hence the government preference for dealing with them. This committee actually produced a report ‘The Handling of Detainees by UK Intelligence Personnel in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq’ in 2005. This was pretty anodyne: they failed to see anything significantly wrong. After mentioning that they had taken evidence from Amnesty International, who had made […]
