[…] – 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 […]
[…] and strikes, but this has never stopped him doing deals with the union bosses. Most recently, of course, they helped him avoid discussion of the invasion of Iraq at the party conference, something that shows the state of the Labour Party better than anything. But his career actually started with deals with the union […]
The Americans’ catastrophe in Iraq is prompting a rethink of US military tactics: as in, maybe it would be helpful if we knew something about the countries we invade. We need anthropologists, says Dr. Montgomery McFate, in ‘Anthropology and counterinsurgency: the strange story of their curious relationship’, Military Review, March/April 2005 (at ) ‘Anthropology […]
[…] US defence doctrine; and the aggregation of all of these in the combination of political and strategic factors leading the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. The term ‘war on terror’ (WoT) has been widely derided as both epistemologically illiterate and a transparent catchall for demagogy and the pursuit of long-standing […]
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 […]
[…] ‘pro’ campaign there was no mention; and he was told about it. You leak, we brief Michael Smith, of The Times, who got the big leak over Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo, (2) has described meeting his civil service source, ‘a friend’, to get it. Yet despite this being as big and as […]
[…] not going hard enough for some within the Washington foreign policy networks. What was the geostrategic point of blaming Bin Laden? The Bush regime’s real target was Iraq and their attempts to link Iraq to the Twin Towers were feeble and incompetent. If it was a fake, could they not have manufactured more plausible […]
[…] includes the ‘plethora of media stories about Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons capability’. So, the British government has a new fibbing-machine that enables us to bomb Iraq whenever it is convenient. (Perhaps also to join a common European currency, or not?) When the complete history of MI6 in the Cold War is known, […]
[…] but there was no way of tracing this. The money was paid so that pro-Libyan articles etc. would be published. Healy also provided information to Libya and Iraq in exchange for funding about the activities and connections of various dissidents who had been expelled from those nations. In particular Healy would, typically, organise a […]
