[…] Stephen Byers, then an ardently Blairite education minister, for advice about who The Daily Express should hire.’ He has an illuminating chapter on media complicity in the Iraq war before reflecting on the growing divide between the hinterland-free ‘Political Class’ and the taxpayers who pay their mortgages. This is not just the gap between […]
[…] to write this: ‘as long as support to autocratic Arab regimes and Israel continues unabated, Washington’s rhetoric about freedom and democracy carries little conviction. (p. 61)……… As Iraq testifies, there is probably not enough soft power around to compensate for the friction of war.’ (p. 64) Which about as tough as these essays get. […]
[…] Middle East and European affairs), Russell believes that the CIA’s intelligence was more accurate than that of the defence establishment. Richard L. Russell, ‘CIA’s strategic intelligence in Iraq’, Political Science Quarterly, 117 (2) (Summer 2002), pp 191-207. Also available in full at < http:// www.psqonline. org/ >. Deep Throat Uncovered? At a conference held […]
[…] Notice, by the way, how even critics of the White House/Downing Street information campaign rarely use the term conspiracy theory in the context of the Al Qaeda/ Iraq fantasy.) Nor are the mainstream media entirely immune from the all-explaining global conspiracy that they rightly denounce when cooked up by non-professionals or political enemies. The […]
[…] are, in fact, distinct and competitive ways of seeing and operating. They overlap in some places (in the war against terrorism) and they conflict in others (over Iraq). Conflicts continue and are inevitable. I explore a theory of why this is below. A new consensus Three conservative models are starting to converge, with, as […]
[…] public until the Americans fuck-up and then they mutter in the corner about the dumb, incompetent, cowboy Yanks, as they did most recently over the debacle in Iraq. You may be thinking that I am anti-American. Not so: but I am anti-American foreign policy. My parents were in the Communist Party until the Soviet […]
[…] were involved in, or claim to have been involved in, the various intelligence scandals of the Reagan/Bush years: October Surprise, Inslaw, BCCI, the arming of Iran and Iraq. And so Stich begins to learn about Mossad operations; factions within the CIA; assassination squads; drug dealing on a massive scale; corrupt politicians, judges etc. etc. […]
[…] the Baath party. Today, the Arabs are no longer afraid…… The old Sharon policy into which the American neo-conservatives so fatally bought before the 2003 invasion of Iraq – of beating the Arabs till they come to heel or until they “behave” or until an Arab leader can be found “to control his own […]
[…] ground. I noted it was a coincidence that whenever Blair got into deep trouble, we had a terrorist alert tanks at Heathrow three days before the Iraq anti-war march; the fertiliser-bomb raid in Middlesex the day Beverley Hughes was forced to resign, and the Manchester arrests on EU U-turn day.’ And what happened? […]
[…] would New Zealand be spying on the UN? How could that be in our national interest? As was revealed in the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US National Security Agency (NSA, the Big Daddy of all the GCSB’s Big Brothers) systematically spied on the UN. So, the answer is that spying […]
