[PDF file]: Useful idiot The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq Emma Sky Atlantic Books: 2015, £18.99, h/b D efeated armies often console themselves by constructing a ‘stab in the back’ myth. The war was going well, victory was in sight, but the politicians back home let the troops down. Most famously, the German […]
[PDF file]: Asil Nadir: another victim of the arms-to- Iraq conspiracy? Andrew Rosthorn A sil Nadir was sentenced to 10 years in prison on 23 August 2012, for stealing £29 million from his company and from its North Cyprus subsidiary Uni-Pac. Soon after Justice Minister Chris Grayling rejected Nadir’s request for a transfer from a British […]
[…] and a belief that life should be better for the vast majority of mankind for whom it is unbearable.’ And on the subject of liberty, and the Iraq of his diary, he quotes approvingly T. E. Lawrence: ‘Freedom is taken, not given.’ Glass does not pontificate on the remark – he rarely does on […]
Robert Parry Arlington (VA): The Media Consortium, 2004; $22.95 (US); p/b Order from <www.secrecyandprivilege.com> This is the book I have enjoyed most since the last Lobster and it is one of the best books I have read on American politics and parapolitics. Robert Parry really is very good indeed: he has the serious investigative … Read more
[…] Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) published in June (26) estimates that some 30,000 employees of US and European-based Private Security Companies (PSCs) are at work in Iraq. ‘They have been involved in firefights…..scores of them…..have perished….. add by 20% the number of foreign troops in the country.’ Not that this would be apparent […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one […]
[…] a US president tries to advocate a contrary view. Thus, for instance, attempts to resolve the occupation of the Golan Heights are invariably ignored, delayed or wrecked. Iraq Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book deals with the 2003 invasion of Iraq which, the authors argue, was triggered by intense Israeli lobbying of […]
[…] Blair backed him, but the issue was particularly contentious if only because two persons, including a civil servant, were simultaneously being tried for leaks associated with the Iraq war. Leaking is a political act and the operational leaking appeared to be directed by one part of government at the expense of operational efficiency by […]
[…] the Near East for decades and are organized by the BIS in practically all states. For example, the BIS residents prepared and distributed two anti-government brochures in Iraq in 1966. The BIS residency in Baghdad received much help from the BIS in Beirut where the skilled master of such operations, Peter Lunn, with the […]
[…] of the Arabian American Oil Company. At the time (pre-Suez) Britain successfully forced a Saudi withdrawal. The British wanted the oil reserves to be exploited by the Iraq Petroleum Company, a UK-dominated concern. 2 When events started up again in 1958 it was not only after Suez but also after the April 1957 Defence […]
