Category: Iraq War

Blog Nation: what would I like to see discussed

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Sunny ‘Liberal Conspiracy’ Hundal is organising a follow-up to 2008’s successful ‘Blog Nation’ event. Details over at Liberal Conspiracy, but Sunny asks what we’d like to discuss; below the fold, then, are some thoughts.

In terms of logistics, I would make three suggestions. Given the layout, it’s important that each table isn’t talking amongst itself thereby making so much noise that you can’t hear the speaker. Secondly, there are two breakout rooms. I would like to see the two used for an hour each for anyone to stand up a present an idea for five minutes. Thirdly, I’d like to see it recorded and ideally live streamed. Certainly, the plenary sessions could be on uStream or BlogTV.

Continue reading “Blog Nation: what would I like to see discussed” →

The Iraq inquiry should be conducted in secret

Posted on by David Landon Cole

“The Iraq war was a disaster” is a familiar refrain. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us very much. Do we mean the concept, the planning, the implementation, the strategy, the tactics, what? Or do we want an official stick with which to beat the government?

Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?

Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well? Continue reading “The Iraq inquiry should be conducted in secret” →

Why we should take non-Brits from Guantanamo

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Iain Dale asks why we should accept people who aren’t connected with Britain from Guantánamo Bay. These are my reasons why we should.

Firstly, it is in our strategic interest for two reasons. I will look at the morality and legality later, but it is enough to say that many states and people, friendly, neutral and hostile, regard both Guantánamo as immoral and the UK as very close to the United States. By acting to expedite the closing of Guantánamo, we are acting to right a perceived wrong. It also improves our standing within the EU and NATO if we can demonstrate an ability to act as an effective link or broker between the western and eastern sides of the Atlantic. I would add that there might well be (although I do not know this for a fact) people who would be repatriated to, say, Bosnia-Herzegovina. While I do not wish to impugn Bosnia-Herzegovina and am using it just as an example, I do not believe that it, or many other states, have the state-capacity to effectively monitor these people. If we look slightly more widely around the Balkans, the apparent ease with which people evaded the ICTY, I believe the point is proven. In the long-term, taking in detainees here is more secure than leaving them in limbo or Ruritania.

Secondly, it is expeditious. Whether Mr Dale likes it or not, President-Elect Obama has made it clear that Guantanamo is to be closed. As I mentioned, we are seen as close to the US in foreign policy terms. One of the big problems with Guantánamo was the lack of clarity as to what was going to happen to people held there. We now have a resolution; however, we will have to accept people who do not have an immediate connection to the US for a few reasons. One is that some states will not accept people who have a prior or stronger connection to them. We can exert more moral pressure on them to accept people from Guantánamo if we show how much we are doing; in any case, it will not work for everyone. There are some states that it would be wrong to ‘export’ these people to; they are those states that would torture them. They would go from a frying pan to a rather hotter fire and many of the problems we face because of Guantánamo would be reinforced.

Thirdly, it is morally right. Guantánamo was an abrogation of rights, poorly implemented and conceived, that took away some of our moral high ground and constitutes a serious threat to habeas corpus in the USA. Its closure rectifies at least some of those issues. Moreover, the USA is our friend and ally; if it seeks our support on this, given that the costs are minimal and the benefits great, I would have hoped it would have been a no-brainer.

If I may refer to the title of Iain’s post – “Guantánamo is a problem made in America” – I would contend that the problem may have been made there, but that does not relieve of us our obligations to justice and due process, or to our ally, or the effects its existence and the method of its closure may have on us.

In short, it is both morally right and in our strategic interest.

xD.

The Counter-terrorism Bill and coroners

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Section 42 (4) (b) (ii) of the Counter-Terrorism Bill, as it seeks to extend detention without charge to forty-two days, has attracted some considerable criticism. Unfortunately, it is not the only part of the bill that is, at best, distinctly ill-considered and with considerable scope for abuse. Serious consideration must also be given to clauses 64 and 65, which can be found on page 50 of this PDF of the bill. Clause 64 allows the Home Secretary to issue a certificate requiring an inquest to be held without a jury or discharging a jury mid-inquest. Clause 65 allows the Home Secretary to discharge a coroner and appoint a coroner of their own choosing. The two powers can be exercised simultaneously; that is to say, the Home Secretary would have the power, if they thought the an inquest would embarrass the government, to discharge the jury and the coroner and have the inquest started again without a jury and with a coroner of the Home Secretary’s choosing.

Inquests are unusual in English law in that they are the only inquisitorial proceeding, as opposed to the adversarial form that every other legal proceeding takes.

It is worth remembering that there are two main objections to the provision for forty-two days’ detention provided for in S42 (4) (b) (ii). The first is deontological; the period of time that any entity or person acting under the law (ultimately dependent on Weber’s definition of the state) should detain anyone else should be kept to the absolute minimum as the potential exists that, before trial, the person is innocent and so their detention is unjust. It is the same logic that insists justice should be speedy; detention before charge should be speedy1.

The second is utilitarian. While I’m sure some people will disagree with me1, I do not think that the current government is an evil monster that wants to abolish all our civil liberties. However, I do not think that the current government should hand a carte blanche to every single, future government. The risks and potential harms of the 42 days’ detention, and the deeply unsatisfactory safeguards – that people could be taken off the street if they threatened a future government (say, 41 days before an election) and held incommunicado – far outweight any potential benefit. Liberty make that point very well in this briefing document (PDF).

I feel the same applies to S64 and S65. Firstly, the idea that someone in the executive should be able to wander into a judicial proceeding and change things is opening the process up to abuse. It is different from making provisions for national security – things can be heard in camera – and, in any case, it should not be possible to change things in the middle of the proceeding, but only a priori. Secondly, the risks are significant as they would allow interference, as I have said, and set a worrying precedent for expansion.

If nothing else, connections will be made between a stroppy Oxfordshire coroner, a move to Gloucestershire for repatriating the bodies of people who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, a stroppy Gloucestershire coroner and then this bill; it does look as if the Government is trying to cover its tracks.

xD.

1 – the definition, not the blogger.

Stop the War Coalition and Channel Four

Posted on by David Landon Cole

A group has been set up on Facebook called (in capitals, so it must be important) ‘Vote Stop the War Coalition for Channel 4 News Award’. It reads rather like the headlines of spam emails and the content of the group is similarly inaccurate. The award in question is ‘most inspiring political personality of the last decade’ and the Stop the War Coalition are not (repeat: not) up for the award.

Stop the War Coalition logo‘Anti-Iraq war protestors’ are up there along with Tony Blair, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness, Ken Livingstone, Alex Salmond and the Countryside Alliance. Have a look on the Channel Four website. The fact that the award goes to a rather nebulous group of people rather than one of the organisations behind the protests is interesting. It suggests that the brand identification of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) is negligible and Channel Four have to copy Time Magazine‘s ‘person of the year 2006’1 in going for a non-entity. This is rather surprising, given that the Stop the War Coalition’s logo is really rather good – easy to remember, easy to identify and easy to reproduce – and its message was supported on a grand scale.

Why, then, has the StWC declined from public view?

Part of the answer is in a previous post of mine:

If the Stop the War Coalition was going to continue as a meaningful force, it needed to attract and retain the soggy left of the ‘Various People Against Nasty Things’ variety. Providing placards that said ‘Victory to the Resistance’ was, at risk of being controversial, not the best way of building a broad coalition. It was a very good way of alienating the people who don’t consider the Socialist Worker newspaper to be some of Fleet Street’s finest editing and putting the few remainders a short step from carrying SWP banners.

although now I would add ‘We are all Hizbullah’ to ‘Victory to the Resistance’. In short, the aim was not to build a mass movement, but to increase the number of members of the SWP, StWC and RESPECT. If the hitrate for long term, useful members was (say) one in a thousand, that would still have yielded two thousand members from the Day X march alone. It made sense to the SWP; given that they believe we are in a permanent arms economy anyway, the war going ahead or not would have been largely immaterial.
Equally, the StWC didn’t represent all of the anti-war movement; it was one of three organisations, the others being CND and MAB, that called the protest. A lot of the people who opposed the war and marched under the StWC’s roundel never felt any particular attachment to it as the representations made by Lindsay German et al. never really resonated with the Chelsea tractor drivers. The messages were about imperialism, when what people felt was either that Britain was a client state or that it was just a wrong decision, badly taken. Imperialism – the desire to cow the Iraqi people – didn’t enter into most people’s opposition because they didn’t believe it to be so.

I am not sure of this point, so forgive me if sounds a bit strangled, but the StWC also sought to forge links with the Muslim communities in the UK. The questions there are which Muslim communities? and who’s linking to them?. Had the StWC really been about preventing a racist backlash in response to the Iraq war, it would have done a lot more to bring groups together. It didn’t, the evidence being the quite common anti-Muslim sentiment we see expressed in the press. I’m not blaming StWC for racism, but I am saying that they failed to do as much as they could have done because they were more interested in building a political movement that wasn’t there to be built.

There was never single set of ideas behind the brand; in essence, there never was a brand. The StWC had an organisational role that it could have used to advance political knowledge in the UK. It squandered the opportunity so that, a few years later, all people remember is that a lot of people were quite annoyed about …something.

There is, at the time of writing, no mention of the award nomination on the Stop the War Coalition website.

xD.

1 – I’m thinking of including ‘Time person of the year 2006’ on my CV.

Will the real George Galloway please shut up?

Posted on by David Landon Cole

An article for the Script. Whether it will be published or not, I don’t know, but I thought I’d put it here.

xD.

Well-meaning Guardian readers against the war, the Sectarian Workers’ Party and Monopolise Resistance, or: why the Stop the War Coalition failed.

Look. I’m sorry, but I read the Guardian. I take after the time-honoured strain of pinko thought that opposes any and every war on the sole condition that it finished at least ten years ago. I think it’s absolutely essential that people have the right to demonstrate because they look so cute on Parliament Square. In the rain. Listening to Lindsay German. I can remark loudly to tourists how wonderful it is to live in a free country as I go past on the bus, thankyouKenLivingstonedontchajustlove’im?

I wasn’t very keen on Saddam (Sir, I bloody well do not salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability) but I didn’t really like the idea of the Americans blowing bits of Iraq up. Afghanistan was probably OK and gave me great potential for agonised, liberal hand-wringing, but Iraq was such a bad idea that, horror of horrors, I would actually take a position on it.

The Stop the War Coalition, by anyone’s measure, achieved phenomenal growth. It went from nowhere to organising not on a town-by-town basis but on a suburb-by-suburb basis. The Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) deserve a lot of credit for this, as do CND and MAB, as they did provide a lot of the administrative support that allowed the organisation to function at all. It was, though, a grass-roots movement based on a very real feeling that the war on Iraq was wrong. The Stop the War Coalition provided agency for that movement but did not create and did not grow that feeling. It did call the 2,000,000 march on February 15 2003, but I suspect that a drover’s dog could have achieved a similar number, such was the feeling against the war.

Oh, and please don’t tell me that the Stop the War Coalition brought together lots of intellectuals and gave them a position on the news. I refuse to believe that Jeremy Corbyn et al. would not have been interviewed by the various media outlets had the Stop the War Coalition not been around.

Why, then, has the Stop the War Coalition gone from having a thirtieth of the population of this island marching through London to damp protests on Parliament Square?

If the Stop the War Coalition was going to continue as a meaningful force, it needed to attract and retain the soggy left of the ‘Various People Against Nasty Things’ variety. Providing placards that said ‘Victory to the Resistance’ was, at risk of being controversial, not the best way of building a broad coalition. It was a very good way of alienating the people who don’t consider the Socialist Worker newspaper to be some of Fleet Street’s finest editing and putting the few remainders a short step from carrying SWP banners.

The people in, allied to or close to the SWP were probably, I should fancy, already against the war. There was absolutely no need to appeal to them – most people on the left, including the SWP, are in favour of a co-operative system rather than the confrontational nature of capitalism and so one presumes they would be prepared to coalesce around a common goal – unless the SWP was running the Stop the War Coalition for its own ends. I hesitate to say that the SWP went into the Stop the War Coalition as part of a recruitment drive, particularly as I think that the other main groups that went along with the anti-war movement, CND and MAB, would have words to say about it. Nevertheless, I think it is possible that the mindset was so much one of being a small party become little more than a protest group that people just didn’t know what to do.

The protest virgins who came out for a jolly on that February 15th were not going to make it a regular occurrence. They’re too lazy, too busy and too far away. Endless demonstrations in Parliament Square addressed by the same group of speakers – no doubt, talented orators with a valid point to make – just makes the Stop the War Coalition look like another pointless, hard left group with initials (StWC, to join AWL, WSWS, ICFI, CFE, SWP, SWSS, CPE(M-L), LSESU, NUS) rather than ideas.

How would the Stop the War Coalition have succeeded?

By stopping the war. Sadly, it didn’t. It was not, though, time at that point to pack up and go home or become increasingly radical and distasteful to the Chelsea tractor drivers who we adored on February 15. If we are serious about having – and I use this phrase with more than a little trepidation – an ethical foreign policy, we need to show not merely that, in that time-honoured phrase, ‘bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity’ but that there is an alternative. Moreover, that alternative has to be acceptable to people; a socialist world might well be more desirable for some, but that doesn’t achieve the aim of stopping the war or, at least, limiting or eliminating British involvement in said war.

Don’t get me wrong: the Stop the War Coalition, all the people who worked in the office in Brick Lane and then at King’s Cross, all the people who attended and organised meetings did a great deal of work and, I think, an amount of good. The Stop the War Coalition will go down in history. It will not, though, go down as the moment at which everything changed but as an interesting aberration from the norm of apathy and disengagement. It could have kept people on board – not turning out to protests every week but by maintaining a sentiment that the war on Iraq was wrong, the occupation of Iraq is still wrong and the Government’s actions over terror are wrong.

The Stop the War Coalition started, I believe, around the time of the conflict in Afghanistan, the war in question being (as CNN put it) The War Against Terror (TWAT). If that is so, and given that Liberal Democrat and, horror of horror, some Conservative sentiment is riled by, for instance, the new powers for house arrest that the Government has arrogated itself, a protest about civil liberties might have attracted more people, made the Stop the War Coalition look like more than alphabet soup leftie groups and educated the masses a bit about why they need to be concerned about public freedoms.

I suspect that before overly long, we will be again on the eve of war in the Middle East. Whether that war is stopped or not, we cannot at this juncture say, but there will be calls for more restrictions on civil liberties, more secrecy and more alienation of people from politicians.

At that time, we will have the opportunity to plant a seed – an opportunity we missed in Iraq – that says that this sort of military adventuring is wrong and perhaps stop it happening again.

Now, can I have some guacamole, please? No, the organic one. Thanks, Tony.