Mick Hartley

Iraq Myths

David Rose in the Observer is prompted by the NYT mea culpa on media sources to have a look at the "hidden agendas on all sides" that "can still distort reporting". Naturally enough, he concentrates on the INC-Chalabi stories of WMDs, and the accusations now flying around that they were pushing an Iranian agenda for getting rid of Saddam. He then goes on to describe the OSP, "Office of Special Plans", within the Pentagon, whose job it was to plan Iraq's post-war future. There were, it seems, stories that the OSP was being used to channel WMD stories through to Dick Cheney:

All the stories about it appear to share a single source, Karen Kwiatkowski, a now-retired lieutenant colonel who worked in the Pentagon - but not in the OSP - on North Africa. So how would she know what went on there? The answer she gave me was that she regularly had 'conversations in the hallway' with someone who did, an official called John Trigilio. Trigilio denied any such conversations took place, saying neither he nor his colleagues ever met an INC defector. Why would Kwiatkowski make it up? On the one hand, she has written for Pat Buchanan's extreme right-wing journal, the American Conservative, and described herself to me as a 'conservative anarchist'. Meanwhile, her story first surfaced - with her name concealed - in a dubious outlet: the Executive Intelligence Review, a virulently anti-semitic magazine run by conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche.

Kwiatkowski told me she admired LaRouche's work and admitted giving his editor, Jeff Steinberg, an interview. However, she also needed an echo chamber. She got one in Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief of the Defence Intelligence Agency, who supplied quotes endorsing her story. He sent an email to several journalists, enclosing the transcript of the Kwiatkowski-Steinberg interview. 'Jeff Steinberg is a first-rate scholar,' Lang wrote. 'I am not concerned where he works.'

Lang popped up again, last week with the claim that he had learnt from his associates that Chalabi and his defectors were an Iranian intelligence scam, 'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history'.

I assume Lang, who is widely admired in Washington, would not knowingly disseminate inaccurate information. But it is possible his political beliefs may make him credulous. The Pentagon, he said, had been seized by extremists, 'Zionist revisionists', whose goal was to 'de-Arabise' the Middle East. Ariel Sharon's Likud party had in effect directed America's invasion of Iraq, and the way to visualise Likud's power was as 'a steel barbell, with one ball in Israel and another in the Pentagon, among the neo-conservatives'.

It is, I suppose, interesting that such groups exist, if we can take Rose's word for it, but this is lunatic fringe stuff - Lyndon Larouche; the Likud party directing America's invasion of Iraq. The strongest language Rose manages about this is that it's "contentious", which seems a little understated.

It's certainly true though that there are hidden agendas within the media as far as Iraq is concerned. Take Rose himself:

Now, with the war fought and Iraq on the brink of catastrophe, does any of this matter? It does: for the propaganda battles continue to resonate politically. Disinformation helped to drag Britain and America into a war.

On the brink of catastrophe? Don't you just wish. And this line about disinformation dragging us into the war....wasn't there something about Saddam not complying with UN resolutions? Just a vague far-off memory now of course, as the media line hardens around the idea that the sole reason for war was that Tony lied to us about Saddam having WMDs ready to fire in 45 minutes....

Freudians at War

An article in the NYT (via AL Daily) looks at a spat between the British Psychoanalytic Society and a new group calling themselves the College of Psychoanalysts. It's not, as it turns out, a particularly interesting or unusual development; the history of psychoanalysis is full of splits and internal wranglings, and this one doesn't appear to have any interesting characters or outrageous behaviours to recommend it. I was, however, struck by this little snippet:

[A]ll psychoanalysts share certain beliefs: the importance of the unconscious, for example. And Freud's own legacy is still central. His sense of mistreatment by Viennese academics is one reason psychoanalytic training still goes on mostly in private institutes rather than in university departments.

That must also, I imagine, be the reason that Scientology training isn't taught in university departments: because L Ron Hubbard was so upset at the way he was treated by academia....

For a more penetrating look at Freud's legacy, check out this at butterfliesandwheels.

London Mayor

The battle for London mayor is not inspiring. Ken takes any opportunity to broadcast his left man-of-the-people image, including regularly denouncing Bush as a war criminal, sharing platforms with George Galloway, and playing the green card for all it's worth. The Conservative Steve "shagger" Norris is now defying his party and calling for Britain to withdraw its troops from Iraq as soon as possible, in a shameless attempt to pull some of the wavering voters, though Ken knows that when it comes to the anti-war vote he's on a winner:

Mr Livingstone, who did address the CND peace hustings last night, questioned how serious Mr Norris was over the Iraq issue. "Though Steve Norris is saying he is against the war, I didn't see him at any of the marches," he said.

Meanwhile:

Mr Livingstone said: "I'm worried about the safety of our boys and girls. That's why I want to bring them home."

Our boys and girls? Oh please...

Other than these two, there's Lib Dem Simon Hughes, a Green candidate, Lindsey German for the SWP......... I like to exercise my democratic rights, but this is a tough one to get enthusiastic about.

Charity Muggers

There's something about those charity collectors that really annoys me. "Excuse me, I wonder if you could spare a moment for Oxfam/Cancer Research/Amnesty International...": such nice young people with such sincere smiles. You can only sympathise with the poor wretches who've been trapped by them: skewered by middle-class guilt. Once they succumb to the appeal of the really rather attractive young woman, who's been trained no doubt in the importance of maintaining eye contact and keeping up a regular patter, there's no escape unless you want to seem callous and selfish. "Just a small regular donation could mean life for some poor..........." I imagine many, as I did at first, will assume that these are idealistic young people working voluntarily for a cause in which they passionately believe. No effort will be made to disabuse you of this notion.

The whole enterprise stinks, and only increases cynicism. It exploits people's natural tendency to want to appear friendly, and to return a smile with a smile. Instead now, in Central London at least, if some young person comes towards you with a smile you know they're after your money, and you know the only appropriate response is to mutter a stony-faced "sorry", and walk on. And so the quality of life goes down, while the charities get richer, and more and more concerned with their own survival.

Now, eventually, the government is going to do something about it:

Charity collectors faced tough government curbs today after complaints that they hassle pedestrians and mislead donors about where their money goes.

The clampdown applies to " charity muggers", known as " chuggers", who stop people in the street to ask for direct debit pledges.

A powerful code of conduct will ban collectors from stepping in front of pedestrians to force them to stop.

In addition, a new licensing regime will allow councils to bar charities from certain streets at particular times to stop overcrowding. The collectors will also be forced to tell would-be donors exactly how much from each gift goes to charity, and how much to the professional firm running the operation.

Ministers are closing a loophole which allows chuggers to operate without regulation because they do not collect cash.

The measures were unveiled as the Home Office published its draft Charities Bill to update the way the voluntary sector is regulated. The code of conduct will be voluntary at first, but will be made legally binding if widely ignored.

Voluntary at first? Yeah, that'll work.

Update: Well yes, voluntarily might work in fact, now I think about it. After all, the charities must be aware that this sort of hard sell is damaging to their image, and if that image gets tarnished they're in trouble. Also the numbers of these "chuggers" seems much reduced recently, though maybe it's a seasonal thing and they'll come out in force again in the warm weather.

A Nation Mourns

Tragedy strikes in East London as "some of the finest works of British contemporary art" are destroyed in a warehouse blaze. Among the works lost for ever to posterity are - oh no! - Tracey Emin's seminal (!) "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With".

The question arises, of course: why can't she just make another one? Presumably she's now slept with a few more people, so the work will be that much bigger and more valuable. Though apparently she claims that the 100-odd names were strictly sleeping partners, and she only ever had sex with a few of them. Just in case, you know, people might think she was some kind of slapper.

Of course the whole thing is highly suspicious. The Britart thing was/is a bubble which has been deflating for a while now, and the lost pieces are mostly garbage: a monument to the foolishness of collectors in general and Charles Saatchi in particular. So he collects on the insurance and sees his remaining few Britart pieces in the Saatchi gallery gain by becoming the definitive works of Britart (and yes, I will admit a liking for some of Damien Hirst's stuff like his famous shark). The only problem with the compelling image of Charles Saatchi creeping through the East End with his box of matches is that it's too bloody obvious: alas, he wouldn't be that stupid.

Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan is on top form at the moment. Already (10am UK time) he's got six posts up for today Wednesday, including a rebuttal of the latest set of headlines (for example here and here) about a split between the US and the UK on the question of Iraqi sovereignty, and a defence of Bush's plans for Iraq:

There are plenty of reasons to worry about Iraq. There are also many valid criticisms of the occupation. But I have yet to read any cogent criticism that offers any better future plan than the one president Bush outlined Monday night. John Kerry's plaintive cries to "internationalize" the transition are so vacuous they barely merit attention. The transition is already being run by the U.N.; very few countries have the military capacity to cooperate fully with the coalition, and few want to; quicker elections would be great, but very difficult to pull off on a national level before the end of the year. So what are Bush's opponents proposing? More troops now? But wouldn't that undercut the message of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis? A sudden exit of all troops? But no one - apart from right-wing and leftwing extremists - thinks that's a wise move. Giving a future Iraqi government a veto power over troop activities? Done, according to Blair. The truth is: Bush's plan is about as good as we're likely to get. And deposing a dictator after decades of brutal rule could never have led immediately to insta-democracy.

Plus he's written a piece on Susan Sontag in the New Republic which is well worth reading.

South African Tragedy

For some reason I can't get this story out of my head. The guy shoots his own daughter, thinking she's a car thief. You think, jeez what an idiot: he's an ex-Springbok, a bull-necked Boer, not normally the sort of guy to inspire sympathy. But then...

He'll be running an endless loop in his mind: wake up, hear the noise outside, someone trying to get into the car, the surge of anger, "right, this time I'll get the bastards," see a shadowy figure, rush to get the gun, take aim, fire... Why didn't I see it was her? Why didn't I aim high, low, to the side, just to scare? Why why why why. His own daughter for God's sake. But whichever way he turns it, however often he asks himself why, it's always going to come out the same. And now he's being charged with murder. What circle of hell is this poor guy now living in?

Bed-Wetting Traitors

Whew! Julie Burchill in the Times has more to say on Iraq, post-Abu Ghraib. No creeping doubt or wavering here:

I see the snaps of our young Yankee allies taking their low, lonesome revenge at Abu Ghraib — for all the times their fresh-faced, well-meaning comrades have been butchered, blown up, pulled through the streets barely dead by people of the very nationality they gave up their lives to help — and I see, in the very exposure of those photographs, a good part of the reason why we are fighting, and why we are better. At last in Iraq there is a regime under which “torture” is NOT the norm, but something which has even that regime’s supporters running around screaming like hairdressers for it to be stopped, right now! Now that’s progress.

And who else could come up with this:

Many things are done in the heat of battle which wouldn’t get one’s PC dance-card ticked in peacetime. Unfortunately, due to the murderous nihilism of the Baathist stragglers, battles still continue in Iraq, despite the natural desire of most Iraqi people for a life so ordinary that it can easily be made to fade into the background next to the danse macabre demands of the few. My second thought, as the Abu Ghraib weepathon began, was of the Soviet Army in 1945, and its dreadful, joyous progress through a conquered Germany. Now, not even the nastiest, most anti-Nazi Soviet apologist (a title to which I totally stake my claim) can ignore the accounts of the triumphalist behaviour which came to a head when the Red Army entered Berlin; a vanquished Berlin, too, composed almost solely of women, children and the elderly. But would anyone bar a cretin claim that the wholesale rape of German women by Soviet boys invalidated the Allied victory, or made the Red Army’s contribution less cherishable? Soldiers are never saints — unlike we hacks, they never claim to be! — but thank goodness we have them there to protect our sissy ways.

Every paragraph's a calculated affront to the massed ranks of Guardian readers:

It’s priceless, isn’t it? God forbid an unrepentant Zionist like me should bring up the uncomfortable fact that there are on Earth 22 MUSLIM NATIONS, NOT ONE A DEMOCRACY! as I do all the time on internet talkboards; do that, and you’re “just playing on racial stereotypes”. But it’s 22 NATIONS! — how can it be a coincidence that not ONE of them trusts their people enough to give them the vote? What would be convincing — 23 Muslim nations, not one a democracy? Yet let a few scared-stiff young blue-collar (not “white-trash”, because “white trash” is an inherently racist term, implying as it does that “trash” generally is black, and if you want to insult working-class whites you have got to be subtextually specific) soldiers turn out not to be perfect, and whole swaths of people — genders (female), classes (working), countries (the USA) — can instantly be dismissed as worthless.

Not strong enough for you? This is how she finishes:

And if anybody still believes that, because of Lynndie England and her friends, women should not have rights, the working class need to be kept firmly in their place, and the Western way of life is a total lie, there are always 22 Muslim theocracies where they could go and live, where the lack of decadent old choice and free will would suit them fine. And let people who would value and cherish their freedoms (some of the 80 per cent of the world’s migrants who are Muslims on the move, voluntarily, from Muslim theocracies to Western democracies, for instance — I think it’s called voting with your feet?) take their place. Go on — push off, you bed-wetting traitors, and let somebody else have a go.

Saudi Justice Again

From Saudi blogger The Religious Policeman's latest post:

Here's a little test, to see if you've been paying attention to all of this blog so far. Match the act, and what should happen next.

1. You take part in a political meeting in a hotel.

2. You are an adult male and you have sex with a 13-year-old girl.

a) Someone writes a flattering newspaper article about you.

b) You go to prison

If you answered 1b and 2a, well done, you have the mind of a "Muttawa", reward yourself with a shawarma, a smoke, and a snooze.

If you answered 1a and 2b, you're obviously still corrupted by decadent western zionist thinking, you don't understand our unique traditions and culture, go back to the beginning and start again.

Publishing Pictures of Abuse

Richard Webster has an interesting post on the rights and wrongs of publishing images of prisoner abuse, taking issue with an article by Ian Mayes in the Guardian. Mayes is defending against reader complaints the prominent front page publication of a naked Iraqi prisoner being humiliated in Abu Ghraib:

Although readers did not always say so, it seemed to be the fact that the man's face was shown that increased the degree of distress communicated by the picture. "I realise that you have printed such pictures before on this terrible subject and I know that it is important for us to receive this information," one wrote. "Nevertheless, I object to [this picture] because I feel it is now bordering on voyeurism - it feels like incitement, somehow, or as if we all have a part of this man's shame and humiliation. I do not wish to be in any way associated with this sort of inhumanity, and by blazoning it on the front page of the paper it makes us all implicated."

There is, I suggest, some confusion here between the crime and evidence of the crime. Publication of the photograph does not infringe the man's human rights; but it does graphically convey an infringement of his rights. Taken with other photographs, and we now know there are at least 1,800, many showing greater abuses, the picture has an imperative that demands prominent publication - and demands it, apparently, regardless of all consequences (for instance the further excitement of anti-American feeling in the Arab world). The story has been rightly persistent.

Despite Mayes' patronising tone - "there is, I suggest, some confusion here..." - he misses entirely the point that the reader is trying to make: that publication broadcasts the man's humiliation to the world, and makes us all complicit. It serves to project an image to the Muslim world of a collective contempt for Arabs by the West.

Webster writes:

By far the most striking feature here is the phrase 'regardless of all consequences.' The appearance of these words, written by an experienced journalist and passed for publication by an editor, is nothing other than extraordinary. One sign that, by this point in his article, Mayes is not thinking clearly about the question he is attempting to address is the language which he uses. In reality the decision to publish this picture on the front page of the Guardian was made by journalists - almost certainly including the editor himself. It was a complex moral choice and, as the response of readers suggests, there were and are significant arguments both against using the picture without masking the victim's face, and against using it at all. Mayes, however, obscures this human and moral dilemma by an oddly impersonal turn of phrase. According to him, the picture compelled its own publication. ' . . . the picture,' he writes, 'has an imperative that demands prominent publication.'

Having made this practically meaningless claim, he goes on to deliver himself of the extraordinary pronouncement already referred to - that the picture should be published regardless of all consequences. He then pauses to mention one possible consequence: 'for instance the further excitement of anti-American feeling in the Arab world.' The choice of the word 'excitement' when normal usage would be 'incitement' is itself odd. One suspects that one of the reasons Mayes has shied away from the more natural choice of words is that 'incitement' is commonly used with 'hatred'. It is indeed anti-Western hatred that the picture in question is likely to incite, not simply 'anti-American feeling' as Mayes euphemistically writes. And hatred very frequently leads people to kill those who are its object.

This is one of the possible outcomes which Ian Mayes should be contemplating. If he believes that the picture should be published 'regardless of all consequences' he should be thinking more carefully and less euphemistically about just what those consequences might be. How many American and British soldiers is Mayes prepared to see killed before he begins to consider resisting the picture's alleged 'demand' to be published? How many Muslims must lose their lives in the reprisals that follow? How many hundreds of thousands of men, women and children must be killed before those who, like Ian Mayes, mindlessly recite the mantras of free speech, begin to realise that there are some possible consequences of publishing images of violence and degradation of which we should be mindful?

Mayes writes that 'publication of the photograph does not infringe the man's human rights; but it does graphically convey an infringement of his rights.' It is this view which leads him to proclaim that the picture has an 'imperative' which 'demands prominent publication'. Would he apply this argument to a victim of rape? Will the Guardian now be publishing pictures of women being sexually humiliated by men on the grounds that to do so 'graphically conveys an infringement of women's rights'? And how long will it then be, as the Guardian lurches deeper into the course of brutalisation which its readers' editor has now commended to us, before it starts fearlessly to publish pictures of children being sexually assaulted on the grounds that such images graphically convey an infringement of their rights?

That the pictures which have emerged from Abu Ghraib are a disgrace both to America and to its allies is beyond question. The existence of these pictures undoubtedly should have been made public, as it eventually was. The pictures themselves should have been seen by a number of people, and these should almost certainly have included responsible journalists. But the decision, taken originally by American newspaper editors, to publish images of Arab Muslims being mocked, bullied and humiliated so that the degradation inflicted on them could be seen by all the world, is a very different matter.

Partly because belief in free speech is as unreflective in Britain and America as belief in an omnipotent deity is among devout Muslims, little if any thought appears to have been given to this question.

No doubt we'll be seeing more and more of these pictures, their publication being greeted with smug satisfaction at the powers of a free press to expose the evils of Western power. We will not, however, see too many re-runs of, say, Nick Berg's decapitation, or other gruesome reminders of anti-Western brutality. Too upsetting for the relatives... It's this pursuit of a shamelessly partisan approach wrapped up in high moral language which I find so unpleasant.