Chilcot Report

[phonics]

It's out today lads :cool:

Alastair Campbell off to The Hague pls.

[Magic]

Nothing will happen.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Nothing less than the full Blair 2001-2005 Cabinet being hanged at Tyburn tonight will satisfy me.

[GS]

Chilcot being late for his own press conference is apt, really.

"Stop the War" have organised a protest, inevitably. The Twitter outrage mob are also sharpening pencils to try and fit their preconceived notions of Tony Blair as a war criminal into 140 characters.

[Jimmy Floyd]

This is all very retro. We should hire Pabs to make some specially-commissioned jokes for the occasion.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Tony's getting skewered.

[GS]

Well, lads.

I think it's fair to say that Tony Blair has been absolutely hammered.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Never mind that, Messi's going to prison (he's not actually, but you know).

[Lewis]

Hopefully that is the last we see of Tony Blair as a public figure, but I'm sure his journalist mates are already on the case (and have been for months).

[GS]

I've said this previously, but Maxwellisation means he's already seen the bits criticising him. This is why he's mobilised Team Blair to get himself into the public eye again so he can begin laying the groundwork for his defence.

I agree, though - hopefully he's finished as a public figure. You can basically dismiss any criticism he gives of anyone else with "but Iraq, mate".

[Jimmy Floyd]

Hopefully that is the last we see of Tony Blair as a public figure, but I'm sure his journalist mates are already on the case (and have been for months).

I saw Steve Richards briefing yesterday that everything was right and proper, so I imagine they are barricaded in the drawing room now with six months' supplies of cava and Walkers Sensations.

[Lewis]

His immediate reaction (http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/statement-from-tony-blair-on-chilcot-report/) is mental.

[Magic]

Fuck this, how can he not be a war criminal? Everyone in cabinet who advocated that war should be fucking tried in court.

[Yevrah]

Whitewash you say?

I'm shocked.

[Yevrah]

When's Jezza on?

[Jimmy Floyd]

Whitewash you say?

I'm shocked.

It's not a whitewash.

[Yevrah]

Yeah, I'll retract that, having read more it obviously isn't.

Not sure where it goes from here though, which suggests it's ultimately pointless beyond lessons being learnt.

[Lewis]

It just makes everybody feel happy. Everyone against the war gets to say 'lol told you so'; Blair gets to 'take responsibility' (how, you cunt?) without having to admit anything particularly damning; all the supporters get to hide behind there being no 'deliberate attempt to mislead people' (David Cameron) and Blair doing it in 'good faith'; and, most importantly, politicians will get to use it and its 'lessons' as cover the next time people question the wisdom of wrecking another country.

[Lewis]

This speech he's giving (in full 'People's Princess' mode) is painful. He genuinely is off his head.

[Lewis]

It was a good idea to change the regime because, if Saddam Hussein he was still in power, the Arab Spring would have led to a sectarian civil war in Iraq. Where do you even start with that? What sort of fucking deranged worldview has he constructed for himself?

[five time]

Blair :cool:

[7om]

Chilcot: Sir John found Blair presented the case for war with 'a certainty which was not justified' based on 'flawed' intelligence.


Blair: 29 secret letters Mr Blair wrote to George W Bush were published for the first time today and in July 2002, eight months before MPs voted to back an invasion, Mr Blair had told the president: 'I will be with you, whatever'. After 9/11 he told President Bush: 'Act now, explain later'.

...


Blair: 'I can look those families and the country in the eye and tell them I did not mislead them.'

Lock him up already.

[elth]

I'm not a sad enough bastard to read it, but people I follow on Twitter who are say that the executive summary is a bit sexed up because Chilcott knows nobody who counts will bother reading the full report, and the report itself basically gives Blair the out of honest action - he just happened to honestly be completely, utterly and horrifically wrong. But no deliberate deception or malice - just a bit of a gullible scared idiot making bad decisions.

The political class, ladies and gentlemen!

[GS]

I would suggest the Twitter outrage crowd should be taking the report, all 2.6m words of it, at face value as it's inevitably going to be far more considered than the YouTube videos, Guardian articles and sense of grievance that said outrage crowd have constructed their own view on.

Not that Blair's not a wanker, but you have a section of the public who will be happy with nothing less than Blair's indictment and immediate transportation to the Hague. See: Magic.

[GS]

750643742646923264

"People in this country have had enough of experts."

[Jimmy Floyd]

Pretty sure it doesn't say either that Blair lied or that the war was illegal.

[GS]

It says nothing of the sort. She's making it up because it's what she wants it to say.

An elected official, no less. And we wonder why there's a permanent sense of outrage from the left. :moop:

[Bernanke]

if Saddam Hussein he was still in power, the Arab Spring would have led to a sectarian civil war in Iraq.

This is legitimately amazing.

[Magic]

It was a good idea to change the regime because, if Saddam Hussein he was still in power, the Arab Spring would have led to a sectarian civil war in Iraq. Where do you even start with that? What sort of fucking deranged worldview has he constructed for himself?

I knew we should have went to war with the Irish. Bastards.

[GS]

You did. We lost 26 counties, and my lot were the ones who got bombed because we kept six.

[Magic]

Hardly a war. I mean full on millions dead sort of thing. And not a proxy with potatoes.

[GS]

The 'war' part of Iraq was barely a war worth the name, given the Iraqi army and state collapsed within a month.

Whatever the merits of the decision to invade itself, the real clusterfuck came about from the completely inadequate occupation of the country after the fall of Baghdad. If there had been a genuinely sound plan for the occupation, and an orderly transition to civilian rule, we'd probably only be arguing about the invasion's legality and whether the financial cost was worth it.

[Magic]

Yeah you can't really just go in and annihilate the army and government then disappear again, we really should have made it part of the Commonwealth.

[GS]

The coalition didn't disappear, they were just completely overwhelmed by the scale of the task. There wasn't enough money, there wasn't enough experience and training, and any plans for occupation, such as they were, simply weren't up to scratch. Not that this was entirely our fault - the report suggests that Blair seriously overestimated his 'sway' with the Americans. We were partners in name, but not in practice. Iraq would have been a complete shambles irrespective of whether we were involved or not, as the Americans completely fucked it up as well.

Jezza is currently giving the speech he's wanted to give his whole life, and he's relishing sticking the boot in. He's suggested that the ICC should be allowed to prosecute people for 'military aggression', which would open a can of worms you'd never get the lid back on. He's also apologised on behalf of the Labour party, which is presumably the very reason he's held on this long.

[Magic]

Didn't they just think 'yeah basically what'll happen now is the opposition will take charge now Saddam is gone lol and all will be well? What could go wrong?'

[GS]

I think politicians in the west vastly overestimate the desire of people to have liberal democracy imposed upon them.

[Lewis]

The post-invasion planning was presumably handled about as well as it could have been given the nature of the invasion. They wanted regime change, so they had to sweep away all aspects of the regime to make way for freedom and democracy and the new 'global order' Blair mentioned in one of the letters (what a twat). It's a bit like when people criticise Adolf Hitler for not having gone into the Soviet Union as a liberator. He wouldn't have gone in had he wanted to liberate them.

[igor_balis]

I saw Steve Richards briefing yesterday that everything was right and proper, so I imagine they are barricaded in the drawing room now with six months' supplies of cava and Walkers Sensations.

I thought the Iraq War was the evil machinations of the New World Order, not the BLUE World Order!!!!

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/fantendo/images/e/e0/BlueWorldOrder.gif/revision/latest?cb=20150828104113

We only have three words for you - we're bombing Iraq

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f380/hbkendrick/richards4.jpg

No evidence of WMDs? I'LL SHOW YOU, YOU'LL SEE.

[Shindig]

Looking at the 129 casualties, one of them was a suicide from an sad woman who got told off for being drunk. I don't think Blair should be pinned on that one.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Our casualties are beside the point. The army go and do what they signed up to do. It's our part in the (presumably avoidable, although he seems to be arguing not) long term strategic fuck-up in Iraq that Tony should be getting the blame for.

[GS]

The post-invasion planning was presumably handled about as well as it could have been given the nature of the invasion. They wanted regime change, so they had to sweep away all aspects of the regime to make way for freedom and democracy and the new 'global order' Blair mentioned in one of the letters (what a twat). It's a bit like when people criticise Adolf Hitler for not having gone into the Soviet Union as a liberator. He wouldn't have gone in had he wanted to liberate them.

They knew they were going to wipe out the regime, and that would mean a complete political vacuum. They'll also surely have known that it would lead to a security vacuum (as you couldn't just let the current crop of Baathist loyalists continue imposing law and order) and the collapse of the country's economic system for the duration of the war and the initial stages of the occupation. You're basically talking about stripping a country down and starting again with a system that is completely alien to the people there. They clearly underestimated that task to an unacceptable level, and the willingness with which people in said country would adopt and adapt to the change.

To be blunt, foreign occupations of this kind don't work anymore. It was fine in the days of Empire when you had a far more sophisticated army and could just buy off some local figurehead who would do what he was told, but it's not the Raj anymore. You go in, and you very quickly become the enemy. It's your army that are having to police the streets and impose law and order, and it's your civilian and military occupying powers that are controlling the economic levers - so you're the ones who are going to get the blame when someone is wrongfully arrested or there's not enough food. See: West Belfast.

They fucked it completely. The invasion itself, whatever the legality of it, was fine - it was over in a month, well done everyone. We had a moral authority and legitimacy to do this - i.e. a complete overhaul of a country's political structures - in Germany and Japan after WWII, but we didn't in Iraq.

All the subsequent issues with Iraq's stability were foreseeable (according to Chilcot, anyway) - and Blair ultimately carries the can for that.

[Lewis]

Yeah. They obviously underestimated things (seemingly because they were fucking naive rather than incompetent), but they still handled it reasonably well when, as you say, there was a complete political vacuum and economic collapse exploited to the full by both internal and external actors. I was too young to care about it in 2003, and I'm against these sort of interventions now; but the actual death tolls and amount of aggro were not particularly high by historical standards, so my point is that, given what unfolded, the occupation was conducted pretty well. Five thousand coalition dead, a few hundred thousand Iraqi dead after years of insurgency and all-out civil war... These sort of figures compare reasonably favourably with tinpot African wars, let alone things like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or Vietnam.

[GS]

I suspect they vastly overestimated the levels of cooperation they'd get within Iraq and just assumed that everybody would be happy because they'd booted Saddam up the arse - they'll all be up for a bit of democracy now and extending the franchise to include everybody who would normally be put to death.

It's a bit like when the success of one of the inevitably failed Irish rebellions against British rule hinged entirely on 'the people' rising against the 'occupier', only for it turn out that nobody could be fucked. The rebels would always go to the gallows in a state of shock that the population were seemingly alright with having their potato crop stolen by the English.

It seems metropolitan liberal groupthink has been a thing for longer than you'd realise.

[mikem]

It is down to both institutional memory and the difficulty of ignoring bad evidence that supports "known" positions.

They cheered us in the drive to Baghdad. Pulled down statues, waived and shouted "USA" with their kids in every single town. Hundreds of people like me went back home with those images and they became institutional memory and wisdom. And I got the twofer of Operation Provide Comfort and saw the clinics full of gassed Kurds and the corresponding gratitude. We assumed everyone would be like that sans Saddam. It was inconceivable that WMDs were not real.

But sanctions only punish the innocent and provide the regime with cover. None of which is to argue that the war was anything other than stupid and inhumane. Or that those in charge are excused because they fell into something easy to believe. It is just really easy to fuck it all up.

[GS]

Again, if one ignores the question of legality, I have no problem with the way the invasion itself was conducted. The coalition rolled the Iraqi army over in a month. That part was perfectly well planned. It was the disaster that followed, in assuming everybody would always just think the Americans were great for 'liberating' the country.

I'm sure people were happy originally, mind you - like the lads in eastern European cheering their Russian liberators until they ended up in Siberia - but really it was just replacing one failed system with another. And one suspects that rose-tinted spectacles came into play and the view was that at least Saddam maintained a largely stable country and his regime had the merit of at least being comprised of Iraqis.

[mikem]

My second paragraph was not clear enough - I am old and was in Desert Storm. The images that we brought back from that is what I think led to the erroneous thinking going in a second time.

That and the sheer self-delusion of anyone who "liberates" somebody else. Nobody has ever liberated without expecting the subjects to do exactly what they are told afterwards.

[Lewis]

Did the post-Gulf War uprisings (or whatever you want to call them) not really get much coverage? Were you personally aware of them? What did you make to the sanctions regime during the nineties?

[mikem]

I "remember" various people trying to kill off Saddam but don't honestly know what you are referring to in the first question which answers your second. And I really don't know if those memories are reliable or subplots to a Bourne movie. What are you referring to actually?

I used to think sanctions were good and would have supported them wholeheartedly for all the typical reasons. That has changed.

I won't argue against sanctions ability to contain, but I think they have a 90% track record of encouraging the behavior they are meant to change. The limiting of choices actually helps the government in question by providing a real enemy and only the poor and vulnerable face real consequences.

[Lewis]

I meant these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_uprisings_in_Iraq). You would expect them to have gone relatively unnoticed by the general population since it all went up about thirty seconds after the liberation of Kuwait and ceasefire, but I was wondering whether it was different for somebody who was out there (although you probably had better things to think about).

[mikem]

Oh, ok. I was in the 82nd and would have been back being stationed out of Vicenza by the time of most of that. Yes, we were painfully aware of that from Stars and Stripes coverage and wondering when we were going next. My mind just blurs that and the Kurdish uprising / payback and the no fly zones together because that is when And why I went back. And going back was far worse than Desert Storm which mainly centered around "hydrating" for me.

[mikem]

Sorry for the double post but I finally read that article more carefully and a lot of that must have happened when I was still in Saudi. We would have heard of some of that but you have to remember we lived on pre-Internet, non-cable, hastily constructed, metal pre-fab bases whose only news sources were Stars and Stripes and Armed Forces Radio, weekly calls home or all the gossip that we made up but believed wholeheartedly. Our lack of knowledge would have been about access and the fact that we were high school educated 18-24 year olds from Louisiana, Alabama, Oklahoma and Kansas.

[Spoonsky]

Oh, ok. I was in the 82nd and would have been back being stationed out of Vicenza by the time of most of that. Yes, we were painfully aware of that from Stars and Stripes coverage and wondering when we were going next. My mind just blurs that and the Kurdish uprising / payback and the no fly zones together because that is when And why I went back. And going back was far worse than Desert Storm which mainly centered around "hydrating" for me.

:)

My mom was born there in 1960 while my grandpa was teaching English to kids from the army base.

[Magic]

Mikem. :cool:

[Kikó]

I could listen to mikem's stories all night. Great stuff.

Sure beats Henry's broadband stories.

[Magic]

Has Henry popped in to call him a baby killer yet?

[Davgooner]

I could listen to mikem's stories all night. Great stuff.

Sure beats Henry's broadband stories.

Fibre to the cabinet. :drool:

[Shindig]

How does Tony Blair sleep at night?

In a chill cot.

[John]

How should you be punished for that joke?

With a shin dig.

[Shindig]

Pun-ishment.

[Lewis]

George Galloway is on Question Time. :drool:

[GS]

I saw that. Galloway will seethe himself hoarse, but Ian Hislop is also there to throw a bucket of ice water over him and offer some plain common sense.

It's a shame the rest of the panel are shit.

[GS]

Charlie Falconer is fighting a heroic last line of defence on Blair's behalf, but literally everybody else is calling Blair out as a wanker.

[Shindig]

If he ran successfully for Labour leader and an election was called, he'd stroll it,

[Jimmy Floyd]

He really wouldn't. He must have an approval rating of about -90.

[Shindig]

Well, he's king of my heart. Honest Tony.

[GS]

Chilcot has poisoned Blair's legacy to a point it can't recover. He's fucking toxic. He knows it as well - you only have to look at the cold, distant stare in his eyes from that marathon press conference he called the other day.

In a few years' time, he might get some more sympathetic coverage given the usual trend of historical revisionism.

[Jimmy Floyd]

I don't have too much truck with him for Iraq, though we shouldn't have gone, but you could see why he wanted to line up behind dubya. It's everything else he did that I mind.

[GS]

If you haven't outlined in detail why you hate Blair, now is your chance to do so. You'll never get a more sympathetic hearing. I'm coming round to your view that 1997 is the point at which the country began to fall apart.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Brexit has probably ended his 20 years of doom I think, but to sum up, do people really want to eat at Pizza Express, or do they just think it's the right thing to be seen doing?

[phonics]

Alright Giggles? Haven't seen you round the place in a while.

[Jimmy Floyd]

To be fair, Pizza Express has improved a lot since he stopped being Prime Minister. It's Pret and their four quid sandwiches doing the real damage now.

[mikem]

:)

My mom was born there in 1960 while my grandpa was teaching English to kids from the army base.

That's wonderful. Camp Ederle was great. In so many ways it was like an extended adventure camp. Seeing snow for the first time at 19 years old and then learning how to ski by being dragged behind a snow plow on the same day.

My wife always mocks me for volunteering for an alpine post when I don't like cold, snow, or heights. In my defense, I'm from the bayou. How was i supposed to know?