It was a shocking, abominable murder. But the fear remains that this may not be the action of hatred-obsessed psychopaths, but the beginnings of a long-drawn-out saga of Muslim revenge. The words that the murderer used have already gone round the world: “we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this […]
Posts Tagged ‘Iraq’
10 years on from Iraq: a violent country and a secretive state
Mar 18th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.At the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, it is said that the US won the war, Iran won the peace, and Turkey won the contracts. But did the US win the war? At a cost of £1.1 trillion and a death toll of 4,500 US troops, 32,000 wounded and with thousands […]
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Iraq: Ten years on
Feb 15th, 2013 by Kate Hudson.As The Guardian editorial says today, ‘The judgment of those who took to the streets against the rush to war only looks wiser.’ Of course there is no joy in being right when the outcome was a desperate tragedy for so many people – and continues to this day. But one would like to think that those […]
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Hitchens, the “kitsch-left”, and the cult of the individual
Nov 1st, 2012 by Conrad Landin.I was somewhat taken aback when I saw that James Bloodworth had joined the brigades calling for a ‘statue’ to the late journalist Christopher Hitchens to be erected in London’s Red Lion Square. Taking to the pages of the Independent, he proclaimed: “Hitchens represents a break only with those parts of the left that after […]
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On Jimmy Savile, Tony Blair, and turning a blind eye to serious crimes
Oct 15th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.The terrible thing about Jimmy Savile’s serious crimes involving young girls is how many people in senior and influential positions knew about his behaviour and chose to do nothing about it, to turn a blind eye. People who knew him at Radio Luxembourg and Mecca as early as the 1960s, Detective Inspector John Lindsay’s superiors […]
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The US: a declining military and economic power
Aug 31st, 2012 by Michael Meacher.The news today that 3 more NATO troops have been killed by Afghan soldiers – bringing the number of such murders to 15 in this month alone and 45 this year so far – is serious enough, but it hides a much more disturbing background. It has been dismissed as a series of random killings, not […]
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The end of the biggest military disaster since Vietnam
Dec 15th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.The final pull-out of US troops from Iraq marks the end, or perhaps just one stage of the end, of the biggest military disaster since Vietnam. Every US-UK goal behind the invasion has been lost, in some cases humiliatingly. Iran, the target for revenge after the sacking of the US embassy in 1979, emerges as […]
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Iraq and the Arab Spring: a thought experiment
Dec 15th, 2011 by David Osler.Very few things about the political state of Iraq can accurately be described as clear. But now that the flag has been cased and the last 4,000 US troops are on the way home, some sort of preliminary balance sheet is finally possible. As president Obama told the troops at the military base in Fort […]
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Liberal interventionism: an excuse for yet another war
Nov 2nd, 2011 by Daniel Blaney.For 10 years the peace movement has been on continuous high alert. We have had ‘liberal intervention’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and most recently in Libya. Even before September 11th 2001, we had NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and regular US/UK bombing raids over the misnamed ‘no fly zone’ of Iraq. During this time, public opinion in the UK has […]
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Bush and Blair finally lose war in Iraq
Oct 24th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.Buried in all the reporting about Gadaffi’s death was a much more significant piece of news about the Middle East. Obama announced late on Friday night – with a timing very likely connected to the news from Libya – that all US troops will be withdrawan from Iraq in 2 months time. This is a […]
