In confession, Blair admits launching an illegal war

There’s been some controversy these past few days over remarks made by Tony Blair to the effect that he would still have taken Britain to war even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass descruction (WMDs) in 2003. Put aside Blair’s continued pretence that there was any clear evidence that Iraq had WMD. Put aside the fiction that the existence of WMD would by itself have constituted a case for war (there was no chance that Saddam would have provoked the US by using them aggressively). A detailed look at what Blair said about the justification for starting the Iraq war reveals more about the nature of the decision that was taken than even many of Blair critics have fully realised. Because Blair has now effectively admitted that the war was, at least in part, an act of political violence taken, not as a last resort, but as a policy choice to advance a strategic agenda.

The remarks were made in an interview with the BBC that focsed largely on Blair’s religious faith and the role it has played in his public and personal life. Unable to find a transcript of the interview, I’ve just subjected myself this morning to watching fully one hour of Blair’s sanctimonious, middle-brow twaddle on the BBC website so I could copy down word-for-word the relevant parts of the interview.

No need to thank me.

Here’s what Blair said on Iraq, in full, followed by my analysis of the implications.

Asked if it was WMD that persuaded him to join the invasion of Iraq, Blair says:

“It was the notion of him as a threat to the region, of which the development of WMD was obviously one. You'd had 12 years of United Nations to-and-fro on this subject, he'd used chemical weapons on his own people. So this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind, the threat to the region. Also the fact of how that region was going to change and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region and whilst he was there I thought and actually still think it would have been very difficult to have changed it in the right way.”

The interviewer then asks: “If you had known then that there were no WMDs would you still have gone on?”

“I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat ... but I find it quite hard because I've spent so much time out there now and you know they're about to have an election which will probably be the single most significant thing that's happened in that region for many years because they've managed at long last to break out of actually the religious divide. So you've got groupings for the first time standing there in elections who are going to be broad-based. Now, we hope that it works. But I'm out there a lot of the time now in the work I do in Israel and Palestine. I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge, but its incredibly difficult and I totally understand that's why I sympathise with the people who were against it for perfectly good reasons and are against it now but for me in the end you know I had to take the decision.”

Later on, talking about the decision to invade from a personal point of view, Blair takes the subject back to the broader justifications for the war:

“And you also understand I think with these types of decisions that the judgement about them is a very long run thing I mean you ...it all depends what view you take I mean I happen to think that there is a major major struggle going on all over the world really which is about Islam and what is happening within Islam and I think its got a long way to go. So I think its probably only significantly later that you will look back and work out in a context was this helpful to achieving change or was it not helpful, and that's difficult to judge right now.”

[Source: Fern Britton Meets...Tony Blair, BBC One, 10:00am Sunday 13th December 2009]

So Blair advances two justifications for the war:

1. The security threat to the region and to Iraqis posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction; and
2. The obstacle Saddam posed to “change” in the region.

He then says that minus WMD he would still have thought it right to go to war. He would just “have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat”. So what he describes in one breath as “the thing that was uppermost in my mind” turns out a moment later to be a detail, and not fundamental to the decision at all. Therefore we can discount justification 1.

This leaves us with justification 2. Saddam was an obstacle to “change” in the Middle East “and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region” which needed to be “changed in the right way”. Blair was explicitly told by his Attorney General that a war for regime change would be illegal. But put aside the legal question for a moment. One does not unleash a force of nature as catastrophically destructive as war simply because one wishes to effect a form of political change. Violence is only justifiable to avert an ongoing or imminent attack, only as a last resort and only to the extent that is strictly proportionate to the threat. Blair sees it differently. To him, violence can be used as a policy tool if Western political leaders feel that, in their judgement, a certain part of the world needs to “evolve”.

Blair talks about democratic elections in Iraq as proving the worth of his decision, but Blair's was not some principled war for democracy. We know for a fact that Blair has no interest in democracy in the Middle East. When the Palestinians voted for candidates that the West disapproved of in their elections of January 2006 Blair’s government colluded in a US-Israeli led boycott of the occupied Palestinian territories – one of the poorest places in the world - that effectively punished the Palestinian people indiscriminately for how they had chosen to vote. If any election deserves to be described as the “single most significant thing that's happened in that region for many years” it was the Palestinian elections of 2006, because of the overt contempt both for democracy and for the lives of the people of the Middle East that the Western reaction to it demonstrated. This – even more than the ongoing backing for various authoritarian Arab regimes - exposed the narrative of democratisation that Bush and Blair were peddling at the time to justify their approach to the Middle East for the fiction that it always was.

Blair says “in the end you know I had to take the decision”; but this is just the point. He was not in the position of a Winston Churchill, forced by an aggressor into making tough choices. His was not a decision of last resort. His choice to go to war was freely taken, because he thought it might help advance the West’s strategic agenda in the Middle East. There is no such thing as a just war that is freely chosen by the party that instigates it. A war of choice is by definition a war of aggression. Blair, by his own admission, is a war criminal.

The limits and context of New Labour's left turn

Today's editorial in The Guardian takes up an interesting theme: the long-term changes in the political economy of Britain and how the apparent move towards "industrial activism", made recently by New Labour, may fit into broader economic trends.


The rise of socialist and social democratic politics, driven by the organisation of mass labour rooted in manufacturing and other blue collar industries, probably reached its peak at around the mid-point of the last century, winning in the process some vital gains in terms of the political enfranchisement and economic welfare of the general population. Subsequent years saw the demographic make up of the country change, with manufacturing industry declining sharply as a mass employer, the move of many working class people into white collar work, an increase in home-ownership and the general break-up of the social base that had driven the Labour Party in particular and the political challenge to the vested interests of the economic elites more generally. The end of this historic socialist/social democratic coalition saw the establishment of a new Thatcherite consensus, first by Thatcher herself, then later on by New Labour.

However, recent months have seen something of a change in tone from the Labour government, including a willingness to intervene in support of the industrial sector and to (vocally at least) challenge the banking industry. We have also seen Gordon Brown directly challenge the regressive taxation policies of the Conservative Party and link those to the privileged background of its leading figures. Obviously Labour has to tack left at least slightly in order to rally support ahead of next year's general election. Its traditional base can no longer be relied upon to turn out and vote after 12 years of neo-Thatcherism from Brown and Blair, not to mention Blair's politically disastrous alliance with George W Bush. So trying to shore up that constituency makes sense. But is there also something deeper at work here?

The long-term social changes and trends described above that undermined traditional Labourism, though not entirely within the control of policymakers, were at the same time, not entirely due to forces of nature. The political economy is a system created by human beings and driven by human choices.

Similarly today, with it having become obvious that the British economy is fundamentally unbalanced and over-reliant on the "socially useless" activity of the financial sector, it is right that politicians should make the conscious choice to change this balance away from "financial engineering" towards "real engineering". This is especially true when climate change demands that we radically and swiftly alter the technological base, a situation that offers huge opportunities in research, development and production to the nation states and companies smart enough to take them. More national reliance on capital investment and less on capricious financial flows would also - potentially at least - render the democratic state better able to hold its own against the demands of elite international economic interests.

So it turns out, after 11 years of New Labour being "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", that you don't have to accept post-Thatcherite neo-liberalism as though it were written into the laws of physics. You can, in fact, make choices.

The costs of the centre-left's intellectual and moral timidity in the face of the status quo post-Thatcher can be measured in the damage done to the economy by the collapse of those orthodoxies in the autumn of 2008. Labour appears, very slowly indeed, to be coming round to an understanding (an understanding that is at least partially right) of what this might mean politically. It would be a shame if it lost the opportunity to develop this line of thinking more fully, given the unpleasant alternative facing us at the ballot box next spring.

Labour's current politics, irrespective of the recent mild drift away from Thatcherism, still require a serious overhaul or wholesale replacement. That's a long-term task for Britain's progressive majority, requiring dedication and commitment. In the short term, we should be aware of the changing political weather in the aftermath of the banking crisis and work to ensure that the obvious lessons are learnt about the sustainability of neo-liberal economics. In those circumstances, a Labour victory is plainly preferable to a Tory victory in the election next spring. But given New Labour's dismal record in entrenching Thatcherism during its first 11 years in power, and the extremely limited nature of its political conversion post-credit crunch, an anti-Tory vote next spring should be one very small part of a far greater effort to move the long-term trends of the British economy in a more progressive direction.

Demanding a New British Foreign Policy

My article, "We Must Demand a New Foreign Policy", was published on The Guardian's website earlier this week.

The article set out to do three things:

First, to point out that at the next election the political system will not be offering us any alternative government that presents the clean break in UK foreign policy that the public desires, following the Blair-Bush years.

Second, to try and describe some of the main features of what a progressive transformation in Britain's relations with the rest of the world might look like.

Third, to encourage the public to get involved in activism that challenges current UK policy and aims to change it for the better.

You can read the article here.

Many comments were made by readers (I believe it was one of the top five most commented-upon pieces in the 24 hours it was prominent on the site, and the editors were kind enough to nominate it 'Thread of the Day'). Some of the input was good, some less so, as is always the way in these forums. One comment I thought particularly valuable was this from Paul Lambert in which he cites polling evidence backing up my point about the democratic deficit on foreign policy.

It was good to get the opportunity to publish in the Guardian and get some of these ideas out to a much wider audience than I get here (no offence to either of you, my faithful and valued readers). Hopefully this will be the shape of things to come.

The Death of John Smith: 15 years on

"The Second Commandment calls on us to love our neighbours as ourselves. It does not expect human fraility to be capable of loving our neighbours more than ourselves: that would be a task of saintly dimensions. But I do not believe that we can truly follow that great Commandment unless we have a concept of concern for our fellow citizens which is reflected in the organisation of society."

John Smith, Labour Party leader, 1992-94

“We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich"

Peter Mandelson

Rupa tagged me on this John Smith thing that's been doing the rounds (the former Labour leader died 15 years ago last week). Here's my answers to the questions.

Where were you when you heard John Smith had died?

It was a school day and I was round a friend’s house at lunchtime when the news came on the TV.

How did you view John Smith when he was leader and how do you view him now?

Smith came across as a strong, credible and articulate politician. Labour were 23% ahead of the Conservatives in the polls at the time of his death, with the width and depth of the government’s unpopularity very much established. The 1992 election had been a dispiriting missed opportunity to remove the Tories from office, but it was now reasonably clear that Smith was capable of winning the next election and repalcing Thatcherism with something if imperfect then at least somewhat better. So from a political point of view, his death created an unwelcome sense of uncertainty about the future - in terms both of Labour's electibility and its political direction - where before there had been decent grounds for optimism.

Do you think he would have made a good Prime Minister?

Its hard to say, but we do know what happened in his absence. Labour moved sharply to the right, essentially embracing Thatcherism albeit with a few softening aspects. The results are well known. An economy consisting of a consumer credit bubble teetering atop a property bubble tottering above a financial bubble, whose collapse led to the worst recession in decades. Inequality worse than at any time since records began. Poverty on the rise. Corporate welfare masquerading as investment in public services under the guise of the PFI. And an illegal war of aggression, launched in collusion with a US government of the hard right, sold on disinformation and resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions and one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the last ten years. Those, of course, are just the highlights.

My sense is that few, perhaps even none of those things – the very worst of New Labour - would have happened under Smith. New Labour was a significant departure even from his fairly run-of-the-mill brand of social democracy. I’m under no illusions about the shortcomings of the pre-Blair Labour Party as a force for progressive change. Even Clement Atlee’s government, which implemented the most progressive domestic agenda yet seen in Britain’s history, fought a vicious colonial war in Malaya and began the plotting that later led to the overthrow of Iran’s elected government, a coup effected in order to maintain Western control over that countries oil reserves. I’m sure that Smith would have done many things that I disagreed with, even things that would have appalled me, not least in foreign affairs. But I find it unlikely that his administration would have been remotely as cynical and disastrous as those of Blair and Brown.

What do you think is his lasting legacy?

Tragically, Smith’s overriding legacy is probably the disappointment of his premature death in terms of its implications for the country.

Thatcherism was widely discredited and its replacement with a British version of social democracy would have improved the lives of millions (and also raised the possibility of a subsequent move to something more progressive still, perhaps along Scandinavian lines). There was a very reasonable possibility of that happening while Smith was alive and leading the Labour Party.

Instead, by establishing a neo-Thatcherite consensus and reducing politics to managerial questions within those constraints, Smith’s New Labour successors – in the name of pragmatism and, laughably, “what works” – locked Britain into the political-economic model which is now collapsing around us and which both Labour and the Tories appear morally and intellectually incapable of abandoning.

That’s where we are now, and its hard not to wonder how different things might have been had Smith lived and the Labour Party not fallen into the hands of those who succeeded him.

Government minister says, Blair administration talked "bollocks" on terrorism

I love a good headline, don't you?

Britain's security and counter-terrorism minister, the unenviably named Lord West of Spithead, has broken with New Labour tradition and acknowledged the obvious.

"In an outspoken assessment of the terror risk facing Britain, Gordon Brown's security adviser was scathing about the assertion, made by Tony Blair when prime minister, that foreign policy did not alter the UK's risk of a terror attack.

"We never used to accept that our foreign policy ever had any effect on terrorism," he said. "Well, that was clearly bollocks."

He added: "They [the Blair administration] were very unwilling to have any debate about how our foreign policy impacted on radicalisation.""

As I wrote shortly after the bombings here in London on 7 July 2005, Blair's government government "deliberately and repeatedly ignor[ed] the advice of the UK’s intelligence services, departmental advisers and independent experts" that Britain's foreign policies, especially the invasion and occupation of Iraq, were increasing the threat of terrorist attacks being carried out on British soil.

Now when politicians swear blind that black is white, one of the questions that springs to mind is whether they can genuinely believe what they're saying, and if not, how they can consciously peddle what they know to be falsehoods while keeping straight faces. Does the last remark from the minister quoted above - that the Blair administration were unwilling to have any internal debate about how our foreign policy impacted on radicalisation - give us an insight into this? Did Blair and his advisers stick their fingers in their ears and shout "la la la" whenever someone suggested that blowback from their foreign policies was endangering the British public, because they genuinely believed it wasn't true? Or because they didn't want to allow what they knew was a pathetically flimsy position to be tested in serious debate?

At one level it doesn't matter. Britain has continued with substantively the same Middle East policies post-Blair; backing local tyrants, supporting Israeli expansionism and repression of the Palestinians, and playing spear-carrier to the United States' imperial role in the region. All this is music to the ears of AlQaeda's recruiting officers, who can fill their ranks with young Muslims and Arabs driven to violent rage by these injustices and unable to see credible non-violent outlets for that anger. It matters little whether the government acknowledges the fact of this dynamic's existence if it pursues substantively the same policies, since the results will be the same. Better PR by Western governments won't change that. But it's interesting to see how, within power-structures, debates takes place between rational pragmatists and true-believer dogmatists. Both will pursue policies that serve powerful interests to the exclusion of more moral concerns. But each will have differing takes on how best to formulate and present those policies.

Clearly this isn't just a matter of abstract interest. If you can understand the kind of thinking that leads people to start wars like the US-UK invasion of Iraq then you're better placed to challenge that thinking and maybe prevent those wars from taking place.

Gaza: another shameful day for Israel

Here’s Norweigan doctor Mads Gilbert, interviewed on the scene in Gaza by the BBC (I posted an earlier interview of his with CBS yesterday). According to Gilbert, Gaza's hospitals are completely overwhelmed with casualties, almost all of whom are civilians.

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Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford who served in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s, today delivers possibly the best analysis of Israel's assault on Gaza that I have seen so far, giving the essential factual background and context in which these events should be understood. If you read nothing else about what's been happening over the past two weeks, read this.

A quote:

"The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies."

"A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe."

"The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises."

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This morning the Guardian reports that, “Israel's assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.”

“The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates.”

“Explaining its attack on al-Fahora school, the Israeli military claimed that a mortar was fired from the playground, and it responded with a single shell which killed known Hamas fighters; the resulting explosion was compounded because Hamas "booby-trapped the school". Two Hamas militants were among the dead, both part of a rocket-launching cell.”

As a former British intelligence analyst notes here, the Israeli military has a long history of lying about these sorts of incidents. But lets - for a moment - give them the entirely unearned benefit of the doubt and say their claims are right. What then? Well we can simply recall that – as Avi Shlaim notes in the article mentioned above (and more of this below) – the current round of violence started when, on 4 November, Israel decisively broke a ceasefire whose terms Hamas had basically adhered to but which Israel had not respected. Even the US media, some of the most dogmatically pro-Israel in the world, are being forced to accept this now.

The upshot? Israel is claiming is that it shelled these civilians in self-defence….in a conflict which it itself initiated. That is the absurd interpretation it is now trying to peddle. A less demented way of looking at it might be to say that the best method of self defence for Israel would have been not break the ceasefire in the first place. After all, there were zero Israeli deaths in the six months before the start of its all-out attack on Gaza on 27 December 2008, which by now has claimed over 600 Palestinian lives. Also, a great way of avoiding shelling civilians would be not to start a war to begin with (or, even then, to...er...just not shell civilians).

But that’s giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. In fact, John Ging, the director of operations of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, has said "I can tell you categorically that there was no militant activity in that school at the time of that tragedy...We have established beyond any doubt that the school was not being used by any militants...They were innocent people".

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Israel today began what it said will be a daily three hour ceasefire to allow Gazans to "get medical attention, get supplies... whatever they need". Wow, these guys are like saints, aren’t they? For every 21 hours of murdering innocent people there’ll now be 3 hours of not murdering innocent people, so the innocent people can get “whatever they need”, before they start getting murdered again.

Don't forget that Israel is defending Western civilisation against the barbarians, will you?

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Lets go back to that ceasefire that Israel broke. Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presents an important piece of empirical analysis in an article for The Huffington Post, showing that (a), yes, Hamas held the ceasefire and Israel broke it, and (b) that since the second intifada began eight years ago, the side that breaches periods of calm with new attacks has overwhelmingly been Israel. Not only that, but the longer the period of calm, the more likely it is that Israel will break it by launching a new attack, to the point where “it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week”.

“79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian… of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days”

Lets be clear about the importance of finding (b). In conflict situations, periods of peace provide something to build on; space for anger to subside, for dialogue to take place, even for levels of mutual trust to emerge. The longer a period of peace continues, the greater the chances of the cycle of violence being broken in a more substantive way. According to Kanwisher’s analysis, the greater the window of opportunity for peace that opens in this conflict, the greater the likelihood that Israel will slam that window shut, while it is hardly ever the Palestinians that do so.

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Finally today, a look at the longer term consequences of Israel’s aggression. The Guardian talks to “Gaza's leading child psychiatrist, Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, who has studied the effects of violence and trauma on children for 20 years, [and says that] about 65% of young people in the enclave suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

““There are many other traumatic symptoms, like headaches and abdominal pain and vomiting. There's an inability to concentrate, panic, anxiety, irritability," he said. "I've observed much change in the children. They are more anxious, more fearful. Children are panicky because of the explosions. Children want to leave. You hear it. They feel there is no hope, that the world can't do anything for them and they can't do anything for themselves."”

“Thabet says the impact of trauma on older children combines with other experiences to push them to extremes.”

“The perpetual killing has also drawn many children into the cult of the "martyr" and led them to expect an early death.”

“Thabet said the traumatizing of children was having a profound effect on Gaza's future. The children he studied in the early 1990s are now adults.”

“"They become fighters. I warned about this 15 years ago, that in 15 years these traumatized children will be more aggressive, they will want to fight, there will be more violence in the community. You saw it in the factional fighting in Gaza in 2007," he said.”

“"So now we will have another generation of more aggressive behaviour. They will go to more extremes because they have no future. This is a problem. I've been warning people of this but nobody was listening. It's a cycle of aggression.””

“"Children see their parents killed in front of them. What do you expect?"”

Juan Cole, professor of Middle East History at the University of Michigan, has a good post on his blog today describing how previous Israeli atrocities have led to vicious terrorist reprisals. He notes that Israeli politicians are well aware that this will be one of the consequences of their actions.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, “predicted that the Israeli invasion of Gaza would see "extremists try to radicalise individuals for their own purposes". Research had shown "no single path" on the way to violent extremism, but foreign policy was certainly one factor, along with economic, social, and personal circumstances.”

So if it comes to light that Gordon Brown really has had our diplomats at the UN working in secret to block calls for a ceasefire, then not only will he have been assisting in the slaughter of innocent people in Gaza, he will also be responsible for creating what are known to be the conditions for an increased likelihood of deadly terrorist attacks in the UK. (In this regard, it seems Brown’s odious predecessor has also been busy recently)

Gaza: the word you’re looking for is ‘massacre’

Let's clarify five key points about Israel’s attacks on Gaza this weekend.

First, “self-defence” isn’t a catch-all justification for any act of violence one cares to perpetrate. Violence is permitted in self-defence – both in common morality and international law – strictly on the basis of proportionality: i.e. the minimum necessary to repel the attack.

Israel claims its bombardment of the Gaza strip is aimed at defending itself from rocket attacks by Palestinian militant groups. In the past eight years, Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza have killed around 18 people in southern Israel. Between the start of the recent Hamas-Israel truce in June this year until the start of the Israeli bombing campaign on Saturday, no Israelis were killed by Hamas. Since Saturday, Israel has killed more than 300 Palestinians, including scores of civilians, and since those attacks began two Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets.

Overall, since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, around 1,000 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians and around 5,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, including 1,000 minors. That is to say that in just over the past forty-eight hours, Israel has killed a third as many Palestinians as Palestinians have killed Israelis in eight years. In a single weekend, Israel has increased the number of people it has killed since September 2000 by 6 per cent.

Therefore, since its actions are so grossly disproportionate to the threat they are said to be aimed at, Israel’s justification of self-defence plainly does not stand.

Second, while Israel claims to be targeting Palestinian militants, it is plainly not possible to “target” individuals in one of the most densely populated areas on the planet with the use of bombs and missiles fired from F-16 fighter jets. In fact, attacking Palestinian cities at 11:30 on a Saturday morning, when the streets were full, shows – shall we say – the direct opposite of an effort to avoid civilian casualties.

Israel claims that, unlike its enemies, it does not deliberately attack civilians. The distinction between targeting civilians and taking action that is absolutely certain to kill civilians, and which is totally disproportionate to the claimed purpose of the action, is not just a fine distinction. It is, in moral terms, no distinction.

Watch the video above; a news report from one of Gaza’s hospitals, already desperately short of medical supplies as a result of Israel’s blockade. Look at the infant child who appears towards the end of the report, clearly suffering from serious head injuries and in what appears to be a state of total shock. It’s an unbearable sight. Well, Israel and its apologists are claiming that those injuries were inflicted on that infant child - by an Israeli piloting a multi-million dollar, US-supplied fighter jet - in “self-defence”.

It doesn’t stand up, does it?

Thirdly, this is in no sense an Israeli “response”. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, noted earlier this month:

"the situation [has] worsened [since] the breakdown of a truce between Hamas and Israel that had been observed for several months by both sides. The truce was maintained by Hamas despite the failure of Israel to fulfil its obligation under the agreement to improve the living conditions of the people of Gaza. The recent upsurge of violence occurred after an Israeli incursion that killed several alleged Palestinian militants within Gaza."

Israel has maintained a blockade on the Gaza strip since early 2006, when the Palestinians committed the crime of voting the wrong way in an election. In the words of Israeli Government adviser Dov Weisglass, “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet”, so as to encourage them to reconsider their choice of Hamas over the US/Israeli-backed Fatah. The blockade has been tightened in stages since then, most notably when Hamas foiled a US backed coup-attempt by Fatah in the summer of 2007 and seized control of Gaza.

As a result of the blockade, Gaza has been forced into appalling levels of deprivation. Even by September 2006, The Independent was reporting that some Palestinian mothers had been reduced to scouring rubbish dumps for just enough food to feed their children once a day, and the situation has deteriorated sharply since then, especially in recent weeks. The UN Special Rapporteur, along with all leading aid agencies and human rights organisations, has consistently condemned the blockade in the strongest terms, with Falk stating that “[s]uch a policy of collective punishment, initiated by Israel to punish Gazans for political developments within the Gaza strip, constitutes a continuing flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”.

Fourthly, a more fundamental point cannot pass without mention. The root cause of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not Palestinian terrorism, however disgusting the attacks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad undoubtedly are. The state of Israel was created in 1948 by the violent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, forcing them out into neighbouring states and territories, like Gaza, where they and their descendents continue to live – as stateless refugees – to this day. In the “Six Day War” of 1967, Israel seized further territories - Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank - which it then began to colonise, all in clear violation of international law which forbids both the acquisition of territory by force and the colonisation of such territories.

There is now a clear international consensus on the solution to this conflict: Israel should withdraw to its recognised borders, handing back the illegally occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, who would then build their own state there. Last month the UN General Assembly voted 164-7 in favour of a settlement based on this formula: i.e. on Israeli compliance with international law. In the rejectionist camp were Israel, the United States, Australia, and four South Pacific island nations. Iran was one of the 164 who voted in favour. The Arab states, including the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, have been pushing for a specific peace initiative on this formula for many years. And even Hamas, in May 2006, joined with the other Palestinian factions in signing up to a “National Conciliation Document” calling for a Palestinian state on the legal, 1967 borders, in accordance with the repeated statements of leading Hamas officials in recent years.

In other words, the conflict continues, to the extent that it does today, because Israel would sooner massacre innocent people in Gaza, if that’s what it takes, than hand back the land it has stolen and allow the Palestinians the right to have their own country and run their own affairs.

The fifth and final point is that Israel is able adopt this position because a few key states are prepared to provide strong backing for its rejectionist stance. As the leading international affairs scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have noted, Israel

“has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance [from the US] since 1976 [receiving] roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. [In addition] Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 [UN] Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It [also] played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords ... consistently support[ing] the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.”

No words need be wasted on the stance adopted by the outgoing Bush administration, to the conflict in general or to these latest atrocities in particular. What is more noteworthy is the response from people we might have expected slightly better from. For President-elect Barack Obama, the “fierce urgency of now” appears to have been replaced over the weekend by the fierce urgency of “monitoring the situation”. One suspects that, if Hamas had butchered scores of Israelis in cold blood over the weekend, Obama would not be hiding behind the protocol of “one President at a time”. He would be falling over himself to make a strong moral statement, rightly, and just as he should be doing now.

Or take British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who called for “Gazan militants to cease all rocket attacks on Israel immediately”, but for Israel merely to “do everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties”. Why is it so hard for Britain to simply and unambiguously call for both sides to cease all fire immediately? Are we having a re-run of the summer of 2006, when Israel carried out weeks of indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon while Tony Blair’s government worked in the international diplomatic arena to block calls for a ceasefire? Why does Britain continue to sell arms to Israel, including key components for the fighter jets carrying out the current attacks? Is this what New Labour calls an enlightened, ethical foreign policy?

I’ll conclude by saying this. There is no law forcing people to just sit at home and shake their heads while their governments aid and abet Israel’s massacre of innocent civilians. Israel depends on international support or acquiescence for it to continue on this path, and our governments rely on our support or acquiescence to maintain their own wretched positions. You can change this equation. There are protests taking place all over Britain, today and later on this week, including one outside the Israeli embassy this afternoon. If you can attend one of these events, even for a short time, then please do. If not, it is the simplest thing to write a letter to your MP and MEPs. This website helps you to do it, via email, in a few minutes. Ask them what they personally are doing to end the Israeli atrocities. If you get a poor response, write again and demand a better one.

It was the accumulation of thousands of small individual acts like this that helped bring about an end to Apartheid. It was partly the strength of public revulsion at Blair’s role in the Israeli-Hezbollah war that hastened his own departure from office two years ago. When you see those horrific images on the news bulletins today remember, this is not something you have to accept.

****

Update - thanks to Jamie SW for pointing out an error in the overall death toll above, now corrected (its 1,000 rather than 600 Israeli deaths since September 2008). Jamie's blog has some excellent and very well researched coverage of these events, which I recommend you check out.

Time for change

With New Labour's latest huge defeat at the hands of David Cameron's Conservatives, it looks like a change is coming in British politics.

Britain’s failure in Iraq

My article "Britain’s failure in Iraq" is published this month in the English language edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. An excerpt:

"In 2003, Britain promised a post-Saddam Iraq that would be “a stable, united and law-abiding state providing effective representative government to its own people.” That those ambitions have not been realised is now widely acknowledged even within the political establishment. A recent report by Michael Knights and Ed Williams described Iraq’s deep south, the area for which Britain is responsible, as “a kleptocracy” where “well armed political-criminal mafiosi have locked both the central government and the people out of power”. "

"Britain’s official goals have now been significantly downgraded to keeping violence at a manageable level, and leaving local administrators and security services to deal with the situation. Even this is far from being achieved, and Britain faces these problems in near isolation from the international community. British policymakers and analysts will be asking themselves what went wrong for many years to come."

Read the rest here. Alternatively, if you want a hard copy, you can get LMD in English from one of the bigger branches of a major bookstore, e.g. Borders on Oxford Street, London.

The Blair Myth

My latest article, "The Blair Myth", is available at UKWatch.

"In spite of the heavy political weather that cast a shadow over the latter half of the Blair premiership, there exists across the spectrum of mainstream political discourse something approaching a personality cult where the departing British prime minister is concerned. This is based primarily on two widespread views of Blair: firstly, as a uniquely gifted politician, and, secondly, as a crusader for liberal values on the world stage. However, a review of the evidence exposes these views as having, at best, a limited grounding in reality."

Read the whole thing here.

Kosovo and its Implications

I will argue that the concept of “humanitarian intervention” can serve an important purpose for powerful states, one that is more strategic than moral in nature. The commonly formulated question raised by “humanitarian intervention” is that of “sovereignty versus human rights”. In my view, this paradigm of understanding can be used by powerful states to justify their dispensing with the normative and legal constraints of the international system even when taking military actions that are not of a moral character.

Since the 1999 NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo is seen as a definitive moment with regard to the question under discussion, I will examine this issue with particular reference to that conflict. I will do this in three stages. I will begin by critically examining the apparent presumption in the mainstream scholarly literature of the benign intent of the states carrying out this purported “humanitarian intervention”. I will cite contemporaneous examples of enforced population displacement and human rights abuses – in Turkey and East Timor - where the British and American involvement was markedly different to that seen in the case of Kosovo.

I will then examine the Kosovo action itself, firstly arguing that the war did not qualify as a “humanitarian intervention”; and, secondly, proposing some alternative reasons for why the action was undertaken.

Finally, I will turn to the above-mentioned question of “sovereignty versus human rights”, arguing that if humanitarianism was not the prime motive for the Kosovo intervention then, with this key assumption potentially discredited, the war’s implications for the international system as discussed in the scholarly literature will need to be comprehensively rethought. I will propose that the real issue at hand is not of “sovereignty versus human rights” but “sovereignty versus power”, where the concept of “humanitarianism” can be used by certain states to justify dispensing with elements of the legal and normative international system – e.g. sovereignty - that constrain their ability to project power.

The assumption of benign intent

The founding assumptions of debate

In examining the debate over the concept of “humanitarian intervention” we can learn as much by identifying points of consensus as we can by noting the points of contention. On this topic, there is some debate over whether “humanitarian interventions” are likely to meet with success, but less debate over whether the professed humanitarian impulses of the actors themselves are in fact genuine. Betts for example, whilst expressing strong reservations about the prospect that such endeavours will be successful, still characterises them as flowing from “the best of intentions” and “resonating with respect for the law and international co-operation” (Betts:1994:20-22).

These general scholarly assumptions apply to the case of the Kosovo war. Reviewing the literature on Kosovo and humanitarian intervention, David Chandler says that, “Apart from being seen as the first ‘humanitarian war’…the war over Kosovo has been generally recognised as a crucial point in the gradual evolution of a new set of international norms”. On this normative evolution, Chandler quotes Patrick Thornberry, who claims that “We are witnessing a sea-change in the relations between sovereignty and human rights”. Chandler says that “most commentators agree that, overall, this development is a progressive and desirable one”. (Chandler:2002:111).

It appears that for many commentators – whether they are in favour of “humanitarian intervention” or not – debate over the concept rests on the assumption that the relevant states’ professed concern for humanitarian values is genuine. Plainly this assumption is non-trivial. A “humanitarian intervention” that is not humanitarian is simply an intervention, a distinction that materially alters our conception of its character and legitimacy.

It is essential, then, to challenge this assumption of benign intent with possible countervailing evidence to see if it withstands scrutiny. At the outset of the Kosovo action Tony Blair spoke of “a new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated” (quoted in Chomsky:2001:1). Was Blair’s government attempting to lead the world into the new era of the kind he described? There is evidence to suggest otherwise.

Countervailing examples- Turkey and the Kurds

The 1990s saw serious atrocities committed against the Kurdish population of Turkey as the government fought Kurdish nationalist guerrilla forces. Between 1994 and 1998 3,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed, at least 1.5 million people were made homeless and/or internally displaced, and many thousands were killed by Turkish security forces. To this day, widespread human rights abuses against the Kurds in Turkey are ongoing. The European Court of Justice accuses Turkey of subjecting the Kurds to house destruction, torture, ‘disappearances’ and extra-judicial executions.

Referring to Tony Blair’s statement that, under the “new internationalism” heralded by NATO action over Kosovo, “the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated”, we might ask why the West has not intervened in this case.

In a sense, the West has intervened, but on the side of Turkey. During the mid-1990s British and American arms exports to Turkey increased sharply, in correlation with the increase in atrocities. British arms sales and training of Turkish security forces continued after the New Labour government came to power in 1997. In the years before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Turkish forces were permitted to conduct operations in the US-UK-enforced ‘no-fly zone’ in northern Iraq. Turkish incursions sometimes lasted months, with villages burnt and atrocities committed (for all facts cited in this sub-section, see Curtis:2003:38-46).

Countervailing examples- Indonesia and East Timor

Also in the late nineties, another example of the brutal repression of an ethnic group, including population displacement and large scale atrocities, was unfolding in East Timor. Again, British and American involvement on the side of the repressor was long-established and remained apparently unaffected by the advent of the “new internationalism”.

Indonesia had invaded East Timor in 1975. In suppressing a popular insurgency and enforcing its rule it proceeded to kill an estimated 200,000 people, nearly one third of the East Timorese population. As in the case of Turkey’s repression of the Kurds during the 1990s, an increase in Western arms exports to Indonesia during the late 1970s correlated with the increase of atrocities carried out in East Timor.

A referendum on East Timorese independence in August 1999 was preceded by renewed abuses carried out by the Indonesian military and its proxies, commencing in November 1998. These were designed to intimidate the population in advance of the vote, and therefore qualify as a straightforward instance of terrorism. An estimated 3-5,000 people were killed (twice the death toll in Kosovo on both sides before the NATO bombing) and eighty-five per cent of the population were driven from their homes.

British and American arms sales to Indonesia continued throughout this period, including joint US-Indonesia military training exercises. Support was finally ended in September 1999 under massive public and international pressure, ten months after the new wave of atrocities had commenced, and also after the referendum that they had been aimed at influencing (though they had notably failed in this regard with the East Timorese voting in favour of independence). When Western support was withdrawn, the atrocities stopped almost instantaneously. Chomsky notes that this demonstrates the decisive nature of that support and strongly indicates that its withdrawal at any point over the previous quarter century could have saved many thousands of lives (for all facts cited in this sub-section, see Chomsky:2001:21-26).

Implications for US-UK humanitarianism

In both of the cases highlighted above the atrocities could have been ended, or at least mitigated, by the cessation of US-UK support for the repressor government. Even if one were to argue that the atrocities would have continued – ignoring the example of East Timor – the humanitarian policy choice would still surely have been to end complicity in “the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups”. Such a cessation of support would have carried relatively little cost, as compared to an armed invasion, but the humanitarian option was not taken.
That the US-UK did not adopt humanitarian policies in the above-mentioned cases does not logically preclude the possibility that they might have chosen such policies in the case of Kosovo. But it does enable us to say three things before proceeding further:

1. that intrinsic US-UK humanitarianism does not appear to exist and certainly cannot be casually assumed;

2. that claimed US-UK humanitarianism in the case of Kosovo should therefore be examined very closely; and

3. that if such an examination reveals the humanitarian credentials of the Kosovo action to be suspect, then this, coupled with the non-humanitarian approach taken in similar contemporaneous cases, must disprove the scholarly consensus that the “war over Kosovo [was] a crucial point in the gradual evolution of a new set of international norms” where henceforth “the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated”.

It is therefore to Kosovo that we now turn.

Kosovo - a humanitarian intervention?

To assess whether or not the war over Kosovo qualifies as a “humanitarian intervention” we may ask three pertinent questions:

1. was it a war of last resort?

2. did it avert a humanitarian crisis? and

3. was it fought in accordance with humanitarian principles?

The account of the war set out by the historian Mark Curtis provides some revealing answers to these questions. Facts cited in this section are from his account of the conflict (Curtis:2003:134-157).

A war of last resort?

Curtis’ account of diplomatic activity in the run-up to the war strongly suggests that NATO avoided a peaceful settlement. It is hard to envisage any country accepting the demands it made of Serbia at the Rambouillet conference in March 1999; for example that NATO forces be given free right of movement throughout the Former Yugoslavia. Curtis quotes a senior US administration official who told the media at the conference, “we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing and that’s what they are going to get”.

During the war, German and French attempts to impose a peaceful settlement were also rejected. However, the final peace accord after the war dropped many of the most onerous demands put forward by NATO at Rambouillet, suggesting, as Curtis points out, that scope for a peaceful settlement had existed before military action was taken. Since these options were not explored we cannot say whether they would have been successful, but we can say that military action was not a last resort taken after all possible alternatives had been explored and exhausted.

Did war avert a humanitarian crisis?

Curtis cites authoritative sources indicating that, far from averting a humanitarian crisis, the war in fact precipitated one, and furthermore that this was a predicted consequence of military action being taken. For example, the OSCE’s account of the war noted that a “vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage [took place] once the NATO air war began”. That Serbia would instigate full-scale ethnic cleansing in response to a NATO attack was expected by those prosecuting the war. NATO commander Wesley Clark said that “The military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt”. The Guardian reported on 28 April 1999 that “MI6 is understood to have warned that bombing would accelerate ethnic cleansing”. In fact, four weeks after the bombing commenced Clark said the operation

“…was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was not designed as a means of waging war against the Serb forces in Kosovo. Not in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea…”.

Was the war fought in accordance with humanitarian principles?

Again, the factual record does not suggest that humanitarian concerns were a priority for the war’s instigators. After the war, with NATO troops on the ground, the Kosovo Liberation Army instigated atrocities and ethnic cleansing against Serbs without serious interference from NATO. Furthermore, the conduct of NATO itself in the course of the war raises questions about its humanitarian credentials. Extensive use was made of cluster bombs during the war; in fact, half of all British bombs dropped during the campaign were of this variety. Cluster bombs are inherently indiscriminate and therefore pose particular dangers to civilians. In addition, direct attacks were carried out on non-military targets such as Serb radio and television.

Human rights groups condemned NATO’s prosecution of the war. Amnesty International said that “NATO forces [had] violated the laws of war leading to cases of unlawful killings of civilians”. Human Rights Watch said: “We are concerned that NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure …because its destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put pressure on Milosevic to withdraw from Serbia”. This latter interpretation of NATO conduct, if accurate, would amount to a charge of terrorism.

If not humanitarianism, then what?

If military action over Kosovo was(a) not taken as a last resort; (b) taken with the expectation that it would precipitate a humanitarian crisis; and(c) if humanitarian principles were repeatedly violated in the course of it being fought, then the scholarly consensus that this was “the first ‘humanitarian war’” is seriously undermined. It also logically follows that the claimed reasons for fighting the war may not have been the real reasons, and that we should therefore consider this possibility together with any other potential reasons for why military action might have been taken.

Curtis notes that the other reason given by Tony Blair for going to war, aside from humanitarian concerns, was “credibility”. “To walk away now” said Blair on the eve of war, “would …destroy NATO’s credibility” (Curtis:2003:141). What is meant by credibility? Policymakers may describe military “credibility” as simply the establishment in the popular understanding of one’s willingness and capability to defend oneself and one’s allies against aggression. This was no doubt the case that Blair wanted to make. But unless we propose that states in general, and the US and UK in particular, only take military action for defensive reasons, we must recognise that credibility also has an offensive, proactive nature, i.e. the establishment in the popular understanding of one’s willingness and capability to proactively advance one’s own interests via military action, if such action is deemed necessary.

Michael Ledeen – a scholar close to the Bush administration – is reported to have made a statement that, though somewhat stark, effectively describes the essence of this latter meaning of credibility. "Every ten years or so” Ledeen reportedly said, “the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." (Goldberg:2002). The NATO approach to the war set out in Curtis’ account suggests that we must consider the possibility that it was not the former, defensive form of credibility that was in the minds of NATO planners.

Curtis also points out another potential reason for NATO to take military action, namely that “Serbia posed the last real barrier to openly expressed British, EU and US aims in Eastern Europe”, i.e. the implementation of “Washington consensus” economic policies and the extension of NATO up to the borders of Russia. According to John Norris, “it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war”. During the war Norris had been director of communications for Strobe Talbott, a Deputy US Secretary of State closely involved in the campaign. Talbott says that Norris’ account explains “how events looked and felt at the time to those of us that were involved” (Achcar & Chomsky:2006:253).

At this point it may be useful to ask what the NATO policy might have been if, in early 1999, Serbia had been an integrated part of the Western economic and military system. The support given to Turkey and Indonesia in the cases discussed above suggests a possible answer to that question.

If the war was fought for the reasons given by Norris, then this would be consistent with a demonstration of credibility of the kind described by Ledeen. This essentially Realist interpretation – of states acting in accordance with self-interest largely irrespective of ethical concerns – is also consistent with British and American policies toward their Turkish and Indonesian allies. This interpretive consistency contrasts with the difficult questions and inconsistencies raised by the claimed humanitarian motives, as discussed above.

Implications for the scholarly consensus and the international system

These conclusions have serious implications for the scholarly consensus described by Chandler. Thornberry said that Kosovo signalled “a sea-change in the relations between sovereignty and human rights”: a state’s sovereign impunity for events occurring within its borders could now be overridden by other states seeking to prevent human rights abuses being committed within those borders. But if humanitarianism was not an operative factor in US-UK decision making over Kosovo, then whilst we can say that a normative change may have occurred, we cannot say that it is the one described in the scholarly literature.

We are therefore forced to look at an alternative issue: not “sovereignty versus human rights” but “sovereignty versus power”. This is a very different proposition, which for example gives new meaning to Chandler’s observation that “the NATO powers asserted that the restriction on the use of force and presumption of equal rights of sovereignty [under the “Westphalian” system and the UN Charter] were a barrier to effective international regulation” (Chandler:2002:114).

Having failed to get Security Council approval for military action against Serbia, NATO did not attempt to gain UN General Assembly approval, in the expectation that the vote would be lost (Chandler:2002:112). The “new internationalism” described by Blair would therefore be inaugurated without the consent of the international community. Under the normative revolution that was actually taking place, “effective international regulation” was to be the task of certain states – necessarily the powerful ones.

This international opposition shows that the scholarly consensus on the significance of the Kosovo war as described by Chandler is not the universal consensus. In April 2000, the Group of 77 nations – comprising the governments of eighty per cent of the world’s population – stated that “We reject the so called right of ‘humanitarian intervention’”, viewing the new normative order as imperialism in a different guise (quoted in Chomsky:2001:4). The facts reviewed here indicate that this view has merit. We may indeed argue that, in this respect, the widely acknowledged unilateralist tendencies of the current White House administration have a parallel with the policies of its predecessor and its allies. Both administrations – perhaps attempting to take advantage of US global pre-eminence in the post Cold War era – challenged the “barrier to effective international regulation” presented by the international system. Under President Clinton, this was justified on the basis of “humanitarian intervention”, whereas under President Bush the justification is the “war on terror”.

Conclusion

My argument here has not been against humanitarian intervention. In fact I have lamented a lack of humanitarianism in US-UK foreign policy. Noam Chomsky has said of humanitarian intervention that “the proclaimed principle has merit, or would, if it were upheld in a way that honest people could take seriously”. I have shown here that an honest appraisal of US-UK foreign policy in general, the Kosovo war in particular and the implications of such actions for the international system are not encouraging for those concerned with humanitarianism in world affairs. If genuine “humanitarian interventions” are to be possible – as we must hope they are - then a critical appraisal of the credentials of the states proposing such interventions will be essential. This is particularly true when such actions have seminal implications for the international system. Otherwise we risk the concept of “humanitarianism” being put in service of far less enlightened ends than those for which we might hope.

Bibliography

Achcar. G., and Chomsky. N., (2006), “Perilous Power”, (London:Hamish Hamilton)

Betts. R.K., (1994), “The Delusion of Impartial Intervention”, Foreign Affairs 73(6): 20-33

Curtis. M., (2003), “Web of Deceit”, (London:Vintage)

Chomsky. N., (2001), “A New Generation Draws the Line”, (London:Verso)

Chandler. D., (2002), “Kosovo and the Remaking of International Relations”, Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 1(4):110-118

Goldberg. J., (23 April 2002), “Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two”, National Review Online. Viewed online 7 March 2007