How Populists defeated Liberal Democracy: John Gray

 

New World Order?

 

Who’s to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war’s cheerleaders

Today the media are looking for scapegoats, but 20 years ago they helped facilitate the disastrous intervention writes George Monbiot in The Guardian

‘Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable.’ A US marine with evacuees at Kabul airport. Photograph: U.S. Central Command Public Affairs vis Getty Images
 

Everyone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.

Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it. 

Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.”

The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”.

Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul.

The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.

So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?

An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.

Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.

For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.

But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.

Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.

You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.

Why we may never know if British troops committed war crimes in Iraq

Samira Shackle in The Guardian

January 2004. The mobile phone footage is grainy, the sounds of a riot audible in the background. A group of British soldiers grab four Iraqi boys on the street and drag them into their barracks. The camera zooms in and out as the soldiers beat them. A soldier walks up to one boy and kicks him between the legs. Another punches a boy in the head and stomach. The soldier filming keeps up a steady patter. “Oh yes! You’re going to get it,” he says. He imitates their screams for mercy. “Oh please! Please no!” Other soldiers pass in and out of shot, apparently indifferent.

This footage, from southern Iraq, would be passed to the News of the World and published two years later. It was one of the first cases of British soldiers abusing Iraqi civilians to become public, and provoked fury both in Iraq and Britain. “Jail them,” demanded a Daily Star article. Across the Middle East, the footage looped on news channels. In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where British troops were stationed, 1,000 people took to the streets in protest, chanting “No, no, Tony Blair” and burning British flags outside the consulate.

The nine soldiers involved – eight carrying out the beating, one filming the attack – were questioned. But almost a year later, the Service Prosecuting Authority (SPA), the military equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service, decided not to bring charges. Although there was sufficient evidence to prosecute two of the soldiers, the statute of limitations had expired and it was deemed not in the public interest to pursue them.

This was not the only case of alleged abuse by British soldiers in Iraq. Over time, a steady drip of shocking allegations about British troops emerged in the press. One of the most notorious was at Camp Breadbasket, an aid distribution centre in Basra, where a group of soldiers beat and humiliated Iraqi prisoners, taking photographs of the abuse. As stories of torture and unlawful killings in British custody came out, they fed into the wider sense of outrage about the war. The public wanted answers about how politicians had sold the war to them in the first place, how the media had failed to scrutinise politicians’ claims in the run-up to the war, how the military had failed to prepare and equip its troops. The shocking stories of abuse and torture by British troops added to the fury.

But over the past three years, the question of whether British soldiers committed crimes in Iraq, and the scale on which it happened, has been largely displaced by outrage over attempts to investigate them. In the media, rhetoric has shifted radically – from horror at the alleged crimes of British soldiers, to outrage against human rights lawyers pursuing such allegations. “Mr Cameron MUST stop these vile witch-hunts against our brave troops,” read a 2016 column in the Daily Mail. Conservative politicians have echoed this line. David Cameron, then prime minister, promised to stop “spurious” claims. Defence secretary Michael Fallon criticised “unscrupulous” lawyers; armed forces minister Penny Mordaunt described these lawyers’ actions as the “enemy of justice”. When Cameron left office, his successor, Theresa May, lambasted “activist, leftwing human rights lawyers”.

The target of most of these complaints from cabinet ministers has been an investigation launched by the UK government itself. The Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat) was set up by the Labour government in 2010, to draw a line under lingering allegations from an unpopular war and dispatch the idea that military misconduct was widespread. It aimed to investigate credible claims of abuses in Iraq and secure criminal prosecutions where appropriate. But if Ihat was supposed to be a way to decisively establish guilt or innocence, it failed spectacularly.

By February 2017, the investigation had become the centre of a national scandal over its methods and scope, and the government announced it would shut Ihat down. “What was meant to be an administrative exercise, tidying up a few loose ends, had taken off into the stratosphere,” Nick Harvey, minister for the armed forces from 2010-12, told me. A parliamentary inquiry concluded Ihat had “directly harmed the defence of our nation” by making soldiers on the battlefield anxious about later legal repercussions. When Ihat closed, outstanding cases were reduced, overnight, from 3,400 to just 20. It had cost the taxpayer £34m and failed to secure a single prosecution.

The collapse of Ihat seems likely to mark the end of serious attempts to investigate alleged crimes by British soldiers in Iraq, leaving questions about the scale of abuses and accountability unanswered. After such a public failure, what politician would want to reopen the issue? Yet, behind the headlines of corrupt lawyers and incompetent investigators, the true story of Ihat is more complicated. Both military advocates and human rights defenders agree that the scandal around Ihat was at the very least, politically convenient for the Ministry of Defence. With human rights lawyers cast as the villains, the MoD could avoid uncomfortable questions about its own role in training soldiers in procedures that breached the Geneva conventions. “At times, the MoD has been tempted to throw the uniform under the bus,” says Johnny Mercer, a Conservative MP who was instrumental in Ihat’s closure.

Fifteen years after it began, we are no closer to holding any politicians or high-ranking soldiers accountable for the disaster of the Iraq war. The further we get from the events, the more elusive proper examination has become. Rather than time giving a measure of distance, the tenor of the debate has degenerated to a point where the very words “human rights lawyer” are used as an insult by top politicians. Meanwhile, anger at the government’s own investigation into alleged abuses by British soldiers in Iraq has fuelled scepticism about civilians’ right to even question the actions of the armed forces overseas.

When British combat operations in Iraq ended in 2009, Saddam Hussein had been ousted, but terrorism and sectarian war were surging. More than 100,000 Iraqis had been killed, as well as 4,371 Americans and 179 British soldiers. “Daily life was a mess,” says Safaa Khalaf, a journalist from Basra who covered the British occupation. “The British were saying the city was safe, but armed groups controlled residential areas. Services had been completely destroyed and there were no efforts to rebuild.”

British involvement had cost £9.6bn and the war was grossly unpopular at home. A ComRes poll at the time found that 37% of the British public believed that Blair should be tried as a war criminal. Gordon Brown, keen to differentiate his premiership, established the Chilcot inquiry to help the UK to “learn the lessons” of the Iraq war. In the same month that combat operations ended, a public inquiry was also launched into the killing of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old hotel receptionist beaten to death in Basra by British soldiers in 2003. (The inquiry would later conclude that these soldiers subjected Iraqi detainees, including Mousa, to “serious, gratuitous violence”.) Another public inquiry into claims that British soldiers murdered and mutilated nine Iraqi detainees, known as the al-Sweady inquiry, launched the same year.

 

A crowd burn a British flag to protest the 2003 killing of 26-year-old Baha Mousa. Photograph: AP

The families of Iraqi victims in both inquiries were represented by the same lawyer: Phil Shiner, founder of Public Interest Lawyers, a small Birmingham-based practice. Within government, Shiner was hated – “We had the strong feeling that he was a bad apple,” one former Labour minister told me – but many of his fellow lawyers admired his determination to hold power to account. In 2004, Shiner had been named human rights lawyer of the year by the campaign group Liberty, and in 2007, the Law Society named him solicitor of the year.

In February 2010, Shiner began court proceedings to seek investigation into further claims of ill-treatment of Iraqis. “We were at risk of having a public inquiry for every allegation [of abuse in Iraq],” says Bill Rammell, who was minister for the armed forces during that period. “That would take years – and in the intervening period, the whole reputation of the armed forces would be besmirched.”

To draw a line under the continued legal challenges, MoD officials proposed the creation of Ihat, a legal body that would investigate allegations of crimes, and where appropriate, pursue prosecutions of individual soldiers. Having been signed off by Brown, it was announced publicly in March 2010. “Ihat was a concerted attempt to pull all the allegations together, throw resources at them and process them as quickly as possible,” said Rammell.

One of the central questions raised by Ihat is who, ultimately, is responsible for crimes committed by British personnel in war? Individual service personnel bear criminal responsibility for crimes they commit in war, such as murdering civilians or torturing prisoners. Under international criminal law, senior officers can also be held accountable for the actions of their subordinates if they did not take “necessary and reasonable” action to prevent it. Under the act that Britain signed when it joined the international criminal court (ICC) in 2001, generals and even politicians are potentially liable for systematic abuses by British soldiers. This has proved largely theoretical, however: the last person in Britain to be prosecuted for crimes committed by forces under their command was in 1651 during the civil war.

In Iraq, this question of command responsibility was particularly important. Numerous public inquiries have concluded that five banned interrogation techniques were widely used by British soldiers. These techniques – hooding, white noise, sleep deprivation, food deprivation and stress positions – were outlawed by the UK in 1972 and breach the Geneva conventions. But by the time of the Iraq war, training manuals did not mention that these techniques were forbidden. Nor did the manuals formally advocate using these techniques – they simply were not mentioned at all. Institutional knowledge of the ban seemingly having been lost, in the chaos of the war – where thousands of Iraqi men and boys were arrested without adequate holding facilities – soldiers may have been told by commanding officers to, for instance, hood detainees. This meant that, under Ihat, soldiers could theoretically face criminal prosecution for things they were told by their commanders to do.

Crucially, Ihat was set up in such a way that it could not address wider questions of accountability. Rather than considering systemic problems, it was limited to prosecuting individual soldiers. Overseen by civil servants employed by the MoD, Ihat had a main staff consisting of around 150 investigators who would look into allegations in the same way that civilian police might. If an investigation gathered sufficient evidence, the case would be passed on to the SPA, which would then decide whether to proceed. The odd structure of the organisation – not quite a public inquiry, not quite a police investigation – is a sign of how unusual it was; there are no comparable examples of a country domestically investigating allegations of crimes committed in an overseas war.

By the time Ihat got going in November 2010, the Labour government had been replaced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. Government insiders told me that David Cameron was reluctant to proceed, and would have preferred to shut down the whole process. But he had little choice. In 2011, the European court of human rights ruled that the UK had a duty to investigate allegations of deaths and ill treatment involving its service personnel in Iraq. If it didn’t, Britain and the politicians and generals in power at the time of the Iraq war might have a case to answer in the ICC.

The view within government under Labour, when Ihat was set up, was that it would show Britain was taking responsibility by punishing the worst cases of abuse, while simultaneously proving that there were relatively few serious incidents. Despite Cameron’s reluctance, the coalition had a broadly similar attitude. “What was not anticipated at the outset was the sheer scale of what Ihat was going to end up looking at,” said Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat who replaced Rammell as minister for the armed forces.

On launching Ihat in 2010, Harvey predicted that it would conclude its work within two years. In fact, it barely even started until 2012, as Shiner repeatedly took the government to court to dispute its structure and independence. (“He could start an argument in a phone box by himself,” said one acquaintance.) Initially, Ihat’s investigative team were mostly drawn from a branch of the British military police that had been active in Iraq during the occupation. Shiner successfully argued in court that they had a conflict of interest, and in 2012, Ihat was restructured and restaffed with civilians – mostly retired police detectives. The new aim was completion in 2019, with a budget forecast of £57m.

For the first few years of its operation, few people paid much attention to the work Ihat was doing. In 2013, Shiner’s daughter Bethany, a recent law school graduate, started working at Public Interest Lawyers’ Birmingham office. It was a small firm, employing around seven solicitors, and Shiner was the only partner. Public Interest Lawyers took the lead in gathering cases from Iraqis, ultimately bringing 65% of Ihat’s cases, although another firm, Leigh Day, was also involved. Public Interest Lawyers was paid a set fee for gathering statements on a case-by-case basis by the Legal Aid Agency.

Bethany Shiner, who is now 30, was immediately thrust into the Iraq litigation. She and other junior lawyers took statements from Iraqis over the phone, with the help of an interpreter. Many of them were based in Basra, although calls came from around the country. “The allegations ranged from beatings, hoodings, poor detention conditions, all the way to sexual assault,” Bethany said. “You’d hear the same details again and again.” Some of the firm’s lawyers were traumatised by repeatedly hearing stories of sexual assault and torture.

 

A youth hurls a rock at British soldiers during a violent protest in Basra in 2004. Photograph: Reuters

Most of the cases came to Public Interest Lawyers via a UK-based translation and logistics company run by a British Iraqi, which employed a fixer in Basra, Abu Jamal, to liaise with Iraqi claimants and witnesses. Abu Jamal was a prominent local figure who was well trusted in Basra, and connected Iraqis to the lawyers. In addition to working for Public Interest Lawyers, for three years Abu Jamal was hired directly by Ihat for a salary of £40,000 per year, to find witnesses, help them get visas, and sometimes accompany them overseas for interviews with Ihat staff. “Without him nothing would have happened,” one former investigator told me.

It is testament to the internal chaos of Ihat that no one appears to have stopped to question whether it was appropriate for someone to be employed by both lawyers bringing the claims and the investigators scrutinising them. Although Public Interest Lawyers maintain that Abu Jamal was simply liaising, some journalists later alleged that he had directly approached clients to solicit for business. This practice – often dismissed as “ambulance-chasing” – is permitted in some countries, but is strictly forbidden in the UK. If claimants were coming to Abu Jamal – as he and Public Interest Lawyers have maintained – then that was permissible. If he was cold-calling them, as alleged, it would not. It has never been proven that Abu Jamal was paid to directly solicit clients for Ihat.

Whatever was happening behind the scenes, hundreds of Iraqis were coming forward with stories of abuse at the hands of British soldiers. As the number of claims grew, a sense of purpose united staff at Public Interest Lawyers. “We were trying to find out what happened,” said Bethany. “It was about finding the truth and holding those responsible accountable.” This was no easy task. Because it was pursuing criminal prosecutions, Ihat’s cases had to meet the standard of criminal proof: it had to be beyond reasonable doubt that the alleged incidents took place. Yet most of the alleged crimes had taken place a decade earlier, in an active war zone, so crime scenes were never secured and vital evidence had not been gathered. Alleged victims and witnesses were thousands of miles away, in a still war-torn country. Ihat judged it unsafe for investigators to go to Iraq, so arrangements were made for Iraqi victims and witnesses to be interviewed in Turkey. From 2013, when investigations got underway in earnest, until 2016, these trips happened almost monthly.

As Public Interest Lawyers gathered cases, they passed them on to Ihat for consideration. Usually, this would consist of a written statement, accompanied by supporting documents, such as evidence of detention, medical records or photographs of injuries. The lawyers would ensure the basic facts checked out and that claims were credible, and pass the cases on to a team of civil servants, who decided which claims merited further investigation. As the number of allegations mushroomed, there appears to have been little direction from above about which cases were worth pursuing. “There wasn’t much of a triage system to focus attention on the most serious allegations or those most likely to result in prosecution,” one insider told me.

Of the hundreds of cases Ihat investigated, not one ended in prosecution. While this has been held up in the rightwing press and in government as evidence that the claims were “spurious” and the investigation incompetent, those involved feel that the structure of Ihat was the stumbling block. “My overall feeling is that there was a lot of evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and that nobody has been held to account,” said Jonathan (not his real name), who was part of an Ihat team that went on numerous trips to Turkey. Usually, these trips would last about a week, with five or six Iraqi witnesses interviewed by Ihat investigators. Legal representatives from Public Interest Lawyers would also be there. “Of course there were some false claims, but most of the people I saw I believed to be genuine,” said Jonathan. He emphasised that many interviews were with witnesses who had no financial motive as they were not eligible for compensation.

Many working at the ground level – from the lawyers representing Iraqis to the Ihat investigators – felt that they were being asked to pursue the wrong target, investigating individuals rather than looking at systemic problems in the military. But they were trapped within the process. “Of course, individual soldiers had personal responsibility – but allegations often related to the way in which personnel had been trained, what they were told to do, how they were told to treat people,” said Bethany. “It was about the government and the MoD in particular.”

Paul (not his real name), a retired police detective who worked as an investigator, felt frustrated that his inquiries were limited to low-ranking individuals. Some of the British soldiers he interviewed were functionally illiterate, he said: “They’d signed statements taken immediately after the event [for which they were being investigated]. But I found they could barely read or write, and they’d just signed anything so they could go home,” said Paul. Wanting to investigate the chain of command, in one case, he requested permission from Ihat’s leadership to interview a senior army officer in relation to an alleged unlawful killing. This was refused. Every time he tried to pursue this line of inquiry, he claims that it was shut down by Ihat’s leadership or MoD lawyers.

According to Jonathan, many of his colleagues felt increasingly frustrated. “Many complained that they had gathered what they thought was enough evidence to prosecute, and then they’d have an MoD lawyer go to the senior leadership of Ihat and tell them to drop the case.” An MoD spokesperson denied these claims, saying that “Officers of very senior ranks were interviewed in many Ihat investigations when the evidence and line of inquiry required it, and no investigation was shut down prematurely.” Paul says: “I don’t think anyone there was bright enough for it to be a conspiracy, but I felt the MoD were putting pressure on the senior leadership to wrap things up.”

Paul describes meeting the family of an Iraqi who had allegedly died in British custody. They asked how they could trust him when he was employed by the British government. “I will never forget that I looked that man in the eye,” said Paul. “I made a promise to do a fair investigation that I wasn’t able to keep.”

At the end of 2014, Maj Robert Campbell was on leave and about to go on holiday when he received a call from an ex-girlfriend, who told him Ihat investigators had been asking about him. It was the first indication Campbell had that he was under investigation for murder. The inquiries related to a 2003 incident where a 19-year-old Iraqi, Said Shabram, had drowned in Basra. At the time, to control crowds and prevent looting, British troops would sometimes force civilians into the Shatt al-Arab river that runs through the city, a practice known as “wetting”. The allegation was that Campbell and two other soldiers had forced Shabram into the water, which they denied. Campbell and two of his soldiers had been investigated and cleared on four separate occasions by the military authorities. Ihat’s involvement marked the fifth investigation, although it was the first by civilians.

 

Front cover of the News of the World from Sunday 12 February 2006. Photograph: PA

After Campbell had spoken to his ex-girlfriend, he immediately called his commanding officer. “They said ‘There’s nothing we can do, don’t worry about it’,” Campbell told me. He suffers from PTSD, and his mental health deteriorated as allegations that he had thought were settled suddenly resurfaced. In the months that followed, he received no clear information on how the investigation was progressing – a charge echoed by other soldiers investigated by Ihat, many of whom spent months or years under a cloud of uncertainty. Nor was Campbell offered support by the army or the MoD – there was no clear advice about what to do, and no financial support was provided to cover the cost of hiring a lawyer. He and the other soldiers accused felt ostracised. “We were guilty until proven innocent,” he said.

One of Ihat’s principles, set out by the MoD when it was launched, was that witnesses would always be given advance warning before being approached in person, and that suspects would be informed first by their chain of command. But the MoD later admitted that over 300 potential witnesses, as well as seven suspects, were contacted without prior warning. It would later emerge that some Ihat investigators had used troubling techniques such as telling soldiers not to mention the allegations to anyone, or asking them to meet in car parks. One Ihat investigator was later convicted of impersonating a police officer after using an old warrant card to demand entry to army barracks.

Campbell’s anxiety turned to anger when he found out that the army had disclosed his service records to Ihat without his consent and without informing him. “The army sold us out,” he said. “Forget the MoD. The army handed over my service records and kept me in the dark about what was going on with the investigations. So who is looking out for us?” While unaware of the murder investigation against him, Campbell was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011, where he was severely injured. He is now permanently disabled, with damaged hearing, and walks with a cane. “I would have made different decisions had I known I was under investigation for murder. I might not have continued fighting and fucking dying for these wankers,” he said. “I’m finished now. I’m broken.”

For years, the day-to-day problems with Ihat attracted little media attention. But as the verdict in another inquiry into alleged crimes in Iraq became a national scandal, the controversy engulfed Ihat. On 17 December 2014, the judgment in what was known as the al-Sweady inquiry came out. A group of Iraqi complainants, represented by Public Interest Lawyers and Leigh Day, had alleged that British forces had committed serious battlefield crimes during hand-to-hand combat in a 2004 clash called the Battle of Danny Boy, culminating with the murder and mutilation of nine detainees. The judge found that nine detainees had indeed been mistreated – but that the most serious allegations, of torture and murder, were “wholly without foundation and entirely the product of deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility”.

The al-Sweady inquiry was not part of Ihat, but both Leigh Day and Public Interest Lawyers had worked on the case and both received furious criticism. On the same day the inquiry released its report, Michael Fallon, then defence secretary, gave a statement to the Commons, calling for measures to stop “unscrupulous” lawyers receiving public money for lengthy inquiries. (The inquiry cost around £31m.) Fallon said that the al-Sweady claims were a “shameful attempt to use our legal system to attack and falsely impugn our armed forces”. This was a remarkable attack. Ihat, a state-funded criminal investigation, was ongoing, and the defence minister was criticising the lawyers involved. At Fallon’s request, the two firms were referred to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, a professional body, for misconduct.

Although the al-Sweady case was separate to Ihat, in retrospect it is clear that the judgment marked the beginning of the end for Ihat – and helped transform the public conversation about British military conduct in Iraq. The day after Fallon’s speech, the tabloids went to town (“Shame of the lawyers”, said the Daily Mail’s headline). Staff at Public Interest Lawyers received death threats by email and over the phone. The more serious threats were reported to police. The firm installed a security gate and CCTV. “We felt as if we were under siege,” Bethany Shiner said.

By 2015, Ihat had outlasted yet another government. Among the new MPs elected in May was Johnny Mercer, a former army officer who had served in Afghanistan. Mercer is a young, dynamic man who feels strongly about the poor treatment of veterans. “We treat them like shit,” he told me when we met late last year.

One of Mercer’s highest priorities upon entering parliament as the new MP for Plymouth Moor View was to fight back against Ihat. “It just struck me as a profoundly wrong process,” Mercer said. “I don’t know a single person who served who doesn’t think that those who committed offences should be held to account. But what this struck me as was the denigration of almost the entire British army on baseless evidence.” (Mercer endorses existing measures, such as internal army investigations and courts martial, as a means to hold soldiers to account.)

 

An image of Iraqi detainees guarded by a British soldier shown at the al-Sweady inquiry. Photograph: PA

When it comes to the scale of British wrongdoing in Iraq, many human rights advocates point to the £21.8m paid out by the MoD to Iraqi claimants in over 300 cases, citing it as a tacit admission of guilt. Mercer disagrees. “To settle without even speaking to the soldiers, you’re assuming their guilt before any sort of due process or investigation has taken place,” he said. “I certainly got the impression in Whitehall that somehow soldiers are ‘bad’. They were looking at two accounts, and always siding with the Iraqi civilian or with Shiner. I just don’t believe that that many of our servicemen and women were liars.”

Mercer began asking questions within parliament about the slow progress of Ihat and the behaviour of investigators. He was shocked to find that “ministers didn’t really know what was going on”, denying that Ihat investigators had knocked on doors of soldiers without writing to them in advance. Mercer felt colleagues didn’t appreciate his probing on this issue, particularly given his low place in the “pecking order” of parliamentary politics. But at least in public, his Conservative colleagues seemed to side with him. Penny Mordaunt, then armed forces minister, accused lawyers of “churning out spurious claims against our armed forces”.

Ever since the al-Sweady judgment there had been an intermittent drip of negative coverage about Ihat, which increased as politicians such as Mordaunt, Fallon, Cameron and May criticised the process. In early 2016, the backlash began in earnest, after an article in the Independent stated that prosecutions of soldiers were on the horizon. Disturbing testimonies from soldiers and veterans hit the press, as they described how old allegations had been revived by Ihat, sometimes triggering relapses of PTSD.

Amid these individual tales of human suffering, a clear narrative coalesced: crooked human rights lawyers were persecuting “our brave boys”. Some newspapers even appeared to suggest that civilians had no right at all to question what the military does in the fog of war. “What other country would pay lawyers to persecute its own war heroes?” asked one Daily Mail headline. “Craven politicians and shyster lawyers are not fit to clean our soldiers’ boots,” proclaimed the Sunday Express.

In the run-up to the September 2016 Conservative party conference, Fallon vowed to end Ihat, along with other historic allegations inquiries into Northern Ireland and Afghanistan. The perceived failure of the investigation into abuses in Iraq had become a way to discredit the entire idea of looking seriously at historic abuses committed by British troops. In her keynote speech to conference, the new prime minister Theresa May pledged: “We will never again – in any future conflict – let those activist, leftwing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave.”

In February 2017, after Mercer’s parliamentary inquiry had interviewed Ihat’s top leaders, he published a report. It described Ihat as an “unmitigated failure” that had “negatively affected the way this country conducts military operations and defends itself”. The day the report came out, Fallon announced Ihat’s closure: a direct response to its findings. Mercer describes it as the best day of his career.

Meanwhile, the Solicitors Regulatory Authority was pressing ahead with its investigation of Public Interest Lawyers and Leigh Day over professional misconduct in the al-Sweady inquiry. Legally, a lawyer isn’t culpable if their client has lied – so although the central claims in the al-Sweady case were untrue, that was not the basis of the misconduct allegations. Instead, they mainly related to a complex web of financial arrangements between the two law firms and a network of Iraqi caseworkers. Leigh Day defended itself at a cost of £7.8m. In September 2017, its lawyers were exonerated of all charges of misconduct. (This verdict is being appealed.)

Public Interest Lawyers could not draw upon the same kind of funds to defend itself, and shut down while the tribunal was going on. Ultimately, the Solicitors Regulatory Authority upheld 22 charges of misconduct against Phil Shiner, who did not attend the tribunal or appoint representation. Most of the charges related to improper fee-sharing arrangements but the authority also found that Shiner had “failed to take proper steps to ensure that the relevant al-Sweady clients complied with their duty of candour to the Court.” It announced he was to be struck off and charged the full costs of the prosecution, with an interim payment of £250,000 due. He declared bankruptcy soon after. (Gavin Williamson, Fallon’s replacement as defence secretary, said prison was “too good” for Shiner.)

Yet despite Shiner’s misconduct in the al-Sweady inquiry, this does not mean that every claim submitted to Ihat was erroneous. In many cases, hard evidence exists – videos of interrogations, medical records, or other documents. “What the government has done is taken the findings against Phil and applied it to all the claimants,” said Bethany. In Iraq, when claimants were informed their cases had been closed, they had no opportunity to challenge it. “They’re frustrated and feel completely out on a limb,” said Bethany. “The one rope that was out there to try and deliver something for them has been cut.”

As politicians rode the wave of outrage over Ihat’s treatment of soldiers, bigger questions about culpability were brushed aside. The aspects of the parliamentary report that criticised Ihat and Shiner were widely reported. Less well remarked was a paragraph towards the end: “It is not disputed that there were incidents of abuse by British armed forces service personnel. However, it appears that this may have been at least partly because the training given to military interrogators was inaccurate and may have placed them, unwittingly, at risk of breaking Geneva conventions in their work”.

When Ihat was closed, all but 20 of the 3,400 investigations into cases of alleged abuse were suddenly shelved, with little explanation. “I don’t think the British army has been held accountable for its actions in Basra,” says Khalaf, the Iraqi journalist. “It’s all been vague and incomprehensible. The Iraqi courts have no authority over the British, while reaching British courts presents obstacles like language, visas and people’s ignorance. Ihat followed up some cases but failed to achieve justice.”

The remaining cases were passed to a new body, the Service Police Legacy Investigations. “I feel like I’ve wasted four years of my life,” said Jonathan, the Ihat employee. Paul, the investigator, felt the same. “When I started, I feared the worst and hoped for the best,” he said. “My wife said: ‘They won’t let you succeed.’ And she was right. I think, without a doubt, the MoD are happy.”

 

Lawyer Phil Shiner. Photograph: Reuters

Ministers in successive governments had hoped Ihat would finally put to bed the idea that British troops committed widespread abuses against civilians in Iraq. When it closed, it had certainly ended the discussion – but not with a definitive answer on the scale of abuses. Rather, the tone of public discourse had become so partisan that any who questioned the actions of British troops were cast as unpatriotic traitors, while the armed forces were valorised by the very same institution that had, in the words of Johnny Mercer, been tempted to throw them “under a bus”. Everyone involved – whether as an advocate for service personnel or for Iraqi civilians – agrees that the MoD takes great care to protect its own interests, sometimes to the detriment of those serving on the ground. “We’re just political fodder,” Maj Campbell told me. “I think Ihat was possibly set up to cover up the MoD’s lack of training and infrastructure – to cover up their mistakes,” said his lawyer Hilary Meredith. (An MoD spokesperson said: “Ihat investigations were subject to the highest level of scrutiny, including regular and detailed progress hearings in the high court and an independent review. Sir David Calvert-Smith, former director of public prosecutions, found no major flaws with the investigating process.”)

In January 2014, long before his public downfall, Shiner referred Britain to the international criminal court, submitting a dossier of evidence of alleged atrocities in Iraq. This suggests that he, too, was doubtful about the Ihat process. The court only investigates when the state in question is unable or unwilling to examine war crimes domestically. When Shiner filed the motion, he said that it was about “individual culpability” for top leadership. In 2014, the court opened a preliminary investigation, and published initial findings in 2017. All the evidence presented to the ICC had been gathered by Shiner and Public Interest Lawyers, and much of this initial inquiry involved assessing whether the evidence was reliable despite Shiner being discredited. The ICC judged that it was, stating there was evidence of sufficiently widespread wrongdoing – mostly relating to treatment in detention – to merit investigation. The report noted fears of “political interference” in the closure of Ihat.

The ICC looks at the decision-makers: the generals and senior politicians and officials, not at low-ranking soldiers. When Campbell complained about the Ihat investigation to his commanding officers, he was told the process was vital to avoid scrutiny by the ICC. “Why would I care about that?” Campbell asked me. “If Britain goes to the ICC, it’ll be Tony Blair in the dock, not Tommy Atkins from wherever.” He says he would welcome an ICC investigation. He was recently told that he had been referred to Iraq Fatality Investigations, a body with no powers of criminal prosecution, for yet another investigation of his case.

The ICC is now progressing to the next stage, when the court will consider the state’s ability to investigate war crimes fairly itself. Experts suggest that the furore over Ihat might harm Britain’s case. “Clearly, it’s going to be an issue for the ICC,” says Thomas Hansen, a lecturer in law at Ulster University who is researching British accountability for Iraq.

On a cold day in December, I met Bethany Shiner at Middlesex University, where she now lectures in law. That morning, the high court had returned a judgment on two civil cases involving four Iraqis alleging mistreatment in British detention. The judge found them to be “credible” and ruled that soldiers had breached the Geneva conventions. The Iraqis were awarded tens of thousands of pounds in damages. “These trials took place against an onslaught of political, military and media slurs of Iraqis bringing spurious claims, and strident criticism of us, as lawyers, representing them. Yet we have just witnessed the rule of law in action,” said Sapna Malik, a partner at Leigh Day who represented two of the claimants.

Bethany, tentatively, shared this sense of vindication: “They were testing the facts – evidence of inhumane and degrading treatment. The court found that it was true and it amounted to a human rights violation. They found the witnesses credible. That’s really important.” Taken alongside the ICC’s preliminary assessment, this judgment demonstrated that not all the evidence submitted by Shiner and Public Interest Lawyers comprised of bogus claims from fakers, as had been suggested.

Meanwhile, in Basra, hopes for a genuine reckoning are receding. The city is the largest in southern Iraq, rich in natural resources such as oil, but today it is still run by mafias, a legacy of British occupation when armed militias and religious groups flourished. “People in Basra are always angry at the British army, for the simple reason that it did not fulfil its promises of bringing us stability, prosperity, construction, and turning Basra into a wonderful city,” says Khalaf. “The British have tried to buy people by providing some compensation to those whose property was destroyed. But none of us ever really believed Britain would try its army and soldiers.”

Jeremy's Anthem for 2017

by Girish Menon

I’m not afraid of  Brexit

I’m not worried about Trump

I’m not scared of boundary changes

Don’t care about opinion polls

I don’t bother with Tony

Nor his many cronies

Half a million volunteers

Are my army

Largest party in the EU

I won’t let you down

I believe in socialism

Universal basic income

World class NHS

Pure air, water and food

A safe place to live

For all who live here

Half a million volunteers

Will each bring thirty new voters

Largest party in the UK

I won’t let you down

I said don’t go to Iraq

I did not fudge my bills

I do not hate the wealthy
The media hate me

But the youth relate to me

And I am full of energy

Half a million members

Will spread the good word

A fair government in the UK

I won’t let you down.

-----

Universal Basic Income explained

Labour has rediscovered its soul under Jeremy Corbyn. If he goes, so do I

Dan Iles in The Guardian


 
Jeremy Corbyn addresses a ‘Keep Corbyn’ rally at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images



Before Jeremy Corbyn, I would never have dreamed of joining a mainstream political party. Brought up in Wales in a progressive humanist family, my politics was totally alien to the endless parade of shiny careerist politicians who ran the show. My parents had long since torn up their Labour membership over the Iraq war and I was resigned to a political identity on the left without a party. To me and many of my contemporaries Labour was a party without a soul, whose leadership had poisoned the party with its blinkered pro-business dogma and their illegal wars.

But Corbyn changed all that: his distinctly socialist approach based on principled politics inspired me and thousands of others to come in from the political wilderness and join a party that we previously distrusted. I found myself and many members of my family, friends and colleagues suddenly enthusiastic and full of hope for the future. There was still the huge challenge of defeating the Tories ahead of us, but at least that challenge finally meant something. No more putting a cross in a box next to the lesser of two evils.

And, yes, the last nine months have been bumpy. Corbyn’s leadership has been undermined from the start by an influential ring of MPs on the right of the party who were never going to accept his mandate. His team had to make a fresh start, isolated in Westminster away from the social movements that backed him and without the polished political machine that had furnished the previous leadership. And yet despite this, we have seen a whole number of successes: a huge rise in membership, four mayoral posts, the victory in the Lords on tax credits and defending disabled people against cuts to PIP payments, to name a few.

But instead of focusing on his policies, the leaders of the recent Labour coup want to attack Corbyn’s personal qualities. They say that he doesn’t have what it takes to lead the party. But I disagree. While his speech-making abilities are not perfect and he’s far from the machiavellian politician that we have grown accustomed to, Corbyn is a man of ideas – something that the party up until now has been lacking. And what actually is leadership? Because if leadership means being a person of integrity who makes time for the marginalised, who inspires those alienated from the political process, and who isn’t afraid to speak uncomfortable truths, then Corbyn shows leadership in bucketloads.

I come at this from a standpoint of someone who voted remain. Corbyn was right to take a nuanced approach on the EU referendum. I believe Corbyn persuaded 60% of Labour’s supporters to vote remain because he didn’t ignore people’s concerns with the EU. By admitting that the EU is not without its faults and then demanding that we should stay in to reform it (from the left) he was able to bypass the binary claims of the two main referendum campaigns. People voted leave because they felt abandoned by politics and scared about immigration.

These structural issues haven’t just appeared in the last nine months of Corbyn’s leadership. But I think many felt his defence of immigration and his determination to turn the debate towards austerity was refreshing at a time when the leave campaign was openly whipping up racism and xenophobia.

If Corbyn resigns, a move to the right in Labour is inevitable. And the left will be locked out of the party for a decade as the centre of the party pulls up the drawbridge to parliamentary nominations. With this I not only lose a party (so soon after finding it) but the left will lose a strong agent in the fight for a progressive exit of the EU. The UK faces a bonfire of workers’ rights, financial regulation and environmental protections as it’s torn from Europe. Without Corbyn we face being locked into neoliberal rules for the next century.
But this isn’t about Corbyn. Nine months ago I and so many others were inspired back into a party that had refound its soul. Labour cannot be a party of airbrushed professionals. If it has any hope of achieving power it needs to be linked to a mass movement. The membership and unions are where the Labour party gets its strength. They are what sets them apart from the Tories. And for MPs to choose to ignore them now could be one of the biggest mistakes in the party’s history.

Corrupt elites will fight hard to stop the dismantling of the looting machines from which they draw their vast wealth

States that get all their revenues from selling their oil, gas and minerals could easily turn into kleptocracies where the majority stay poor

Patrick Cockburn in The Independent

A shooper at the Olaya mall in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Ordinary citizens may be hit by efforts to tackle global corruption and patronageGetty


Can corruption be controlled by reform or is it so much the essential fuel sustaining political elites that it will only be ended – if it ends at all – by revolutionary change?

The answer varies according to which countries one is talking about, but in many - particularly those relying on the sale of natural resources like oil or minerals - it is surely too late to expect any incremental change for the better. Anti-corruption drives are a show to impress the outside world or to target political rivals.

The anti-corruption summit in London this week may improve transparency and disclosure, but it can scarcely be very effective against politically well-connected racketeers, busily transmuting political power into great personal wealth.

This is peculiarly easy to do in those countries in the Middle East and Africa which suffer from what economists call “the resource curse”, where states draw their revenues directly from foreign buyers of their natural resources. The process is described in compelling detail by Tom Burgis in his book, The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth. He quotes the World Bank as saying that 68 per cent of people in Nigeria and 43 per cent in Angola, respectively the first and second largest oil and gas producers in Africa, live in extreme poverty, or on less than $1.25 a day. The politically powerful live parasitically off the state’s revenues and are not accountable to anybody.

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This is the essay on corruption that Cameron didn't want you to read

Burgis explains the devastating outcome of a government acquiring such great wealth without doing more than license foreign companies to pump oil or excavate minerals. This “creates a pot of money at the disposal of those who control the state. At extreme levels the contract between rulers and the ruled breaks down because the ruling class does not need to tax the people – so it has no need for their consent.”

He writes primarily about Africa south of the Sahara, but his remarks apply equally to the oil states of the Middle East. He rightly concludes that “the resource industry is hardwired for corruption. Kleptocracy, or government by theft, thrives. Once in power, there is little incentive to depart.” Autocracy flourishes, often same ruler staying for decades.

Most, but not all, of this is true of the Middle East oil producers. A difference is that most of these have patronage and client systems through which oil wealth funds millions of jobs. This goes a certain way in distributing oil revenues among the general population, though the benefits are unfairly skewed towards political parties or dominant sectarian and ethnic groups.

In Iraq there are seven million state employees and pensioners out of a population of 33 million who are paid $4bn a month or a big chunk of total oil income. Often these employees don’t do much or, on occasion, anything at all, but it is an exaggeration to imagine that Iraq’s oil money is all syphoned off by the ruling elite.

I remember in one poor Shia province in south Iraq talking to local officials who said that they had just persuaded the central government to pay for another 50,000 jobs, though they admitted that they had no idea what these new employees would be doing.

Reformers frequently demand that patronage be cut back in the interests of efficiency, but a more likely outcome of such a change is that a smaller proportion of the population would benefit from the state income.

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Saudi is about to attempt its own version of Mao's Great Leap Forward

This could be the result of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s radical plans to transform the way Saudi Arabia is run and end its reliance on oil by 2030. He may well find that the way Saudi society works has long gelled and face strong resistance to changing a system in which ordinary Saudis feel entitled to some sort of job and salary.

The “resource curse” is not readily reversible, because it eliminates other forms of economic activity. The price of everything produced in an oil state is too expensive to compete with the same goods made elsewhere so oil becomes the only export. Migrants pour in as local citizens avoid manual labour or employment with poor pay and conditions.

A further consequence of the curse is that the rulers of resource rich states – like many an individual living on an unearned income – get an excessive and unrealistic idea of their own abilities. Saddam Hussein was the worst example of such megalomania, starting two disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait. But the Shah of Iran was not far behind the Iraqi leader in grandiose ideas, blithely ordering nuclear power stations and Concorde supersonic passenger aircraft.

Muammur Gaddafi insisted that Libyans study the puerile nostrums of the Green Book, and those failing that part of the public examinations about the book, were failed generally and had to re-take all their exams again.

Can “the looting machine” in the Middle East, Africa and beyond be dismantled or made less predatory?

READ MORE
Catholic leaders are undoing the good work of Pope Francis on migrants

Its gargantuan size and centrality to the interest of ruling classes probably makes its elimination impossible, though competition, transparency and more effective bureaucratic procedures in the award of contracts might have some effect. The biggest impulse to resistance locally to official corruption has come because the fall in the price of oil and other commodities since 2014 means that the revenue cake has become too small to satisfy all the previous beneficiaries.

The mechanics and dire consequences of this system are easily explained though often masked by neo-liberal rhetoric about free competition.

In authoritarian states without accountability or a fair legal system, this approach becomes a license to loot. Corruption cannot be tamed because it is at the very heart of the system.

How corruption revealed in Panama Papers opened the door to Isis and al-Qaida

Patrick Cockburn in The Independent

Who shall doubt 'the secret hid

Under Cheops' pyramid'

Was that the contractor did

Cheops out of several millions?

The message of Rudyard Kipling's poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions - and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.

Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that "since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren't built or they were built very badly". She concluded that "corruption is the key to all this".

Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.

There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaida and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.

Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.

In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad's first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.

In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of prime minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including "one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings."

The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies like Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the wealthy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a license to steal by anybody with power.

Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in June 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: "Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!"
He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the American commanders had insisted on out-sourcing food and other supplies to private contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers' jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m a general in charge of a division.

Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed at a time when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad.

For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004/5 when the Defence Ministry was substantially under US control, raising questions of the competence, or even collusion, of the US authorities.

The situation has got worse, not better. "I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria," said one former minister in 2013, "but in fact it is far worse."

He cited as evidence a $1.3bn contract signed by a minister with one foreign company that had only a nominal existence - and a second company that was bankrupt. This took place in a country in which one third of the labour force is unemployed, and, if the underemployed are taken into account, the figure rises to over half.
The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not always to avoid taxes which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but in some cases to conceal what they have stolen and later to legally launder it.
Some of this can be done by buying property in places like Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company like Mossack Fonseca - though these services will be far removed from the original toxic source of the investment.

The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing, or are wracked by conflict and war.

The West likes to think that 'civilisation' will defeat Isis, but history suggests otherwise

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Hitler set a bad example. He was evil. His regime was evil. His Reich was destroyed, the Nazis vanquished, the Fuhrer dying by his own hand in the ashes of the European nightmare. Bad guys lose. Good guys win. Morality, human rights, law, democracy – though with the latter, we should perhaps speak carefully – will always prevail over wickedness. That’s what the Second World War taught us.


We have grown up in a Western society that believes in such simple, dodgy, history lessons. The world’s major religions teach us about goodness, humility, family, love, faith. So why should we not – however liberal, agnostic, cynical – cling on to our fundamental belief that violence and torture and cruelty will never outlast the power and courage of the righteous?


Isis is evil. It massacres its opponents, slaughters civilians, beheads the innocent, rapes children and enslaves women. It is “apocalyptic”, according to the Americans, and therefore it is doomed. Better still, Ash Carter – the US Secretary of Defence who accused the Iraqis of running away from Isis – lectured the Iraqi Prime Minister last week. His message – I could hardly believe this naivety – was Hollywood-clear. “Civilisation always wins over barbarism.”

But does it? We only have to go back to the lie about the Second World War in my first sentence. Sure, Hitler lost. But our ally Stalin won. The 1917 Russian Revolution gave rise to one of the Gorgons of our age: Soviet dictatorship, the mass starvation leading the to death of millions, barbarism – on an Ash Carter scale – and evil incarnate ruled in Russia and Eastern Europe for more than 70 years, 40 of them after the Second World War.

The Romans kept “barbarism” at bay for almost a thousand years, but in the end the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths – the Isis of their time – won. Unless you were opposed to Rome, in which case Roman barbarism – crucifixion, slavery, torture, massacre (the whole Isis gamut minus the videotapes) – was victorious for almost a thousand years.

Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, destroyed almost everything between Persia and the Mediterranean. Ghengis Khan, an inevitable actor in this sordid drama, kept going until his death in 1227 – 30 years longer than Isis has so far ruled. His grandson Hulagu was invoked by General Angus Maude when he “liberated” Baghdad in 1917 and brought “civilisation” to Mesopotamia. Ash Carter should read Maude’s proclamation to the people of Baghdad: “Since the days of Hulagu, your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunken in desolation and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage.” Pretty much like Isis, in other words. But, by Maude’s count, this “tyranny” lasted for around 700 years.

Now let’s go forward to the years immediately after we brought “civilisation” – again – to Baghdad, by illegally invading Iraq in 2003. Between daily trips to the city mortuary and visits to tents of mourning, angry families would tell us that the “freedom” we brought had given them anarchy. They hated the dictator Saddam who slaughtered his opponents – and who imposed 24 years of “barbarism” on his people – but at least he gave them security. If you have children, these people would tell us, you want them to come home from school. You do not want them to be murdered. So which do we prefer, they asked us? Freedom or security? Democracy or Saddam?

Fearful of the Shia-dominated Iraqi government, whose militias slaughtered them, and the corrupt Arab dictatorships, who suppressed them, many hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims appear to have found security under Isis. Not the Shias, nor the Christians, nor the Yazidis. There is no “freedom”, as we would call it. But Sunni Iraqi men in Beirut, for example, regularly travel to and from the Isis Syrian capital Raqqa and report that – provided they don’t smoke or drink alcohol, their women are covered, and they do not oppose Isis – they are left alone: to do business, to visit families, to travel in safety. (Much the same applied under the Taliban in Afghanistan.)

ID cards are issued in Isis-land, the river police have newly-painted boats, taxes are raised, and yes, punishment is barbarous. But that does not mean the “Islamic Caliphate” is going to be conquered by “civilisation”.

And how can we believe that it will, when our own public-relations boss raves on about “British values” – and at the same time worships the venal, hypocritical, immensely wealthy and dangerous men who have helped to inspire Isis. I refer, of course, to those Saudis whose crazed Sunni Wahhabist cult has encouraged Isis, whose grotesque puritanism has led them to adopt a head-chopping extremism, which lies at the heart of Isis’s own “barbarism”. Sure, the Saudi state arrests Isis cells. But these same Saudis are now killing thousands of Shia Houthis in Yemen in a bombing campaign supported by our Western nations. And what does David Cameron do when the desiccated old king of this weird state dies? Money talks louder than “civilisation”. So he orders that British flags should be flown at half-mast. Now that’s what I call British values!

Poor old Dave. He loathes Isis but adores one of its elderly “facilitators”. Yet fear not. “Civilisation” may yet win over “barbarism”. My own suspicion is that Ash, Dave and the rest will try to buy up Isis, split them into factions and choose the “moderates” among them. Then we’ll have a new, liberal Isis – people we can do business with, the sort of chaps we can get along with, sins forgotten – and we can then establish relations with them as cosy as those the Americans maintained with Hitler’s murderous rocket scientists after “civilisation” conquered “barbarism” in the Second World War.

So much for “civilisation”.

Greek debt crisis is the Iraq War of finance

Guardians of financial stability are deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph 6:29PM BST 19 Jun 2015  

Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and by those who set the tone for the Western world.

The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

They want to see these rebel Klephts hanged from the columns of the Parthenon – or impaled as Ottoman forces preferred, deeming them bandits - even if they degrade their own institutions in the process.

If we want to date the moment when the Atlantic liberal order lost its authority – and when the European Project ceased to be a motivating historic force – this may well be it. In a sense, the Greek crisis is the financial equivalent of the Iraq War, totemic for the Left, and for Souverainistes on the Right, and replete with its own “sexed up” dossiers.

Does anybody dispute that the ECB – via the Bank of Greece - is actively inciting a bank run in a country where it is also the banking regulator by issuing this report on Wednesday?

It warned of an "uncontrollable crisis" if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, "an exponential rise in unemployment", and a "collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership".

The guardian of financial stability is consciously and deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state - with possible risks of pan-EMU and broader global contagion – as a negotiating tactic to force Greece to the table.

It did so days after premier Alexis Tsipras accused the creditors of "laying traps" in the negotiations and acting with a political motive. He more or less accused them of trying to destroy an elected government and bring about regime change by financial coercion.

I leave it to lawyers to decide whether this report is a prima facie violation of the ECB’s primary duty under the EU treaties. It is certainly unusual. The ECB has just had to increase emergency liquidity to the Greek banks by €1.8bn (enough to last to Monday night) to offset the damage from rising deposit flight.

In its report, the Bank of Greece claimed that failure to meet creditor demands would “most likely” lead to the country’s ejection from the European Union. Let us be clear about the meaning of this. It is not the expression of an opinion. It is tantamount to a threat by the ECB to throw the Greeks out of the EU if they resist.

This is not the first time that the ECB has strayed far from its mandate. It forced the Irish state to make good the claims of junior bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank, saddling Irish taxpayers with extra debt equal to 20pc of GDP.

This was done purely in order to save the European banking system at a time when the ECB was refusing to do the job itself, betraying the primary task of a central bank to act as a lender of last resort.

It sent secret letters to the elected leaders of Spain and Italy in August 2011 demanding detailed changes to internal laws for which it had no mandate or technical competence, even meddling in neuralgic issues of labour law that had previously led to the assassination of two Italian officials by the Red Brigades. It demanded changes to the Spanish constitution.

When Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi balked, the ECB switched off bond purchases, driving 10-year yields to 7.5pc. He was forced from office in a back-room coup d’etat, albeit one legitimised by the ageing ex-Stalinist EU fanatic who then happened to be president of Italy.

Lest we forget, it parachuted in its vice-president – Lucas Papademos – to take over Greece when premier George Papandreou merely suggested that he might submit the EMU bail-out package to a referendum, a wise idea in retrospect. That makes two coups d’etat. Now Syriza fears they are angling for a third.

The creditor power structure has lost its way. The IMF is in confusion. It is enforcing a contractionary austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment - that has been discredited by its own elite research department as scientifically unsound.

The Fund’s culpability in this fiasco is by now well known. As I argued last week, its own internal documents show that the original bail-out in 2010 was designed to rescue the EMU banking system and monetary union at a time when it had no defences against contagion. Greece was sacrificed.

One should have thought that the IMF would wish to lower the political temperature, given that its own credibility and long-term survival are at stake. But no, Christine Lagarde has upped the political ante by stating that Greece will fall into arrears immediately if it misses a €1.6bn payment to the Fund on June 30.

In my view, this is a discretionary escalation. The normal procedure is to notify the IMF Board after 30 days. This period is a de facto grace period, and in a number of past cases the arrears were cleared up quietly during the interval before the matter ever reached the Board.

The IMF could have let this process run in the case of Greece. It has chosen not to do so, ostensibly on the grounds that the sums are unusually large.

Klaus Regling, head of the eurozone bail-out fund (EFSF), entered on cue to hint strongly that his organisation would trigger cross-default clauses on its Greek bonds – 45pc of the Greek package – even though there is no necessary reason why it should do so. It is an optional matter for the EFSF board.

He seems to be threatening an EFSF default, even though the Greeks themselves are not doing so, a remarkable state of affairs.

It is obvious what is happening. The creditors are acting in concert. Instead of stopping to reflect for one moment on the deeper wisdom of their strategy, they are doubling down mechanically, appearing to assume that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the twelfth hour.

Personally, I am a Burkean conservative with free market views. Ideologically, Syriza is not my cup tea. Yet we Burkeans do like democracy – and we don’t care for monetary juntas – even if it leads to the election of a radical-Left government.

As it happens, Edmund Burke would have found the plans presented to the Eurogroup last night by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to be rational, reasonable, fair, and proportionate.

They include a debt swap with ECB bonds coming due in July and August exchanged for bonds from the bail-out fund. They would have longer maturities and lower interest rates, reflecting the market borrowing cost of the creditors.

Syriza said from the outset that it was eager to work on market reforms with the OECD, the leading authority. It wants to team up with the International Labour Organisation on Scandinavian style flexi-security and labour reforms, a valid alternative to the German-style Hartz IV reforms that have impoverished the bottom fifth of German society and which no Left-wing movement can stomach.

It wished to push through a more radical overhaul of the Greek state that anything yet done under five years of Troika rule – and much has been done, to be fair.

As Mr Varoufakis told Die Zeit: “Why does a kilometer of freeway cost three times as much where we are as it does in Germany? Because we’re dealing with a system of cronyism and corruption. That’s what we have to tackle. But, instead, we’re debating pharmacy opening times."

The Troika pushed privatisation of profitable state assets at knock-down depression prices to private monopolies, to the benefit of an entrenched elite. To call that reforms invites a bitter cynicism.

The only reason that the Troika pushed this policy was in order to extract money. It was acting at a debt collector. “The reforms were a smokescreen. Whenever I tried talking about proposals, they were bored. I could see it in their body language," Mr Varoufakis told me.

The truth is that the creditor power structure never even looked at the Greek proposals. They never entertained the possibility of tearing up their own stale, discredited, legalistic, fatuous Troika script.

The decision was made from the outset to demand strict enforcement of the terms agreed in the original Memorandum, which even the last conservative pro-Troika government was unable to implement - regardless of whether it makes any sense, or actually increases the chance that Germany and other lenders will recoup their money.

At best, it is bureaucratic inertia, a prime exhibit of why the EU has become unworkable, almost genetically incapable of recognising and correcting its own errors.

At worst, it is nasty, bullying, insistence on ritual capitulation for the sake of it.

We all know the argument. The EU is worried about political “moral hazard”, about what Podemos might achieve in Spain, or the eurosceptics in Italy, or the Front National in France, if Syriza is seen to buck the system and get away with it.

But do the proponents of this establishment view – and one hears it a lot – really think that Podemos can be defeated by crushing Syriza, or that they can discourage Marine Le Pen by violating the sovereignty and sensibilities of a nation?

Do they think that the EU’s ever-declining hold on the loyalty of Europe’s youth can be reversed by creating a martyr state on the Left? Do they not realize that this is their own Guatemala, the radical experiment of Jacobo Arbenz that was extinguished by the CIA in 1954, only to set off the Cuban revolution and thirty years of guerrilla warfare across Latin America? Don’t these lawyers – and yes they are almost all lawyers - ever look beyond their noses?

The Versailles victors assumed reflexively that they had the full weight of moral authority on their side when they imposed their Carthiginian settlement on a defeated Germany in 1919 and demanded the payment of debts that they themselves invented. History judged otherwise.