After the 2004 transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi civilian administration, Brigadier Ellery set up and ran the 700-strong security framework operation in support of the US-funded Reconstruction of Iraq. His remarks were made as part of a presentation at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London, sponsored by the Iraqi Youth Foundation, on 22nd April.

World Oil Shortage

“The reason that oil reached $117 a barrel last week”, he said, “was less to do with security of supply… than World shortage.” He went on to emphasise the strategic significance of Iraqi petroleum fields in relation to the danger of production peaks being breached in major oil reserves around the world. “Russia’s production has peaked at 10 million barrels per day; Africa has proved slow to yield affordable extra supplies — from Sudan and Angola for example. Thus the only near-term potential increase will be from Iraq,” he said. Whether Iraq began “favouring East or West” could therefore be “de-stabilizing” not only “within the region but to nations far beyond which have an interest.”

Last month geological surveys and seismic data compiled by several international oil companies exploring Iraqi oil reserves showed that Iraq has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, with as much as 350 billion barrels, significantly exceeding Saudi Arabia’s 264 billion barrels, according to a report in the London Times. Former Bush administration energy adviser Matthew Simmons, author of the book Twilight in the Desert, says that Saudi oil production has probably already peaked, with production rates declining consecutively each year. This month the UK Treasury Department warned of the danger of an oil supply crunch by 2015, due to rocketing demand from China and India.

The Threat of Easternisation

Brigadier Ellery’s career in the British Army has involved stints in the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, Germany and Northern Ireland. “Iraq holds the key to stability in the region,” he said, “unless that is you believe the tide of ‘Easternisation’ is such that the USA and the West are in such decline, relative to the emerging China and India, that it is the East — not the West — which is more likely to guarantee stability. Incidentally, I do not.” Iraq’s pivotal importance in the Middle East, he explained, is because of its “relatively large, consuming population” at 24 million, its being home to “the second largest reserve of oil — under exploited”, and finally its geostrategic location “on the routes between Asia, Europe, Arabia and North Africa — hence the Silk Road.”

Oil production peaks when a given petroleum reserve is depleted by half, after which oil is geophysically increasingly difficult to extract, causing production to plateau, and then steadily decline. US oil production peaked by 1970, while British production in the North Sea peaked by 2000, converting both countries from exporters into net importers of oil and gas.

Oil industry experts and petroleum geologists increasingly believe that world oil production is precariously close to peaking. According to an October 2007 report by the German-based Energy Watch Group, run by an international network of European politicians and scientists, world oil production peaked in 2006. According to BP’s annual statistical review of world energy supply and demand for 2008, released on 11th June, world oil production fell last year for the first time since 2002, by 130,000 barrels per day last year to 81.53 million. Yet world consumption continued to rise by 1.1 per cent to 85.22 million barrels per day, outweighing production by nearly 5 per cent.

Iraqi Reconstruction Corruption Whitewash

Brigadier-General James Ellery is currently Director of Operations at AEGIS Defence Services Ltd., a private British security firm and US defence contractor since June 2004. In April this year, the same month as Ellery’s SOAS lecture, AEGIS won the renewal of its US defence department (DoD) contract for two more years, which at $475 million is the single largest security contract brokered by the DoD. The contract is to provide security services for reconstruction projects in Iraq conducted by mostly American companies.

A US government audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, released exactly two years before Brigadier Ellery’s SOAS presentation, concluded that AEGIS could not prove it had properly trained or vetted several armed Iraqi employees. For a random sample of 20 armed guards, no training documentation was found for 14 of them. For 125 other employees, AEGIS reportedly failed to document background checks. The auditors concluded that “there is no assurance that Aegis is providing the best possible safety and security for government and reconstruction contractor personnel and facilities.”

During his April presentation at SOAS, AEGIS director Ellery declared, “Iraq promises a degree of prosperity in the region as it embarks on massive Iraqi-funded reconstruction, a part of which will raise Iraqi’s oil production from 2.5 million bpd today to 3 million by next year and maybe ultimately 6 million barrels per day.” He added, “With a budget of $187 billion over 4 years, Iraq is poised to have a considerable impact on the economies of countries whose technologies can fill the skills gap left by the latter years of Saddam Hussein’s regime.” During the UN sanctions regime imposed primarily by the US and Britain, Iraq was banned from importing thousands of household goods, including food, medicines, clothes and books, from 1991 to 2003, purportedly to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction. It is now widely recognized that the sanctions led to massive socio-economic deprivation, the break-down of civilian infrastructure, large-scale unemployment, and de-industrialisation, resulting in the deaths of up to 1.8 million Iraqis, half of whom were children. The humanitarian crisis led United Nations officials such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, and Hans von Sponeck, former Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, to resign in protest.

Today, those profiting most from reconstruction projects in Iraq are not Iraqis, but private contractors based primarily in the United States and Britain, according to a new report out last month by Stuart Bowen Jr, incumbent Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The Bowen Report found that at least 855 contracts valued at billions of dollars were cancelled before completion. Another 112 agreements were cancelled because of poor performance, while still more projects recorded as completed never happened. In one case, a $50 million children’s hospital in Basra is listed as completed although the contract was stopped when only 35 percent of the work was finished.

During Brigadier Ellery’s tenure at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, under Paul Bremer’s leadership $8.8 billion of reconstruction funds were unaccounted for, and a further $3.4 billion was re-directed for “security” purposes. A UN body to audit the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), by which the CPA Programme Review Board managed Iraqi oil revenues until June 2004, found “gross irregularities by CPA officials in their management of the DFI,” and condemned the United States for “lack of transparency” and providing the opportunity for “fraudulent acts.”

Under American- and British-administered Iraqi reconstruction programmes, Iraqi agriculture has been devastated. In 2004, the Coalition Provision Authority imposed a hundred economic orders designed to open Iraq’s economy to foreign investment, including Order 12 for tax- and tariff-free imports of foreign products. The Order allowed the giant American agribusiness conglomerate Cargill to flood Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cheap wheat, undercutting local food prices, and wiping out the livelihoods of Iraqi farmers.

As an executive director of AEGIS, one of the most prominent US defence contractors in Iraq, Brigadier Ellery is a personal beneficiary of the privatisation of the Iraqi economy. In the conclusions of his April address, he said, “Iraq has resources aplenty: not just oil, of which there is a prodigious quantity”, but especially “the capacity to rebuild a balanced economy including agriculture — for which Iraq was a legend.”

The current controversy over 42 days is only a sign of things to come. The British state views the House of Commons victory as a stepping-stone on the way to obtaining the power to impose internment, that is, the power to label innocent people people as “terrorist suspects,” and subsequently detain them indefinitely without charge. Yet, just as the House of Lords is expected to reject the Bill for now, it is equally expected that unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown will attempt to galvanise the Parliament Act to force the Bill through.

One of the most vocal voices in the state campaign for internment is that of Ken Jones, who as head of the Association of Police Chief Officers (APCO), and former chair of its counter-terrorism committee, insisted last year that there was a need to hold people without charge for “as long as it takes.” This “judicially-supervised detention” is, we were told, essential to counter the increasingly complex, global nature of terror cells.

This was, however, only an official public admission of police planning that has clearly gone on far longer. The first hint that Scotland Yard was privately pushing for internment came on 8th October 2006. The conservative political commentator Iain Dale revealed that Sir Ian Blair as Metropolitan Police Commissioner told a Reform Club Media Group meeting under Chatham House rules that the British people should “brace themselves for a truly appalling act of terror”, following which “people would be talking quite openly about internment”.

Then on the 19th October 2006, Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence & Security Studies at Brunel University, wrote a piece in the Independent, “Internment should be a policy option,” arguing for the overturning of the European Convention on Human Rights, which he insisted is “inappropriate for a country at war.” Advocating that “We need to think about how we should behave to people who consider us enemies,” namely Muslim communities, he went on to argue:

Internment in the second world war is called MI5’s darkest hour, but internment was a very effective way of keeping the country safe from Nazi subversion. People say that the vast majority of those interned were Jews, and they would be the last people to act in a subversive way. In fact research shows that there were some Jews in Britain as agents of the Third Reich. Their families were in the hands of the Gestapo and they were blackmailed. And some say that internment in Northern Ireland made the situation better. Internment needs to be talked about. There shouldn’t be things that shouldn’t be considered — if they can help.

The increasing attempt to legitimize the concept and practice of internment against predominantly Muslim communities adds to the raft of anti-terror legislation which is already systematically discriminatory. It also feeds into the the rampant politicization of intelligence, in which — as investigative journalist and Spectator editor Peter Oborne has documented in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies — the spectre of terrorism both before and after 7/7 has been deliberately exaggerrated, and even fabricated, by the British government and police to legitimize authoritarian measures of social control at home and abroad.

According to Harmit Atwal of the Institute of Race Relations in London:

There are two criminal justice systems in Britain today. In the first, under the ordinary rule of law, there is a balance between the rights of the citizen and the rights of the state. But in the second, under the special provisions of anti-terror laws, you can be arrested, questioned and publicly accused of being a threat to civilisation on the thinnest of pretexts, detained without fair trial and go slowly mad in the cells of Belmarsh, Woodhill or the immigration detention centres. The first system applies to white Britons. The second system applies to foreign nationals and, increasingly, British Muslims too.

Hence, the impact of creeping internment will most likely be the further systematic erosion of British national security. According to Des Thomas, a former Senior Detective Superintendent, Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) and Deputy Head of Hampshire Constabulary CID, the 7/7 attacks served “to facilitate the introduction of repressive legislation and oppressive policing resulting in the frightening and alienation of the Muslim community.” Thomas warned that the tightening of anti-terror powers is thus “conducive to allowing insurgents to establish an area from which they would be free to move, recruit and mount further attacks. Laws of this kind are often impossible to implement and the trying may itself act as a recruiting sergeant for extremist organisations.” Increasingly harsh anti-terror laws make “it easier for Muslim extremists to convince potential recruits” exposing the “short-sighted and repressive nature of the state response.” [p. 9]

Thomas’ concerns are backed by the evidence — evidence that the British state, MPs and mainstream media continue to ignore. A study by the Democratic Audit at the University of Essex that:

The key to successfully combating terrorism lies in winning the trust and cooperation of the Muslim communities in the UK. However, the government’s counter terrorism legislation and rhetorical stance are between them creating serious losses in human rights and criminal justice protections; loosening the fabric of justice and civil liberties in the UK . . . harming community relations . . . having a disproportionate effect on the Muslim communities . . . prejudicing the ability of the government and security forces to gain the very trust and cooperation from individuals in those communities that they require to combat terrorism. The impact of the legislation and its implementation has been self-defeating as well as harmful.

Similarly, even Demos, a think-tank of which Brown’s predecessor Blair has been particularly fond, backs up these findings in a study setting out a six-point strategy for countering extremism by working within and alongside Muslim communities. The report finds that the potential radicalisation of younger generations of British Muslims is precisely the danger that increasing indiscriminate arrests under new anti-terror powers will exacerbate.

Inevitably, casting the net so wide that innocent people are inevitably drawn into new police 42 day internment regimes will culminate in increasing discontent, frustration, and anger at the injustice of the legal system. It will also generate a massive burden in manpower, cost and bureaucracy on a national security system which is already riddled with holes, to process thousands of cases the vast majority of which will be dead leads.

Given that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Kevin Macdonald, had already confirmed that an extension of detention time without charge is simply unnecessary (”Our experience has been that 28 days has suited us quite nicely”), the underlying state rationale behind creeping internment has neither been explained, nor justified.

In part 1, we reviewed the emergence of the modern world system through a process of systematic genocidal violence conducted across disparate continents, killing in total thousands of millions of indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia and America.

But this “hidden holocaust” didn’t end with the demise of colonization: Because colonization never underwent a genuine demise. Rather, it underwent a fundamental re-configuration, prompted by rising demands for freedom and independence from around the world.

By 1945, the end of the Second World War, the contours of a new international order were in place. According to US professors Lawrence Shoup and William Minter its design was being prepared several years earlier. It was known as the “Grand Area Strategy”, drawn up by US State Department policy-planners in liaison with experts from the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC.

If you want evidence for a plan for empire, you won’t get better than this. The planners identified a minimum “world area” control over which was deemed to be “essential for the security and economic prosperity of the United States and the Western Hemisphere.” This “world area” included the entire Western Hemisphere, the former British Empire and the Far East.

Grand Area Strategy saw that US policy was “to secure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by foreign nations that constitutes a threat” to this world area. But this policy could only be pursued on the basis of “an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.” So the concept of “security interests” had to be extended beyond traditional notions of territorial integrity to include domination of these regions “strategically necessary for world control.” Sounds strangely familiar right? (Think “PNAC” or “Defense Planning Guidance”)

In other words, national security, economic security and imperial consolidation were interconnected components of Grand Area Strategy. State Department planners had no illusions about what this meant. Indeed, they candidly recognized that “the British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear”, and that therefore “the United States may have to take its place.” Grand Area planning was about fulfilling the “requirement[s] of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power.”¹

2. The Problem of “Freedom”

So what next? The contradiction between revamped American plans for the extension of a new imperial order, and the struggle for national independence breaking out across Africa and Asia, to be resolved. American and British policy planners recognized the need to subvert the process of decolonization, to sustain control. D. K. Fieldhouse, Professor Emeritus in Imperial History at Oxford University, notes that the economic dependence of the colonies was “the intended result of decolonialism.”² Similarly, Robert Winks, Randolph W. Townsend Professor of History and chair of the Department of History at Yale University, explains that “the imperial nation controlled the process [of decolonization] to the end.”³

Part of the plan to obviate decolonization was implemented through direct force. Since 1945, the United States, with routine support from Britain, has conducted military interventions into more than 70 nations in the South. Many of these were conducted in the context of the Cold War, supposedly to fight off the Soviet Union, which, we were told, was intent on imminent invasion of Western Europe and possibly even the American mainland.

But in truth, the vast majority of interventions conducted had nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but were indeed fought to put down nationalist independence movements across the Third World. The paranoia and fear over the USSR allowed Western policymakers to label anything that threatened Western domination as Communist. According to former State Department official Richard J Barnet:

Even the word ‘communist’ has been applied so liberally and so loosely to revolutionary or radical regimes that any government risks being so characterised if it adopts one or more of the following policies which the State Department finds distasteful: nationalization of private industry, particularly foreign-owned corporations, radical land reform, autarchic trade policies, acceptance of Soviet or Chinese aid, insistence upon following an anti-American or non-aligned foreign policy, among others.⁴

3. 1945-1990: Third World Holocaust?

The scale of the death toll from these interventions is staggering. William Blum, another ex-State Department official, describes the vast loss of life resulting from post-1945 military interventionism in the Third World as a full-scale “American holocaust.”⁵

How many innocent civilians died as a consequence of these military interventions? A detailed break-down of figures can be found in Unpeople, by the British historian Mark Curtis, a former research fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Curtis’ conservative calculations confirm that Britain has been complicit in the deaths of over 10 million “unpeople”, expendable people from far-off foreign lands whose lives are worthless compared to the significance of a specific set of overriding strategic and economic interests.

Here’s another overall estimate from the American development expert, Dr J. W. Smith, director of the Institute for Economic Democracy in Arizona:

No society will tolerate it if they knew that they… were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990.⁶

Dr. Smith’s figures, it should be noted, point not only to a core of up to 15 million deaths directly due to Western military interventions, but a further unknown 100 million plus who died as an indirect consequence of the destruction and reconfiguration of peripheral economies.

We do not recognize the post-war period as a “holocaust.” But it was only a few years after the appalling genocide against the Jews was revealed to the world that the dictum “never again” was forgotten, a pointless platitude by which to ignore the pleas of millions. The reasons we do not recognize this period as a “holocaust” are several. Firstly, our political culture does not really acknowledge the scale of the interventions that our military intelligence services conducted across the South. Secondly, consequently, such figures are totally unheard of. Thirdly, our political culture is not equipped to comprehend these 70 plus military interventions as manifestations of a single expanding system. Rather, we are accustomed to thinking about our history, about these events, about politics, in a fragmented and disjointed manner. Yet it is precisely this political culture that means that our history, perhaps even our historical complicity in this “hidden holocaust”, remains invisible to the majority of citizens.

4. Covering Iraq

The same political culture that mystifies and obscures the systematization and globalization of genocidal violence in the emergence, expansion and consolidation of the modern world system — not only since 1492, but even continuing past 1945 until now — means that even current events are difficult for us to truly assimilate and understand. This is particularly true of our involvement in Iraq. A fragmented and disjointed method of analysis ingrained in our political culture, incapable of serious or sustained self-critique and self-reflection, prevents us from envisioning the Iraq Holocaust as it truly is.

For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. Western pundits, politicians and political analysts routinely debate the emergence of a new form of American empire after 9/11, particularly in relation to Iraq. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the 2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it is to be fully understood.

A broader historical perspective permits us to conceive the 2003 Iraq War as only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe wrought by British interventionism, beginning early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so, continuing to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. With this in mind, we will begin by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial violence, which frequently included episodes that some scholars consider to be genocidal. While not attempting to actually resolve the questions here, if this argument is accurate in highlighting 1) the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding of contemporary international relations in the context of a renewed exploration of the history and theory of imperialism and genocide.

5. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 1 – The “Arab Façade”

Shortly after the First World War, a number of European powers including England turned their eyes toward the Middle East, with a view to weaken the regional hegemony of Ottoman Turkey, the Muslim caliphate for four centuries. The region encompassed by the Ottoman caliphate included the areas of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and much of Saudi Arabia. Amidst a plethora of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and even religious differences, Islam provided the basis of political unity sustaining the caliphate.⁷ The Ottomans were hardly saints, and had their own fair share of violence and repression. Among other things, they were complicit in the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide.

Yet that doesn’t absolve the British for what they planned and did in the Middle East, which has now amounted to the continuation of relations of violence and even genocide. British officers in the Arab Bureau in Cairo improvised plans to sponsor local uprisings. According to Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, British aims were explicitly to divide, and thus weaken, the Arabs, not unify them. Despite public overtures of support for Arab unity and independence, the British secretly signed the 1916 Sykes-Pikot Agreement with France, which made official the task of controlling Middle East oil by exploiting internal divisions. Under the Agreement, Iraq was to be carved-up between France and Britain. Thus, Britain invaded southern Iraq as soon as war with the Ottomans had been declared, taking Baghdad in 1917, and Mosul in November 1918. Iraq was not the only innovation. British, French, American and other European manoeuvres saw the creation of twelve new fictional Middle East nation-states from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The contents of the Sykes-Pikot agreement were revealed in 1921 when the Bolsheviks retrieved a copy. Oil was, of course, a major factor in its formulation, as was officially recognised in the 1920 San Remo Treaty, and in the illegal 1928 Red Line Agreement, involving the British and French sharing of the oil wealth of former Turkish territories originally under Ottoman rule. Here, percentages of future oil production were allocated to British, French and American oil companies.⁸

Subsequently, emir Faysal I — who belonged to the Hashemite family of Mecca — was appointed by the British High Commissioner as the King of Iraq. Faysal immediately signed a treaty of alliance with Britain that virtually re-instated the British mandate. To counter the widespread nationalist protests to this continuation of colonial rule by proxy, the British High Commissioner forcefully deported nationalist leaders, while establishing an Iraqi constitution granting King Faysal dictatorial powers over the Iraqi parliament. Iraqi popular unrest, however, was intolerable enough to make this state of affairs increasingly unsustainable, forcing Britain to grant Iraq formal independence in 1932 as part of the process of decolonisation. The gesture, however, was only token. Britain had already signed a new treaty with Iraq establishing a “close alliance” between the two countries and a “common defence position.” With King Faysal still in charge and British bases remaining in Basra and west of the Euphrates, British rule was rehabilitated in an indirect form. When elements of the Iraqi army and political parties toppled King Faysal in 1941, Britain invaded and occupied Iraq again to re-install him.

This policy in Iraq — which included both the colonial phase of direct rule and the transition to effective indirect rule under decolonisation — was candidly described by Lord George Curzon, then British Foreign Secretary, who noted that what the UK and other Western powers desired in the Middle East was an:

Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff…. There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state and so on.⁹

Lord Curzon had defined in explicit terms the regional framework of political order as a network of surrogate client-regimes. Hence, in attempting to ensure that these client-regimes remain fundamentally compliant with the overall parameters of “British guidance”, regional policy was designed to sustain their internal stability at all costs. As the global hegemony of the British empire faded, virtually eclipsed after the Second World War by the United States, the same policy was pursued. As one US State Department official stated in 1958: “Western efforts should be directed at… the gradual development and modernisation of the Persian Gulf shaikhdoms without imperiling internal stability or the fundamental authority of the ruling groups.” And similarly, the US National Security Council noted in 1958: “Our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close US relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries.”¹⁰ Yet a further secret British document from the same year concurs, detailing other relevant strategic considerations:

The major British and other Western interests in the Persian Gulf [are] (a) to ensure free access for Britain and other Western countries to oil produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b) to ensure the continued availability of that oil on favourable terms and for surplus revenues of Kuwait; (c) to bar the spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism in the area and subsequently to defend the area against the brand of Arab nationalism.¹¹

6. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 2 — Our “Policeman”

The period after the Second World War saw renewed imperial overtures from both Britain and the United States to regain hegemony over Iraq. After taking power in 1958, Iraqi president Abdul Qarim Qassem was tolerated by the Eisenhower administration as a counter to the pan-Arab nationalist aspirations of Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt. [Roger Morris, ‘A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,’ New York Times, 14 March 2003] But by 1961, he challenged US-led Western interests again by nationalising part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company. He also declared that Iraq had a legitimate historical claim to the oil-rich Western client regime Kuwait.⁷

He thus became “regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.” Consequently, plans were laid to overthrow him enlisting the assistance of Iraqi elements hostile to Kassim’s administration, with the CIA at the helm.” In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshalled opponents of the Iraqi regime,” notes the NY Times. “Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents.” Former Ba’athist leader Hani Fkaiki has confirmed that Saddam Hussein — then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after attempting to assassinate Kassim in 1958 — was colluding with the CIA at this time.⁷

Aburish collects together official documents and testimony showing that the CIA had even supplied the lists of people to be eliminated once power was secured. Approximately 5,000 people were killed in the 1963 coup, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors, resulting in the decimation of much of the country’s educated class. Iraqi exiles such as Saddam assisted in the compilation of the lists in CIA stations throughout the Middle East. The longest list, however, was produced by an American intelligence agent, William McHale. None were spared from the subsequent butchery, including pregnant women and elderly men. Some were tortured in front of their children. Saddam himself “had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors [and] was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.”⁷

US intelligence was integrally involved in planning the details of the operation. According to the CIA’s royal collaborator: “Many meetings were held between the Ba’ath party and American intelligence – the most critical ones in Kuwait.” Although Saddam’s Ba’ath party was then only a minor nationalist movement, the party was chosen by the CIA due to the group’s close relations with the Iraqi army. Aburish reports that the Ba’ath party leaders had agreed to “undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies” in return for CIA support. He cites one Ba’ath party leader, Hani Fkaiki, confessing that the principal orchestrator of the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.⁷

In 1968, another coup granted Ba’athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr control of Iraq, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. The violent coup was also supported by the CIA. Roger Morris, formerly of the US National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, recalls that he had “often heard CIA officers — including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time — speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.” [Morris] Thus, two gruesome CIA military coups brought the genocidal Ba’ath party, and with it Saddam Hussein, to power, in order to protect US strategic and economic interests.

Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the direct and indirect impact of these Anglo-American interventions and occupations. Using United Nations data and the concept of “excess mortality” — “the difference between actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently run country with the same demographics” — Polya calculates that since 1950, 5.2 million Iraqis died during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators, until Saddam himself obtained power.¹²

Western sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, now well-documented, continued through to the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. During that period, funds and technologies supplied by the US, Britain, France, to name only three major powers, served to support Saddam during his war with Iran (1980-88) — killing 1.7 million people on both sides; and his internal repression such as the genocidal Anfal campaign (1987-89) against the Kurds — killing 100,000 people including the gassing of 5,000 at the village of Halabja in 1988. Although the US Senate passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq for the Anfal atrocities, the Reagan administration pressured the House of Representatives to block the bill. In 1989, a year after the attacks, the US government doubled its annual Commodity Credit Corporation aid to Saddam to more than US$1 billion. A declassified National Security directive issued by then President Bush Snr. in October that year prioritised the provision of funds and technology to Saddam’s regime, describing it as the “West’s policeman in the region.” The international community, in other words, under US leadership, was complicit in Saddam’s acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.¹³

7. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 3 – “Paying the Price”

Finally, of course, we have the scale of deaths resulting from direct Western interventions in the post-1991 period until today. According to a demographic study by Beth Daponte, formerly of the US Commerce Department’s Census Bureau of Foreign Countries, Iraqi deaths due to the 1991 Gulf War totalled 205,500. Out of these, 148,000 civilians were killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the war, including due to adverse health effects resulting from the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure during the Allied bombing campaign.¹⁴

1991 is also the year in which the Allies imposed via the United Nations comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq, purportedly to prevent Saddam’s access to weapons of mass destruction, but which tended to entrench the power of his regime while fatally depriving the Iraqi people of essential items to survive. Thus, from 1991 to 2002 under the Anglo-American imposed UN sanctions regime, UN data confirms a death toll of 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children. In fact, officials had occasionally acknowledged that the Iraqi population was the primary target of the sanctions regime, a means of waging protracted war on Saddam. “Iraqis will pay the price while [Saddam] is in power”, warned Robert Gates, then presidential national security adviser and current Defense Secretary.¹⁵

Arguments that the UN sanctions regime constituted a form of genocide are supported by multiple United Nations officials who were directly involved in the administration of the regime, such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Hans von Sponeck, former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Generally, the argument has pointed not only at the immense scale, in terms of numbers of people who have died due to the sanctions, but has also highlighted direct evidence of Western intent at senior levels, by proving that officials responsible for sanctions policies were fully cognizant of their impact in the deaths of Iraqi civilians.¹⁶

8. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 4 — Exporting Democracy

Then we have the death toll of Iraqi civilians in the 2003 Gulf War. Of the several credible academic studies of civilian deaths in Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, the most rigorous was the epidemiological study by John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. Although the study employed standard statistical methods widely used in the scientific community, critics argued that the numbers of bodies being discovered did not match Lancet figures, which were more than 5 times greater than the Iraqi health ministry’s figures. Yet even the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser described the survey’s methods as “close to best practice” and its results “robust”, advising ministers not to criticise the study in public.¹⁷

Indeed, Lancet’s figures could be empirically verified if journalists visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths. This is exactly what was subsequently done by the British polling agency, Opinion Business Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005. Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged 18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll found that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians had been murdered since the invasion.¹⁸ The ORB findings tally with those of the John Hopkins team, whose data-set, according to independent experts such as Australian biochemist Dr. Gideon Polya, calculated for a year later confirms at least one million post-2003 Iraqi deaths due to the war.

These are staggering figures. They suggest that since 1991, the total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to a total of 3 million.

The “hidden holocaust in history” thus continues now. It erupts directly from the unjust political and economic structure of the global system, and intensifies against target populations in the process of the system’s attempts to expand and consolidate its interests and activities, to eliminate resistance to its rule.

Hand on his heart, Tony Blair told the world before his resignation that he “believed” what he did in Iraq was “right”. No doubt, so did Hitler with regard to his exterminatory campaigns in Europe.

We may well believe that what the Anglo-American centres of imperial power are doing in Iraq is right. But the truth is that some of the worst crimes in history were committed by people who truly believed that what they were doing was right. If we have any semblance of humanity left in us as we stand and stare pathetically, immobile, at the scale of the horror our governments have wrought, then our most urgent task must be to discover why our global system, as it has expanded not only during the era of traditional modern “colonization” but even moreso in the era of postmodern “globalization”, systematically generates genocidal violence against hundreds of millions of people across the South; and systematically finds ways to legitimize this violence as normal, functional, necessary… for us to live, breathe and prosper.

1. War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Cited in Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and US Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). This edition is now out of print but I believe it is available in print-on-demand format.
2. D. K. Fieldhouse, Black Africa 1945-80: Economic Decolonization and Arrested Development, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 5.
3. Robin W. Winks, ‘On Decolonization and Informal Empire’, American Historical Review (Vol. 18, No. 3, June 1976), p. 540-42.
4. Intervention and Revolution: The United States in the Third World (1968)
5. Killing Hope: CIA and US Military Interventions Since World War II (Zed, 2003).
6. J. W. Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century (Arizona: Institute for Economic Democracy, 2003).
7. Aburish, Said K., A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Indigo, London, 1998.
8. Aburish, Said K., A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite

   In the aftermath of the war, what remained of the Ottoman empire was divided among the colonial powers in the mandate system established under the League of Nations, by which formerly Ottoman territories were to be governed by the European powers to guide them toward self-government. Britain managed to obtain the mandate for Iraq, even threatening war to keep the oil-rich Mosul province in the country. The announcement of British mandate rule in Iraq in 1920 led to widespread indigenous revolts, which were ruthlessly suppressed by British forces. That year, then Secretary of State for War and Air, Winston Churchill, proposed that Mesopotamia “could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops.” His proposal was formally adopted the next year at the Cairo conference, and Iraqi villages were bombed from the air.Edward Greer, ‘The Hidden History of the Iraq War,’ Monthly Review, May 1991.

9. William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1982, p. 28, 34.
10. Curtis, Mark, The Great Deception, (London: Pluto) p. 147, 127.
11. File FO 371/132 779. ‘Future Policy in the Persian Gulf’, 15 January 1958, FO 371/132 778. Cited in Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003).
12. Gideon Polya, “Iraq Death Toll Amounts to a Holocaust”, Australasian Science (June 2004, p. 43); Polya, Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950 (Melbourne: LaTrobe, 2007).
13. Anthony Burke, “Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering”, Global Change, Peace & Security (June 2005, Vol 17, No 2) p. 206; Curtis, p. 129.
14. Beth Osborne Daponte, “A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War” Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly (1993).
15. Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003).
16. George E. Bisharat, “Sanctions as Genocide,” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (2001, Vol. 11, No. 2) pp. 379-425; Thomas Nagy, “The Role of ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others”, Association of Genocide Scholars (University of Minnesota, 12 July 2001).
17. Paul Reynolds, “Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates”, BBC News (20 October 2006); Owen Bennett-Jones, “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’” BBC News (26 March 2007).
18. Tina Susman, “Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million”, Los Angeles Times (14 September 2007).

As we are all aware, the term “Holocaust” is traditionally used to refer to the “systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime”, during the Second World War. The word “Holocaust” is a Greek word, which means “sacrifice by fire.” It conveys an event, the scale and horror of which, transformed the course of world history. Moreover, it’s often seen as a crime against humanity that is unparalleled and unique.

This, we cannot dispute. The Nazi Holocaust was, indeed, a uniquely horrific genocide, whose enormity and systematic character is barely imaginable, designed to exterminate wholly the Jewish people, physically, socially, culturally, from the face of the Earth.

But what then, do we mean by a “hidden holocaust”? This term conveys the reality of a campaign of global homicide, murder, whose scale and enormity is such that one feels that the word “holocaust” does, certainly loosely speaking, apply. It is “hidden”, in the sense that, although experienced by millions of people around the world both historically and today, it remains invisible, officially unacknowledged.

This “hidden holocaust”, is escalating, accelerating, intensifying; according to all expert projections from the social and physical sciences, it may culminate in the extinction of the human species, unless we take immediate drastic action, now.

2. “Civilizational Crisis”

We often hear the word “civilization”. It’s often been used to explain the dynamics of the “War on Terror”, as a clash between two civilizations, the advanced, developed and progressive civilization of the West, and the backward, reactionary civilization of Islam.

As is well known, the man who first formulated this idea as an academic theory of international relations was the Harvard professor and US government adviser, Samuel Huntington.

In early 2007, then Prime Minister Tony Blair described the War on Terror as “a clash not between civilizations”, but rather “about civilization.” The War on Terror is, he proclaimed, a continuation of “the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence.” [“A Battle for Global Values”, Foreign Affairs (January/February 2007)]

But the “hidden holocaust” is not an aberration from our advanced civilization that represents the peak of human development, requiring only some reforms. Rather, the “hidden holocaust” is integral to the very structure, values and activities of our civilization. It is part and parcel of the “global values” of the international political and economic order that underpins industrial civilization. And unless we attempt to transform the nature of our civilization, we will all perish in a holocaust of our own making.

3. The Genocidal Conception of Civilization

The hidden holocaust associated with our modern civilization, began at the beginning of modern civilization itself.

The origins of modern civilization can be found partly in the pivotal voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th century to the 19th centuries. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, English and other explorers ventured out from their home countries in search of new wealth and new land in all corners of the globe. They went to the continents of America, Africa and Asia and set up colonies and trading outposts.

Colonists and settlers had all sorts of intentions. Some of them had capital, and were simply looking for new investment opportunities. Others were trying to escape lives of hardship at home to make new lives for themselves with a fresh start by settling in the colonies. Others wanted to deliver the message of Christianity to native populations. Almost all of them saw themselves as part of the inevitable historical momentum of progress, bringing the fruits of European civilization to backward peoples.

Whatever the intentions, European expansion involved massive, systematic violence. Violence of all kinds. Wholesale massacres, forced labour camps, disease, malnutrition due to the imposed conditions of economic deprivation, mass suicides due to depression and cultural alienation. As Irving Louis Horowitz argues, for example, “the conduct of classic colonialism was invariably linked with genocide.” [Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1976), p. 19-20.] Below we review some salient examples.

4. American Holocaust

Starting from 1492, when Christopher Columbus is said to have discovered the Americas, the deadly conquest commenced. The complex civilizations of native Americans, over the next few centuries, were devastated. British historian Mark Cocker has reviewed reliable estimates of the death toll:

“[E]leven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean Empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil, the Portuguese conquest saw Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of Mexico… Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 800,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million.” [Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p. 5]

Although the majority of these deaths occurred due to the impact of European diseases, disease alone does not explain the variations of death toll rates in different parts of the Americas. The key factors in which diseases operated were ultimately the kinds of repressive colonial social formations imposed on natives by European invaders, consisting of different matrices of forced labour regimes in mines and plantations, mass enslavement for personal domestic use of colonists, religious and cultural dislocation, and so on.

As David Stannard concludes in his extensive study of the genocide, which he describes as an “American Holocaust”, these factors accelerated and intensified the mere impact of disease. He further describes the colonists’ strategic thinking:

“At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and culture and land and independence, swearing allegiance ‘as vassals’ to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer ‘all the mischief and damage’ that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you.” [David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 255]

This binary choice, put to the Native Americans five centuries ago, bears an unnerving resemblance to the rhetoric underpinning the “War on Terror” today, “you are either with us or against us.”

5. African Holocaust

In Africa, the slave trade contributed substantially to the protracted deaths of vast numbers of people. While slave structures had already existed locally, it certainly did not exist on the vast scale it adopted in the course of European interventions. English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Danes, and Portuguese slave-traders started out by raiding villages off the West African coast. The transatlantic slave trade, lasting from the 1450s to the 1860s, consisted of “a series of exchanges of captives reaching from the interior of sub-Saharan Africa to final purchasers in the Americas.” An observer at the time, British journalist Edward Morel wrote: “For a hundred years slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death.” [The Black Man’s Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (New York: Modern Reader, 1969)]

From the 16th to 19th centuries, the total death toll among African slaves being in transhipment to America alone was as high as 2 million. Although the many millions who died “in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East” is unknown, among the slaves “kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died.” Overall, in five centuries between nearly 17,000,000 – and by some calculations perhaps over 65,000,000 – Africans were killed in the transatlantic slave trade. [R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994)].

University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn has demonstrated convincingly the centrality of capitalism to the growth of new world slavery, arguing that the profits of slavery accumulated in the “triangular trade” between Europe, Africa and America contributed fundamentally to Britain’s industrialization. For instance, the profits from triangular trade for 1770 would have provided from 20.9 to 55 per cent of Britain’s gross fixed capital formation. [Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso), p. 572.] The question of capital formation, however, is only part of the story. The trans-atlantic slave trade was an indispensable motor in an emerging capitalist world system under the mantle of the British empire. The mechanization of cotton textiles, originally produced in American plantations manned by African slaves, was overwhelmingly the driving force in British industrialization. [CK Harley and NFR Crafts, “Cotton Textiles and Industrial Output Growth”, Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (1994, no. 420)]

6. Indian Holocaust

In his landmark study, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), historian Mike Davis shows how British imperial policy systematically converted droughts in South Asia and South Africa into foreseeable but preventable deadly famines.

In India, between 5.5 and 12 million people died in an artificially-induced famine, although millions of tonnes of grains were in commercial circulation. Rice and wheat production had been above average for the previous three years, but most of the surplus had been exported to England. “Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread.” Under “free market” rules, between 1877 and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe while millions of Indian poor starved to death.

Crucially, Davis argues that these people died “not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism; many were murdered by the application of utilitarian free trade principles.”

7. Division of the World

This violence was, therefore, not merely accidental to the European imperial project. It was integral, systematic, as a solution to the problem of native resistance.

Between about 1870 and 1914, European imperial policies received a new lease of life, resulting in the intense scramble for control over eastern Asian and African territories. Almost the entire world was divided up under the formal or informal political rule of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, and Japan. Between themselves, in Africa for instance they acquired 30 new colonies and 110 million subjects. African resistance was brutally crushed. Consider, for example, the 1904 uprising of the Hereros, a tribe in southwest Africa, against German occupation. The German response was to drive all 24,000 of them into the desert to starve to death; others who surrendered were worked to death in forced labour camps. [Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent, 1876-1912 (London: Random House, 1991).]

During this period, we can already see drastic inequalities in the international system. By 1880, the per capita income in the developed countries was approximately double that of the ‘Third World’. By 1913, it was three times higher, and by 1950, five times higher. Similarly, the per capita share of GNP in the industrialized countries of the developed core was in 1830 already twice that of the Third World, becoming seven times as high by 1913. [E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 15]

In summary, for five hundred years, hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples were slaughtered, decimated, deported, enslaved, starved, exterminated, impoverished, and forcibly assimilated into an emerging world system dominated by Western Europe. This was how the global values and politico-economic structures of our civilization came into being. Globalization… the bloody legacy of a 500-year killing machine.

Enforced by the spate of testimonials from British military leaders, such as retired General Sir Mike Jackson, or Major General Tim Cross, this has now become the standard conventional critique of our role in Iraq. John Ware’s investigations provided a systematic investigation fleshing out the contours of this critique. But as I’ll argue here, there are serious deficiencies in this perspective.

Writing on the BBC News website, Ware explained that:

“… it’s now clear that Mr Blair knew before the invasion that America’s planning for post-war recovery was woefully inadequate — and so was Britain’s.

There was no properly worked-out strategy for the key longer term objective of transforming it into a stable, prosperous nation that the Blair-Bush vision held out.”¹

He goes on to blame “the rush to war” and “the blur of ideology” for the apparent lack of postwar planning. Ware takes it as given that “the Bush-Blair vision” for postwar Iraq was indeed to build a stable, prosperous democratic nation. Having accepted this as his starting assumption, all and any evidence that what happened in Iraq departed from this vision becomes obvious evidence, for Ware, of how incompetent and bumbling the Americans and British were in failing to plan properly for how to effect this noble vision. Although officials across the Atlantic are eager to blame the other side, he concludes that they’re both at fault:

“The truth is both governments got just about everything wrong in their assumptions as to what would follow the fall of Saddam. … The evidence suggests that in the rush to war, planning for what came afterwards was not a first order priority in either Washington — or London.”²

Ineptitude, lack of foresight and mismanagement no doubt played a role. Ware would have us believe they played the only role. Seemingly critical of Anglo-American policymaking, it’s important to note that Ware’s BBC investigation rarely attempts to actually subject any of the individuals he interviews to meaningful scrutiny. The entire programme assumes that Anglo-American objectives in Iraq were, and are, fundamentally to create a stable, democratic country; that officials were genuine and sincere in their intentions, but were so pre-occupied by rushing to war and some unspecified “ideology”, that they simply “recklessly” failed to plan properly. This failure then, while worthy of harsh criticism, was still a matter of sheer stupidity on the part of our governments.

The outcome of Ware’s analysis is, in many ways, one of moral relief. We’re able to feel satisfied that whatever horrendous disasters and loss of life have occurred in Iraq, it was all the result of unfortunate miscalculations and lack of foresight; nothing to do with our politico-economic institutions, nothing to do with actual government planning, but rather simply to do with lack of such planning.

The implication is obvious. The Americans and British, bearing the heavy (white man’s?) burden of responsibility for Iraq — having now occupied the beleaguered nation for the last 4 years — have a moral responsibility to rectify the unfortunate consequences, all totally regretful, of our governmental recklessness. Although Ware doesn’t spell it out, there is a solution logically implicit in his narrative: to have not less Anglo-American interventionism, by for instance withdrawing troops, but rather to have more and better full-on planning and involvement to ensure that Iraq returns to the course of stability, prosperity and democratization — as undoubtedly originally intended.

In the ensuing discussion, we will discuss how badly John Ware’s BBC television project serves the public interest, by completely ignoring documented facts, all in the public record for the last few years. The result is a programme that is partial, inaccurate, and untruthful; rather like much of the official justifications for intervention and occupation. In preparing this response to Ware, and the trend of thinking he represents, I draw liberally from my book on the Iraq War, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (Clairview, 2003), which critiques the record of Anglo-American intervention in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman empire all the way up to the 2003 Iraq War.

The Bush-Blair Vision for Iraq and the Middle East

If we are to believe John Ware, the Anglo-American vision for Iraq was to develop a stable, prosperous and democratic nation. But it has long been clear that this was never the real agenda in Iraq. Ware avoids all mention of the abundance of evidence that shows, to the contrary, that the Bush-Blair vision for Iraq was part of a wider grand strategy of American expansionism in the Middle East, motivated by extremely dubious interests.

This was not a plan about Iraq. The Iraq War plan was only one stage in a wider strategy to re-configure and thereby dominate the entire Middle East. According to former CIA political analyst Kathleen Christison and former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis Bill Christison:

“… [T]wo strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil. All of these factors – the dual loyalties of an extensive network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil — probably factor in more or less equally to the administration’s calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war with Iraq.”³

Ware seems utterly oblivious to all this, and indeed to the fact that numerous American military intelligence experts have confirmed the role of the Iraq War as part of a wider regional strategy.

According to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism operations of the CIA: “Clearly Iraq is not the last phase of what the administration tends to do in the Middle East.”

Former State Department and CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson similarly agreed that: “The administration may be working on the theory that by taking care of a secondary target like Syria, you bring tremendous pressure on primary targets” such as Iran, which may force changes in behaviour “without resorting to force.” Johnson continues that “By rights [Iran] should be the next target.”

Former CIA official Robert Baer, who worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations for over two decades spending most of his career in the Middle East, further observed that the Bush administration wants “to divide up Syria, give part of Iraq to Turkey, overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz,” a very center of Saudi Arabian culture. “The underlying motivation” for this “is Israel. They think the demographics are going badly for Israel, for the US.”⁴

Democracy? Security? Naah, it’s Oil and Power, Stupid!

That democracy was far removed from the intentions of the war-planners is indisputable. John Ware echoes the government’s own justifications for the war in the form of Saddam himself. He points out that Tony Blair displayed a consistently unhealthy interest in trying to prove that Saddam was “uniquely evil”. The thrust of this, in hindsight, was clearly that Saddam was supposed to be a “uniquely evil” threat to both his own Iraqi people, as well as to the security of the international community. Thus, sincere concern for democracy and human rights meant that the Americans and British had to act against Saddam.

As Ware ought to know, this absurd story was refuted as long ago as one year before 9/11, four years before the Iraq invasion, by the notorious neo-conservative think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose sponsors were ranking members of the Bush administration at that time, including Vice-President Dick Cheney; I. Lewis Libby, the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff; Elliott Abrams, Middle East director at the National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, White House liaison to Iraqi opposition groups; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; John Bolton, Ambassador to the UN; and so on. In September 2000, PNAC published a document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which dismissed the relevance of Saddam’s tyrannical security threats to the need for military involvement in Iraq:

“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

So Saddam’s anti-democratic regime provided an immediate justification for a military intervention in Iraq that was motivated by other more transcendental issues. Issues like control of one of the world’s largest oil reserves. In 2001, a report on “energy security” — commissioned by Vice-President Dick Cheney and sponsored by two leading government-influenced U.S. think-tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy, concluded ominously that: “The world, is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity.” The impending crisis is increasing “US and global vulnerability to disruption” and now leaves the US facing “unprecedented energy price volatility,” One of the key “consequences” of the fact that “the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma” is the “need for military intervention.” The report thus recommends that energy and security policy be integrated to prevent “manipulations of markets by any state.”

The principal source of disruption to the existing energy system, the report concludes, lies in “Middle East tension”, due to which “chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption.” The threat posed by Iraq is highlighted. In 2000, Iraq had “effectively become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so.” There is a “possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time” in order to damage prices.

“Iraq remains a destabilising influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets.

“This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader… and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.

“The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.”⁵

In all of this general evidence of strategic planning behind the 2003 Iraq War, we find that there is no evidence whatsoever of concern for stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq. What we do find is abundant evidence for an overarching concern with geostrategic ambitions rooted in a questionable neo-conservative ideology tied to the goals of sustaining US pre-eminence through both control of oil and manipulation of Israel.

It never occurs to Ware that stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq were never factored into postwar planning in Iraq because the postwar planning was never intended to secure stability, prosperity or democracy. Contrary to Ware’s argument, backed up only by a list of illustrious looking talking heads, postwar planning in Iraq did exist, and it was concerned fundamentally with these other regional strategic, political and economic objectives; those objectives obliterated all other concerns, and this is precisely why Anglo-American leaders remained studiously uninterested in postwar planning for stability, prosperity and democracy.

Er, Lots of Plans, None Involving Peace, in Iraq

Let’s now examine Ware’s overriding theme: There were no serious plans whatsoever for what would happen after the war.

All the evidence, he suggests, shows that the Americans wanted to conduct a quick operation permitting the immediate removal of US forces after the successful removal of Saddam. He reports that Donald Rumsfeld, “The hawkish defence secretary had required his generals to give America a ‘lite’ footprint — a small invasion force that could be rapidly withdrawn afterwards.” He also interviews Sir Christopher Meyer, then British Ambassador to Washington, who tells Ware that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that “there was a black hole in American planning for the aftermath.”

Ware even gets some American talking heads to confirm that any planning that was being done, was in fact not actual planning at all. Longstanding State Department planning, for instance, was “never intended as a post-war plan”, insisted Ryan Crocker, US Ambassador to Iraq. Based on Crocker’s opinion, Ware concludes that whatever the State Department planning was, it only amounted to “a series of expert study groups whose purpose was to engage Iraqi Americans in thinking about their country’s future.” This explains the failure to get off the ground serious reconstruction efforts to help the Iraqi people.

Hmmm. Not quite. Extensive evidence in the public record, evidence that Ware failed to acknowledge let alone address, shows that the Bush administration was indeed working on a very specific postwar plan for Iraq. Such as the State Department’s detailed “reconstruction” plan, designed to rob the country of its resources.

American investigative journalist Greg Palast, who has reported for BBC Newsnight, the Observer and the Guardian, obtained a State Department document, “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth,” in February 2003. In 101-pages, the document detailed the Bush administration’s plans for a complete rewrite of Iraq’s “policies, laws and regulations”, based on low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq’s banks and bridges, “all state enterprises” to foreign investors.

Among other things, the document stipulates that Iraq would have to “privatize” its “oil and supporting industries.” Annex D of the document set out, Palast reports, “a strict 360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq.” Under the tutelage of Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority imposed in the aftermath of the invasion issued “exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of the Economy Plan.” Palast lists several major examples, but one is worth citing here by way of illustration:

“Order 12, ‘Trade Liberalization’, permitted the tax- and tariff-free import of foreign products. One big winner was Cargill, the world’s largest grain merchant, which flooded Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat. For Iraqi farmers, already wounded by sanctions and war, this was devastating. They could not compete with the US and Australian surpluses dumped on them. But ‘the import plan’ carried out the letter of the Economy Plan.”

It is no surprise then that Palast quotes a disgruntled US government insider who worked on the State Department plan, noting that it conflicted fundamentally with real Iraqi democracy. “They have [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz coming out saying it’s going to be a democratic country’ but we’re going to do something that 99 percent of the people of Iraq wouldn’t vote for.”

From the very beginning, reports from high-level sources indicated that the Americans and British were not very interested in facilitating Iraqi democratization. They originally wanted a “regime change” that focused on the removal of Saddam himself and his top associates, without a fundamental restructuring of the regime itself. This had been the strategy as early as the 1991 Gulf War, during which Richard Haas, then Senior Director of Near East Affairs at the US National Security Council, confirmed that: “Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime.” Haas, of course later became Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under the administration of President George W Bush.⁶

Daniel Neep — head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London — reported in late 2002 on the postwar thinking going in Anglo-American policymaking circles: “The ideal scenario is someone within Iraq, preferably within the army, killing Saddam and taking control. That would mean that entering Baghdad would not be necessary and would also solve the problem of who will govern once he has gone.”⁷

As the New York Times elaborated in late February 2003, “outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won’t be any equivalent of postwar de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life…

“Instead the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don’t have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power.”⁸

British academic Patrick Cockburn, Visiting Fellow at Washington DC’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), further commented that:

Kurdish leaders who recently met American officials… are enraged by an American plan to occupy Iraq but largely retain the government in Baghdad. The only changes would be the replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US military officers. It undercuts the argument by George Bush and Tony Blair that war is justified by the evil nature of the regime in Baghdad…⁹

Furthermore, superimposed over the entrenched Ba’athist military-political regime structure, the US had already been drawing up extensive plans to establish a colonial-style administration of direct control. The Independent in February 2003 described documents summarising the conclusions of 17 State Department working groups — the same groups that John Ware accepts were “never intended as a post-war plan” and only designed to help “Iraqi Americans” do some “thinking” about their country of origin.

That’s not how it was reported at the time, but Ware displays little interest in the boring details of recent history. “Britain and America have been working for months on detailed proposals on how to rebuild Iraq after President Saddam”, reported The Independent. “In the initial aftermath of any war, Iraq would be governed by a senior US military officer, probably General Tommy Franks, with a civilian administrator.” General Franks would be expected to “initially impose martial law,” while Iraqis would be relegated to the sidelines as “advisers” to the US administration.¹⁰

And what of Ware’s reiteration of belated official claims that Dick Cheney only wanted a “small invasion force” that would be “rapidly withdrawn” after Saddam’s removal?

Again, this is just plain false. The Washington Post also reported on the postwar planning performed by the State Department, noting that the “blueprints for Iraq’s future… outline a broad and protracted American role in managing the reconstruction of the country.” Particularly, US forces are expected to control Iraq’s oil reserves, something that Ware obviously sees as bearing little relevance to understanding the occupation.

“The [Bush] administration’s plans, which are nearing completion, envision installing a civilian administration within months of a change of government, US officials said. But the officials said that even under the best of circumstances, US forces likely would remain at full strength in Iraq for months after a war ended, with a continued role for thousands of US troops there for years to come… Among key roles for US forces would be the preservation of Iraq’s borders against any sudden claims by neighbours and the defence of the country’s oil fields.”¹¹

Indeed, White House plans outlined in late February 2003 revealed that the US intended to take “complete control of post-Saddam Iraq ‘for an indefinite period.’”¹² So why does Ware, four years later, take seriously Bush administration officials claiming that the original idea all along was to deploy a small invasion force with a view to pull out almost immediately?

The Carve-Up Strategy

One doesn’t need to be a historian of empire to know that divide-and-rule is a rather standard strategy of imperial domination. It was deployed by the British, for example, to great effect in key colonies in North America and India against natives who, once divided along artificially exacerbated ethnic, religious and tribal classifications, were far easier to play off against one another, and thus control to the benefit of the colonial regime.

From the very beginning, American planners envisaged that in the long-term, Iraq would be divided up to facilitate the Anglo-American military occupation. Fragments of a plan to fracture Iraq along ethnic and religious lines to facilitate control of the oil reserves and allow population control emerged in September 2002.

Richard Perle, who then chaired the prominent Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Policy Board, issued a briefing for Pentagon officials that month. Ha’aretz reported from a “top official in the Israeli security services” that Perle “showed two slides to the Pentagon officials. The first was a depiction of the three goals in the war on terror and the democratisation of the Middle East: Iraq — a tactical goal, Saudi Arabia — a strategic goal, and Egypt – the great prize. The triangle in the next slide was no less interesting: Palestine is Israel, Jordan is Palestine, and Iraq is the Hashemite Kingdom.”¹³

This outrageous idea advocates a fundamental reconfiguration of power across the Middle East, with a number of highly dubious parameters, including a greatly expanded Israel fully encompassing the Occupied Territories; the expulsion of the Palestinians to Jordan; and the incorporation of the Sunni areas of Iraq with Jordan to form a wider pro-US Sunni Arab Hashemite Kingdom. How influential was this plan? Extremely.

According to the private American intelligence firm, Stratfor, the United States was “working on a plan to merge Iraq and Jordan into a unitary kingdom to be ruled by the Hashemite dynasty headed by King Abdullah of Jordan.” The plan was “authored by US Vice President Dick Cheney” as well as “Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz”, and was first discussed at “an unusual meeting between Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and pro-US Iraqi Sunni opposition members in London in July” that year. Now under this plan, Stratfor reported, Iraq would be de facto ethnically partitioned into three autonomous cantons: The central and largest part of Iraq that is populated by the Sunni Arabs would be joined with Jordan, and would include Baghdad, which would no longer be the capital. The Kurdish region of northern and northwestern Iraq, including Mosul and the vast Kirkuk oilfields, would become its own autonomous state. The Shia Region in southwestern Iraq, including Basra, would make up the third state, or more likely it would be joined with Kuwait. Why did Cheney and Wolfowitz, the architects of this postwar plan for Iraq in the Bush Cabinet, think this sort of partition would be a good idea? And did their plans have anything to do with facilitating Iraq’s emergence as a democratic sovereign state? Not according to Stratfor, who outlined the advantages for the US as follows:

“First, the creation of a new pro-US kingdom under the half-British Abdullah [king of Jordan] would shift the balance of forces in the region heavily in the US favor. After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.

“Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection — and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.”¹⁴

Yet none of this seems remotely interesting to John Ware who remains adamant, based on the reassurances from either ill-informed or unscrupulous American and British officials, that the allies were well and truly planless.

It is not a coincidence, of course, that a few years later a large number of American politicians security experts began popping out of the woodwork, seemingly at random, all advocating that the best way forward for Iraq was to undergo partition. When this happened, the public was led to believe that the partition proposal was a radically new idea that could solve Iraq’s entrenched problems. But we know that the partition lobby didn’t come out of the blue at all. It was inspired directly by the original architects of the 2002 postwar plan, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle.

There is no conceivable way that such tripartite partitioning of an entire country could be achieved peacefully. Violence, conflict, civil war, along sectarian lines, would be inevitable if this was to be achieved. The task of “eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state” by fracturing the country along ethnic and religious lines, in other words, was precisely the postwar strategy being explored by Dick Cheney as the most effective means of securing American control over the country, and the wider region. It is not simply some sort of accident of Anglo-American stupidity.

Fostering Internal Conflict in Iraq

It is no surprise then to find that at the core of the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq one consistently finds the involvement of the United States. Although systematically ignored by the vast majority of mainstream media, that US strategy has deliberately attempted to foster internal conflict between various Iraqi factions as a tool to consolidate the occupation has been officially acknowledged. In the November 2005 edition of the US Joint Special Operations University Report, Thomas H. Henriken, a senior fellow at the university and a former member of the US Army Science Board, reported that:

The post-invasion stage in Iraq also is an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to ‘red-against-red’ firefights (this color-coding derives from US training exercises, in which red designates enemy combatants and blue designates friendly forces). Like their SOG predecessors in Vietnam, US elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational level…

Events during fall 2004 within the central Iraqi city of Fallujah showcased the wily machinations required to set insurgents battling insurgents. … But Fallujah was hardly a unified camp — the city seethed with internecine tensions. Zarqawi’s strict Salafi beliefs clashed with the more moderate Sufi views of the Sunni residents. Additionally, the Zarqawi jihadis and nationalistic Fallujans disagreed over the use of terror tactics. Both wanted the Americans out of Fallujah and out of Iraq, but they differed on the methods…. Evidence of factional fighting between the residents came to light with nightly gun battles not involving coalition forces. US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists took advantage of the internal warring by tapping into Fallujans’ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis. The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi’s murderous activities—and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters—thereby diminishing his folk-hero image. Battles among anti-coalition forces killed enemy combatants and heightened factionalism. Thus, red-on-red battles enhanced the regular blue-on-red engagements by eliminating many insurgents.Thomas H. Henriken, “The War: Divide et Impera”, Hoover Digest, 2006, No. 1.

I’ve documented some of the evidence confirming a US strategy of tension in Iraq two years ago for Raw Story, and that evidence is still relevant now; I also updated it somewhat and in the latter half of a piece put up earlier this year by Dissident Voice.

Conclusion

The BBC programme portrays itself as a work of solid, investigative journalism, one that takes a thoroughly critical perspective of our governments’ involvement in Iraq. The truth of the matter, however, is that John Ware’s narrative is mired in a set of unquestioned assumptions that systematically misrepresents the reality of the Iraq War 2003 by taking at face value the claims of various British and American officials.

Throughout his investigation, Ware consistently refrains from doing any serious research into his subject. He ignores overwhelming evidence that the grave humanitarian, military and political crisis in Iraq is not simply a regrettable consequence of insufficient planning by well-meaning but hasty politicians; it was a direct consequence of a set of plans prepared before and during the war designed fundamentally to secure Anglo-American strategic and economic interests at the expense of the Iraqi people.

These criticisms of John Ware and the BBC by no means stop there. They are prominent facets of an edifice of disinformation endorsed by a mainstream media that uncritically swallows official government claims all too routinely, as part of its normal functioning.

Throughout, one finds in Anglo-American plans for Iraq no evidence whatsoever that the impact on the Iraqi people was ever factored into the strategic and economic equation. Thus, the catastrophe that currently wracks Iraq was not simply a result of the paucity of planning due to lack of foresight; it is the result of a deliberate set of plans to consolidate Anglo-American political, economic and strategic interests in the region, plans which advocated social, political and economic policies that systematically marginalized and slaughtered Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands. Yes, in this context, there was indeed a paucity of planning to make Iraq a stable, prosperous and democratic, sovereign state. But that paucity didn’t issue forth from some inexplicably bumbling incompetence. It came from carefully thought-out, properly-mapped, conscious decisions that were fully cognizant of the ramifications of the policies being proposed, but derived from a wilful and reckless indifference to the lives and rights of the Iraqi people.

1. John Ware, “No Peace, No Plan in Iraq”, BBC News (27 October 2007).
2. Ware, “UK and US Play Iraq ‘Blame Game’” BBC News (29 October 2007).
3. Kathleen and Bill Christison, “The Bush Administration’s Dual Loyalties: A Rose By Any Other Name,” Counterpunch (13 December 2003).
4. Richard Sale and Nicholas M. Morris, “War talk sweeps city,” United Press International, 11 February 2003; reprinted in Washington Times, 12 February 2003.
5. Neil Mackay, “Official: U.S. oil at the heart of Iraq crisis,” Sunday Herald, 6 October 2002; Neil Mackay, “The West’s battle for oil,” Sunday Herald. For full text see Report of an Independent Task Force, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy / Council on Foreign Relations, April 2001.
6. Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 37.
7. Observer, 17 November 2002, p. 20.
8. Paul Krugman, “The Martial Plan,” New York Times, 21 February 2003.
9. Patrick Cockburn, “Kurdish leaders enraged by ‘undemocratic’ American plan to occupy Iraq,” The Independent, 17 February 2003.
10. Andrew Buncombe, “US sees ‘someone like Jimmy Carter’ to oversee administration after overthrow of Saddam,” The Independent, 13 February 2003.
11. Washington Post, 17 January 2003.
12. Ian Bruce, “General Franks ‘to run Iraq after war,’” The Herald, 24 February 2002.
13. Akiva Eldar, “Perles of wisdom for the Feithful,” Ha’aretz,1 October 2002.
14. Stratfor, Uniting Jordan and Iraq Might Be Prime Post-War Strategy, 26 September 2002; Stratfor Press Release, “US plan to merge Iraq, Jordan after war”, 26 September 2002; Gary D. Hallbert, “US Considers Dividing Iraq into Three Separate States after Saddam is Gone”, Forecasts & Trends, 1 October 2002.

The chronology requires further probing, and indeed, preliminary analysis raises some unresolved questions.

Their Terror… And Ours

We will start with the UK. First off, we need to consider the way government, police and security services dealt with events. On Friday, official sources immediately told mainstream media that they had successfully defused highly dangerous explosive devices in the cars. The general picture disseminated by government spokesmen was that the bombs could well have killed hundreds of civilians generating a huge and lethal fireball engulfing the surrounding area.

“Although the two London car bombs were rudimentary, depending on a lethal mixture of petrol, gas canisters and nails, they could still have killed hundreds”, wrote Nigel Morris in the Independent:

“They were intended to be triggered by calls to mobile phones left in the cars. Although the bombers rang the phones several times, the bombs failed to go off. Did the calls fail to create the necessary detonation? The Glasgow attack appears to have been a failed suicide bombing. The Jeep Cherokee that smashed into the city’s airport was set alight but the gas canisters inside failed to ignite.”

Fortunately, there were no casualties. Unfortunately, elsewhere in the world, British and American troops were complicit in acts of terrorism which did result in Afghan and Iraqi civilian casualties far outweighing in scale and horror what was going on in the UK. Some of these were flagged by American journalist Chris Floyd, but largely ignored in the mainstream media.

More than 100 Afghan civilians were killed in a three-hour NATO bombing raid on a village in the British-run district Helmand on Saturday, so reported the Observer citing local officials of the US-backed Afghan government, capping off a month of bloodshed in which over 200 Afghan civilians were killed, “a kill ratio far outstripping that of the violent sectarians of the Taliban”, observes Floyd. Hapless British commanders involved in the operations aren’t happy, noting that new NATO commander, US Gen Dan McNeill’s penchant for massive airpower could be “counterproductive.” “Every civilian dead means five new Taliban” said one British Army officer, noting the direct connection between their radicalization and our terrorism. But while UK commanders may have concerns, they have little choice given the decisions made for them by Bush and now Brown.

Yet the mainstream media has shown no interest whatsoever in our terrorism. “Why do these people hate us, why do they want to attack us?” I was asked repeatedly over the weekend by various media pundits wanting to know the secret of how angry Muslims become so radicalized they want to blow themselves and others up. The usual demands for Muslims the world over to buck up and confront the bin Laden-esque “enemy within” were trumpeted. Yet there was little soul-searching about a phenomenon of equal concern – the creeping radicalization of Western societies, where the slaughter of hundreds of Afghan or Iraqi civilians by Anglo-American military forces is justifiable as a form of “collateral damage”, regrettable, but an inevitable corollary of trying to “smoke ‘em out”. Sounds disturbingly similar to al-Qaeda’s own rhetoric of justification for targeting our civilians.

But of course, we’re the free, civilized world. They’re wrong, and we’re right.

So let’s get quickly back on track to look at the terror attempts in the UK. Whatever those attacks “appeared” to be, they were clearly planned and conducted by people with absolutely no real idea of what they were doing. Despite official attempts to ratchet up the fear-level by insisting that the police had pre-empted a spectacular bombing plot that could have slaughtered hundreds, a number of experts have pointed out the obvious.

Improvised Un-explosive Devices?

Larry C. Johnson, a former senior US counterterrorist official for the CIA and State Department who works as a consultant to governments on terrorism issues, described the Friday episode as a “crock of crap”:

… gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapnel.

His observations on the next day’s Glasgow incident are even more cutting:

Preliminary, unconfirmed reports indicate a nuclear blast has occurred at Glasgow’s international airport. No one has seen the mushroom cloud or heard the blast, but something by God is happening and it must be terrible. There is smoke and fire. In fact, a car is on fire. It must be Al Qaeda. Only Al Qaeda knows how to set themselves on fire inside a car. Please. Flee to the hills (leave your doors unlocked). Oh the humanity!…

… we need to stop equating their [religious fanatics’] hatred with actual capability. If today’s events at Glasgow prove to be linked to the two non-events yesterday in London, then we should heave a sigh of relief. We may be witnessing the implosion of takfiri jihadists — religious fanatics who are incredibly inept… Propane tanks and petrol (gas for us Americans) can produce a dandy flame and a mighty boom but these are not the tools for making a car bomb along the lines of what we see detonating on a daily basis in Iraq.

As Thomas Greene further observed, absent an oxidiser, the devices, if one could call them that, would simply have been unable to detonate. The implication that they could have detonated, then, is precisely state propaganda. No wonder ex-CIA terror expert Johnson described the weekend incidents as “non-events.” Thus, concluded Peter Lehr, a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, St. Andrews University: “Just using petrol canisters, nuts and bolts and a cell phone to trigger the explosion, the London bombing attempt would probably not have worked.” He continued about the Glasgow fiasco: “If you take a look at most al Qaeda attacks, they did a lot of work on reconnoitering. Now they got stopped by some bollards. They didn’t seem very familiar with the airport, then they would have known that the bollards would have stopped them or they overestimated the thrust of the Jeep Cherokee.”

For those tracking the recent round of terror plots against the US and Britain, the dire lack of expertise is a familiar pattern. On the August 2006 “liquid bomb plot”, similarly discredited as simply unworkable, former British Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. (ret.) Nigel Wylde pointed out: “Not al-Qaeda for sure. It would not work. Bin Laden is interested in success not deterrence by failure.”

The Propaganda War

Rather than reassuring the public of these facts and implications, the government did the opposite. The UK terror alert was raised to “critical”, and the citizens were urged to remain “alert” and “vigilant”. “If it moves to critical, you should worry”, a senior Whitehall source told the BBC when asked to explain the alert level system.

Rachel North, a survivor of the July 7th 2005 London bombings, comments:

Oh for heaven’s sake. We ‘should worry’. That’s the suggestion is it? The official advice is: to be afraid and stay afraid? And what pray, does being told ‘to worry’ do to help aid the fight against terrorism? Terrorism being of course designed to worry, nay, terrify and terrorise people, using terror: the state of being afraid?

…What is the ‘critical — attack imminent’ stuff then, if not intimidating, and likely to make people anxious and therefore stop them getting on with their lives? … like most of the new anti-terror intitiatives, all it does is sound scary and ramp up the fear without actually doing anything practical to tackle the situation… We didn’t have this during the IRA campaign or during the Blitz, so I don’t see why turning the adrenalin dial up to eleven is going to help now. We can all see the news, thank you. We don’t need to have our strings pulled like this.

So we have established that there is, indeed, a sharp disparity between the reality of these plots as utterly amateur cock-ups by people with no idea whatsoever of how to actually pull off a terrorist attack, and the official propaganda from the state that these attacks could have killed hundreds — which they simply could not have done.

Perhaps it is cynical to recognize that these doomed-to-fail plots coincided with the British government’s new counter-terrorism proposals. Days before these incidents, on 27th June, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee announced it was planning to hold a short inquiry into the new proposals for extended anti-terror powers, originally set out on 7th June by the Home Secretary.

Ironically, the Home Secretary’s announcement for new anti-terror legislation followed hot on the heels of revelations that a purported spectacular al-Qaeda terrorist plot unearthed in the United States may well have been nothing more than Bush administration propaganda. Such was the accusation from Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown show ‘The Nexus of Politics & Terror’, who further noted that this was consistent with a history of such pronouncements:

The abstract, hypothetical terror plot at JFK: It sounds ominous until you ask the experts. Blow up part of the jet fuel pipeline and you still stand zero chance of blowing up the airport… We will truth squad the plot and update the ‘Nexus of Politics and Terror,’ the now 13 times officials in this country have revealed so-called terror plots at times that were just coincidentally to their political benefit, no matter how preposterous the actual schemes might have been, including the plot against Fort Dix where pizza delivery men were supposed to kill at will at an Army base full of soldiers with guns.

But perhaps most disturbingly, Olbermann references the extraordinary public statement by the newly-elected Chairman of the Republican Party in Arkansas: “All we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on 9/11, and the naysayers will come around very quickly for President Bush.”

The full statement, made in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette by Chairman Dennis Milligan, is reported in Raw Story as follows:

In his first interview as the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, Dennis Milligan told a reporter that America needs to be attacked by terrorists so that people will appreciate the work that President Bush has done to protect the country. ‘At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001],’ Milligan said to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country’.

With all due respect: what kind of closet Stalinist thinks that “we need” another terrorist attack “like” 9/11, in order that popular dissent might “come around” in favour of Bush and his policies of domestic and international militarization, mirrored faithfully here in the UK, originally by Blair, and now it seems by his heir Brown?

To those who have researched the development of neo-conservative ideology and geopolitical strategies behind the rise of the Bush administration, this is actually a startlingly familiar sentiment among elements of the American policymaking establishment. Recall the exhortations of Bush’s home-grown think-tank, the Project for a New American Century in its September 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”; or three years earlier, the carefully-crafted expansionist geostrategy charted by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in his Council on Foreign Relations study, The Grand Chessboard — all looking to a spectacular Pearl Harbour-type event as a useful tool for the control of public opinion at home, and thus the legitimization of military interventionism abroad.

More closet Stalinists to add to the collection? And some of them are now in charge of the most powerful state in the world.

Warnings, Warnings

Further questions arise in view of the emerging evidence of several warnings of the plots received by British and American intelligence services. Now the existence of these warnings ought to be contrasted with the official line expressed at the outset, that there was no intelligence chatter, no prior intelligence, and no specific warning about what was going to happen. That stance has now been pretty much discredited.

“Warnings were issued three months ago [in April 2007] about the threat of a terrorist campaign to mark the end of Tony Blair’s premiership, security sources have revealed”. Two major agencies, the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, which reports to MI5, and the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, which reports to chief police officers “warned in April about the possibility of a renewed campaign”. One senior security source told the Guardian: “The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre [JTAC] assessed that a group of individuals, it is not known how many, clearly had the capability and the intent to carry out attacks on the UK. Therefore there was a strong likelihood of further attacks.” But officials insisted that there had been “no specific” information about the events of Friday and Saturday.

Further details came from the Sunday Times which obtained a leaked copy of the JTAC assessment. The newspaper cites Patrick Mercer MP, former homeland security spokesman, asking: “If they had a JTAC document saying there was a high risk of an attack to mark the end of the Blair administration, why didn’t they raise the threat level and why weren’t people warned?”

An alleged al-Qaeda-Taliban video, shot on 9th June in Pakistan by a Pakistani journalist invited for the occasion, was aired by CNN and ABC in that month purportedly displaying a suicide bomber “graduation ceremony”. The video claimed that “suicide bombers were supposedly sent off on their missions in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany.” The video included:

… images of Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah, his brother was killed last month by US forces. On the tape, the leader of the British team speaking of the mission in broken English said ‘Let me say something about why we are going along with my team to tell a suicide attack in Britain.’ The video at the time sent a chilling note across the security services with warnings that attacks in the UK were more than likely this summer…

For those with an eye for detail, the connection between our no doubt utterly justifiable June slaughter of Afghans and this particular warning from Pakistan of an imminent strike on Britain is notable. Yes, it is by no means the whole story, but it is undeniably a significant component. Meanwhile, British officials are falling over themselves to insist that there is no discernable connection to Pakistan — of course our ardent ally in the ‘War on Terror’. Also worth noting is, as the report above continues, the perpetrators of these particular attacks: foreign “trainee doctors are being held as suspects, having passed their security checks and been provided with official approval to practice in the UK.”

Dirty Skins

They were not clean skins, police officials are happy to admit, noting that MI5 had logged several of them in its surveillance database of “desirable” targets, thus allowing them to be quickly identified and apprehended. What a resounding success. “Several doctors arrested over the London and Glasgow car bomb plot were on the files of MI5”, reported the Telegraph, including one

… on a Home Office watch list after being identified by security services – meaning their travel in and out of Britain was monitored by immigration officers. Others were found to be on the MI5 database, which contains an estimated 2,000 suspected jihadists or supporters of terrorism. Whitehall sources said they had not been involved in previous plots, but were ‘people who knew people’ who were under observation… But British security sources insisted there was no intelligence that al-Qa’eda commanders plotted to infiltrate the NHS… Most of the alleged cell members arrived in this country after 2004 to take up NHS jobs.

Desirable targets are individuals directly associated with known al-Qaeda operatives actively engaged in terrorist activity, and/or those involved in fundraising for terrorist activity. But there are slight problems here. For one thing, “American intelligence sources suggested yesterday that some cell members were recruited by al-Qa’eda in Iraq up to three years ago. Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, an insurgency leader, was said to have been ordered to find young men to blend into Western society before staging an attack.”

So the Americans knew about them. What about the British? In fact, who exactly were these doctors associated with? The Americans had more to tell. The Telegraph noted that:

“… reports from the US that the three men had been identified and known to be an associate of Dhiren Barot [convicted last year of a transatlantic terror plan involving nightclubs, car bombs, and other plots], a suspected terrorist who had planned to set off bombs across London, were dismissed by government officials.”

British officials are denying what the Americans are confirming. But the Americans do not merely share all their intelligence with the British as a matter of routine; their intelligence operations are fundamentally inter-coordinated, and have been increasingly so after 9/11. There are more problems. How on earth did foreign trainee doctors logged by MI5 as al-Qaeda associates manage to pass “their security checks” to receive “official approval to practice in the UK”? MI5 already had these individuals logged, yet MI5 did nothing while these individuals predictably applied to join the NHS, the very reason they had arrived in the UK after 2004. The official insistence from British officials that they had no idea these people were trying to infiltrate the NHS is difficult to make sense of. What else would al-Qaeda associates with medical degrees arriving in the UK for the specific purpose of joining the NHS be trying to do?.

Just on a side note, the 7/7 bombers (at least Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shahzad Tanweer), it has been admitted, were also logged by MI5 as “desirable” targets. They will have been, similarly, identified along with other relevant background data, as al-Qaeda associates, at the very least. They will have had files open on them, just as with these “desirable” targets.

And More Warnings

More embarrassing information from the Americans has continued to appear. A senior US official told ABC News that they had “received intelligence reports two weeks ago which warned of a possible terror attack in Glasgow against ‘airport infrastructure or aircraft’…” This was actionable intelligence, as it did indeed lead to action: except not in Glasgow. The official confirmed that “the intelligence led to the assignment of Federal Air Marshals to flights into and out of both Glasgow and Prague in the Czech Republic.” What did Britain know? “US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declined to comment on the report, but on Monday told ABC News that ‘everything that we get is shared virtually instantaneously with our counterparts in Britain and vice versa’.”

It should not surprise anyone by now that the Brits are once again denying everything. “There was no prior intelligence” about the Glasgow attack, said Strathclyde police chief constable Willie Rae. No of course there wasn’t. American intelligence officials are no doubt hallucinating.

Yet another official Foreign Office denial came regarding a separate warning from British priest Canon Andrew White, head of the Baghdad-based head of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, who said he’d been warned by an al-Qaeda figure of an attack. The unnamed al-Qaeda leader from Syria told him on the sidelines of a religious summit in the Jordania capital, Amman “about how they were going to destroy British and Americans. He told me that the plans were already made and they would soon be destroying the British. He said the people who cure you would kill you.” The figure added that the plans “would be carried out in the coming weeks, and would target the British first.”

“Canon Andrew White, a British cleric working in Baghdad, claimed that he met an al-Qa’ida leader in Amman who had warned him about the imminent attack, saying ‘those who cure you will kill you’. Canon White said he passed the message to the Foreign Office. However a Foreign Office spokesman said there is no record of such a warning being given.”

In any case, White points out that he did not mention the medical angle. But it looks like the Foreign Office has got itself into a bit of a tiz. Although issuing repeated denials to various foreign press, insisting that no record of the warning existed and that no recollection of the conversation could be unearthed, Bloomberg was able to report an admission:

“The Foreign Office today acknowledged receiving information from White about the Amman meeting, adding that it was considered at the time to be too vague to merit further analysis. White’s information has since been passed on to police investigating the Glasgow and London incidents, a Foreign Office spokesman said.”

Ah yes, too vague, although it cohered with all the other intelligence of plans to strike the UK being received just around that time. It certainly also cohered with the previous evidence of an origin for the attacks in al-Qaeda in Iraq; as well as in Pakistan.

The official British government position is not tenable. Credible sources confirm that multiple warnings were indeed received. Repeated official denials contradict the evidence and are internally-inconsistent. In this context, the response of the authorities is telling. The denials eclipse the connections of this obviously untrained group of amateurs to an international al-Qaeda-affiliated network in Iraq and Pakistan.

Al-Qaeda or Not? And the Strategy of Tension

The “al-Qaeda or not” question, however, is not a black or white case. The pattern of terror plots particularly in the UK over the last few years since after 7/7 has invariably involved rather inept cells with quite questionable expertise in explosives and other terrorist techniques. Many of these cells while purportedly ‘home-grown’, are nevertheless associated with international networks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where reside senior al-Qaeda operatives with real terrorist expertise. In the UK, USA and Western Europe, one group responsible for mediating communication and movement between these two domestic and international arenas is formerly known as al-Muhajiroun, purportedly banned by the British government, but still intact and still run by self-described cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed from Lebanon, where he was exiled by the British government. It is this that appears to produce a mismatch of actual expertise.

Omar Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudray, continues to run around the UK on Omar Bakri’s behalf (and with his regular guidance) attempting to mentor a new generation of Islamist extremists. It was former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus who confirmed that Omar Bakri and his al-Muhajiroun network had been first hired by MI6 in the late 1990s to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. His UK underlings even continue to maintain a website for him which curiously remains devoid of his hundreds of most inflammatory statements supporting al-Qaeda terrorism. Despite exiling him to Britain, authorities have done nothing to curb his ongoing influence over his UK network, except to protect him from official investigation in connection with the radicalization of that very network. Al-Muhajiroun incubated those involved with Dhiren Barot’s grand plan to bomb targets in the US and Britain, with which the fertilizer and 7/7 plotters were also intimately linked.

Further questions arise when we probe the plausible al-Qaeda connections to these incidents from Iraq and Pakistan. We may remind ourselves that the alleged perpetrators of the latest crimes are mostly of Middle Eastern origin. In September 2005, I had already documented evidence from a number of credible sources suggesting that the United States was covertly supplying arms to Iraqi insurgents described as “former Ba’ath party” loyalists now joining with “al-Qaeda in Iraq”. The proxy for this funnel of weaponry was Pakistani military intelligence, according to a Pakistani defence source cited by the Asia Times. The next year, an outraged British colonel complained that Pakistan was sheltering al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But nevermind him, Bush says Pakistan’s our “major non-NATO ally.”

This strategy of tension in Iraq was, it appears, extended to other key states in the region, namely Lebanon, by late 2006. On CNN, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh summarized his latest exclusive. Hersh’s absolutely critical discovery was that the Bush administration is actively sponsoring al-Qaeda affiliated groups across the entire Middle East, with a focus on Lebanon, to counter regional Shi’ite Iranian influence. Moreover, much of the finances for these covert operations are being funnelled by Saudi Arabia through Iraq:

This administration has made a policy change, a decision that they are going to put all of the pressure they can on the Shiites, that is the Shiite regime in Iran, the Shiite — and they are also doing everything they can to stop Hezbollah — which is Shiite, the Hezbollah organization from getting any control or any more of a political foothold in Lebanon.

… we are interested in recreating what is happening in Iraq in Lebanon, that is Sunni versus Shia… we have been pumping money, a great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any congressional oversight, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia is putting up some of this money, for covert operations in many areas of the Middle East where we think that the — we want to stop the Shiite spread or the Shiite influence.

They call it the ‘Shiite Crescent.’ And a lot of this money… has gotten into the hands — among other places, in Lebanon, into the hands of three — at least three jihadist groups. There are three Sunni jihadist groups whose main claim to fame inside Lebanon right now is that they are very tough. These are people connected to al Qaeda who want to take on Hezbollah…

My government, which arrests al Qaeda every place it can find them… is sitting back while the Lebanese government we support, the government of Prime Minister Siniora, is providing arms and sustenance to three jihadist groups whose sole function, seems to me and to the people that talk to me in our government, to be there in case there is a real shoot-‘em-up with Hezbollah…

… So America, my country, without telling Congress, using funds not appropriated, I don’t know where, by my sources believe much of the money obviously came from Iraq where there is all kinds of piles of loose money, pools of cash that could be used for covert operations… We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…

Déjà vu? An unholy triangle, the US at the helm, Saudi Arabia providing the funds, Pakistan providing military intelligence support, but this time not into Afghanistan as during the Cold War, but into Iraq and thereby throughout the Middle East. It seems, al-Qaeda is still a useful mercenary outfit for our covert regional geostrategy.

In March 2007, Hersh firmed up this conclusion in the New Yorker magazine, citing White House insiders and other US government officials, all confirming in perhaps the clearest terms that the US was deliberately attempting to control al-Qaeda terrorist activity through Saudi Arabia (among others) to be re-directed against Iran:

The ‘redirection,’ as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

… The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

… Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that ‘there is nothing coincidental or ironic’ about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. ‘The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the [al-Qaeda] Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when — if you look at the actual casualty numbers — the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,’ Leverett said. ‘This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.’

… This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that ‘they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at — Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran’.

So, we know the al-Qaeda Salafis will throw bombs. But apart from trying to blow up American, British and other civilians (and perhaps themselves if they’ve got that vibe), funnelling them arms, funds and logistical assistance will allow us to “control” them sufficiently to make life difficult for the Iranians (or even the Palestinians), perhaps even provoke them into a response that will legitimize an Anglo-American “strike at them.” Notice that national security, I mean real national security in terms of the protection of the lives of the Western publics, is not an operative factor calculated into this strategy.

Whose bombs indeed. There is a term for this kind of covert sponsorship of terror networks. It’s called “complicity,” if the Modern Law Review is anything to go by. Thus, by law, the Bush administration, and perhaps now Brown’s also, is aiding and abetting al-Qaeda. They cannot be absolved of culpability in the fall-out.

So why Iran and why now?

Nothing to do with oil, of course. It is merely a coincidence that in late June, a former White House energy consultant and NATO energy delegate Dr. Roger Bezdek, annoyed the Bush administration by demanding that it “must immediately and rigorously assess the looming impact of peak oil.” He said: “… it may already be too late to avoid serious problems.” Dr. Bezdek’s warning came shortly after the publication of British Petroleum’s influential Statistical Review of World Energy which claimed optimistically that sufficient oil reserves remain to meet current demand for the next 40 years. BP’s report, which echoes that of other American and British giant oil corporations, was refuted by leading independent oil industry experts including Dr Colin Campbell, a former chief geologist and vice-chairman at several major oil companies, who noted that on the contrary, the latest data shows oil is set to peak within the next four years. Indeed, Chris Skrebowski, a former chief planner for BP and now editor of Petroleum Review, observes: “I was extremely sceptical to start with. We have enough capacity coming online for the next two-and-a-half years. After that the situation deteriorates.”

Bush administration officials have long been aware of the impending oil crisis. Indeed, it was a key factor in Vice-President Dick Cheney’s formulation of the strategy in Iraq only five months prior to 9/11. Reports like that of BP are designed to misinform, steering public attention away from the real cause of the problem.

If ever there was a resource-driven strategy of tension, this is it; and the fear being ratcheted up in the US and UK is its direct corollary. While the British police and intelligence services are congratulating themselves on having rounded up the terrorists and thus quelled the threat for now, the US government is actively fostering the source of the threat in the Middle East because of its antipathy toward Iran. Given Britain’s close alliance with the US in the ‘War on Terror’, the question must be asked, how precisely involved is the British government in this self-defeating strategy that consciously compromises civilian life?

You want to fight the terror Mr Brown? Perhaps you can start by fighting your new boss, Mr Bush.

Somehow, I don’t see it happening.