Don’t forget to keep hydrated!

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So where does that leave Iraq?

As something for Blair to whine that he is innocent about?
I don’t know – I don’t have the answers. I do see, though, that whilst I don’t have the solution what I have seen was not the best way to have gone about things.

I don’t buy what David Cameron said today: that Britain is in danger from ISIS or from British ISIS fighters returning from Iraq or Syria.

My guess is that he believes that, once their mission in the Middle East is over, the survivors and their mates will try exporting their brand of religious hatred to other areas, Britain being one of them. That thinking should help boost Ukip’s fan base in time for the next election.

To my mind the only danger is if Britain starts to take military action, or supports military action against ISIS.

Maybe, but then again we have already stuck our heads above the parapet so any danger is already a possibility…

Britain should leave well alone. Let Muslim carry on killing Muslim in the centuries-old feud; I’m sure that in some quarters that the West will get the blame but there should be no military intervention whatsoever.

Whoa!!!
Are you not a member of the human race? Does not the killing of one man by another diminish you by association?
Yes, despite that thought there will always be feral swine who need to be culled, but the indiscriminate slaughter that generally takes place NEVER confines itself to just the militant wings of the two parties concerned – innocents always end up being involved.
That is not to say that we should get involved, but if someone doesn’t then there will be (sorry, is!) mass murder… History has shown that this is what has happened before, and will be what will happen in the future.

If ‘the World’ thinks that something should be done about it then let another Muslim country intervene; Saudi Arabia surely can afford to do something, even if it is only to take in the millions of refugees that this latest conflict will produce.

Good grief.
Sure, the Saudis would be happy to get more involved if they weren’t (most probably, since they are the main backers of the Syrian opposition) one of the ‘silent’ ISIS backers…

And the problem with refugees from one of this type of war zone is that insurgents hide amongst the legitimates, whether to recruit from the affected or help cause unrest in the camps. And many Arabic countries have displayed a distinct reluctance to be seen to get involved in case that stirs the ire of groups like ISIS.

Lots of room on roads to waste em between towns, shades of Kuwait… Their supply line must be getting pretty stretched to, cut it off at the Syrian border and they are screwed, if the Iranians etc get in behind them there screwed, bad move was killing Iraqi prisoners, once it’s known that if you surrender they will kill you, no one will ever ever surrender again, they will fight to the death.

…Or run away just that little bit faster.

Sure, it does focus the mind.

And Daffy Duck.

You calling Daffy Duck a lefty?

Are you saying that post 2003 that the Coalition forces were deliberately making attacks to destroy Iraqi infrastructure and disrupt supplies of power and water? I’d have thought that the billions of dollars of investment that the Coalition were making were intended to do just the opposite.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Read those blogs.

Also depends on where the money went…

The problem in Iraq, post 2003, seemed to be the upsurge in sectarian violence; and the best way to raise the level of dissatisfaction with the Coalition in general was probably to cut off people’s power and water. I’m sure Saddam Hussein could have sorted the problem by resorting to the methods that he had used in the past; brutal but effective. The Coalition did not have that option.

As far as I recall, from the blogs I posted links to, power and water were cut off regularly. Had the lines/pipes been targeted by insurgents I doubt the cuts would have been a regular thing, more irregular in fact.

Found this on the first page of the Riverbend blog:

We are learning that those amenities we took for granted before 2003, you know- the luxuries – electricity, clean water from faucets, walkable streets, safe schools – those are for deserving populations.

This post is dated 9/4/2013.

Oooo, another one:

For every two hours of electricity, we have four hours of no electricity in our area- and several other areas.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.co.uk/2004_06_01_archive.html

That is from 1/6/2004.

And plenty of unnecessary civilian deaths are always useful to focus the minds of the population and the world in general. When there was a UN embargo on Iraq Saddam Hussein claimed that tens of thousands died but food and medicine were not part of the UN embargo…

…which raises the question…..what did they die of?

Hmm, you truly believe that Saddam would have openly passed them on to the population?
Listen, I have some beans and, well, not to put too fine a point on it…they are magic.;o)

I bet you’re into rollmops, aren’t you…?

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Jaffa cake?

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I’ll be really interested to hear Gordon Brown’s views on what we should be doing with the economy too.

He has been remarkably quiet on the subject…

And to think he is a Middle East Peace Envoy spouting we should get involved,

Well, the wests appointed envoy…

Which probably means no one needs to take any notice of him. I know I’m not.

I’m probably going to be unpopular for this, but I actually agree with some of what Tony Blair has said recently.

Hissssss!!!

I think he’s quite right in saying that this would have happened with or without our intervention in 2003. Saddam was oppressing the population, and even if it hadn’t happened so soon, I believe that eventually there would have been a violent and bloody revolution.

No, Blair is not right in anything he says. Ever. Even when you think he sounds convincing.
Fact.
And it was never ‘our’ invasion: Shrub and Bliar took it away from any legal process when they ignored their own legal requirement concerning the search for WMD’s.
Anyway. Saddam was not oppressing the population as a whole – pedantic I know, but true. Apart from the Sunnis there were practising Jews who left it several years before emigrating to Israel since it was only after the invasion that they started being oppressed. And there has been many reports with interviewees claiming that things were better with Saddam in control; maybe they remembered little things like electricity or water being available 24 hours a day, or basic food supplies being available without having to bribe someone. Then there has been the various battles between the liberators and the religious factions who tried to take advantage of the situation, which did the population no good at all (unless they worked in the undertaking business).

I also agree that we need to meet this challenge head on. Showing tolerance to these intolerant Islamic groups will not result in peace, only growing sway for them. The fact that Al Qadea has an embassy in the Middle East is an affront to international relations.

Libya was friendly with the IRA, as were some politicians in America – not to the embassy stage, admittedly.
And we were tolerant of the Taliban, right up until we weren’t and invaded Afghanistan…

He is a vile man, who has caused harm to millions of people. His war was illegal, and he should stand trial for war crimes. He managed to unite warring Islamic factions under a common hatred of the Western world, and has created a legacy of violence and Islamic subjugation. But it should be our justice that he faces, nor backwards justice systems from countries that still believe that stoning people is okay in a civilized society.

And he is our war criminal, but don’t forget that he was not the only one pushing for invasion on the basis of false and misinformation.

Don’t have time to read all the previous at the moment but here is a thought…

But there isn’t much of it; it wouldn’t take long.

Be longer now, admittedly, so you should have read it then…;o)

…Britain / ‘the West’ gets a fair bit of blame for imperialism and all the ‘straight lines’ on the maps that we left all around the world but take Iraq for example; what was the experience of the average Iraqi in the decades before the self-rule under Saddam Hussain? How does that compare to the experience of the average Iraqi (and let us not forget the average Kuwaiti or Kurd) under Saddam Husain, the average Iraqi / Iranian during the Iran-Iraq war, or the average Iraqi in the last few weeks under ISIS?

In the main it was, apparently, not too bad – especially if you were on his favourable side of the fence; as I said above some parts of the population weren’t picked out any more than the rest (although some parts would have been on a more constant basis – the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, for example). Obviously when the Iran/Iraq war was in full flow there would have been shortages and conscription (well, more than usual), and if your face or creed didn’t fit in with Saddams view of the world then you might be removed from his sight.
And after the invasion…well, we can guess. Attempts at overthrow, battles, massacres, attacks, counter attacks, kidnappings, etc. Some will have suffered greatly, others will have gotten away with relatively little stress.

Why not do some reading yourself. For pre invasion try Where is Raed? ( http://dear_raed.blogspot.co.uk/) – it goes back to 2002 (used to go back further – one of the earliest posts mentions that it won 2nd prize for blog design – but I believe it had to migrate from elsewhere) and its associate Salam Pax ( http://salampax.wordpress.com/) which covers more of the post invasion period. Neither are recent, though.
Riverbend (http://riverbendblog.blogspot.co.uk/) was a Young Iraqi woman who blogged about the invasion and occupation until she and her family apparently emigrated to Syria(!) in 2007, after which her blog stops, although in 2013 she blogged that she was now in a third Arab country.

I have no desire for Britain to rule or control Iraq but some, and I stress some, of the time that Britain ruled Iraq has got to compare pretty favourably with most of the time that Iraqis had control over their own destiny.

Britain never ruled Iraq. The Kingdom of Iraq was occupied by Britain until 1947 – to maintain the supply of oil (sound familiar?), and Iraq and Britain maintained contact throughout the remainder of the Heshemite rule, until the coup in 1958.
America ruled Iraq after 2003, and Britain had a small role thereafter.

Please, don’t disturb the cattle – they are disturbed enough with the knitted udders and stuff.

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