Posted on 06/01/2003 5:57:41 AM PDT by may18
By Toby Helm, Chief Political Correspondent (Filed: 30/05/2003)
The first signs of a solidly-based Tory recovery for a decade are revealed today in an opinion poll that shows a collapse of trust in Tony Blair is beginning to hurt Labour.
A YouGov survey for The Telegraph puts the Conservatives just one point behind Labour, their highest poll rating since 1992 apart from a blip during the fuel crisis in the autumn of 2000.
The results are a further shot in the arm for Iain Duncan Smith four weeks after the Conservatives gained 561 council seats to become the largest party in local government in England. Tory strategists insisted last night that they still had much to do but claimed that policies on university funding, taxation and Europe were striking a chord with voters.
For the first time since Mr Duncan Smith became leader in September 2001, more voters - 19 per cent - believe he would be a better prime minister than the 15 per cent who back Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader.
Click to enlarge The Tories also lie just one point behind Labour on the issue of economic competence, one of Labour's strongest cards at the 2001 general election. The findings will cause alarm in Labour ranks at a time when Mr Blair is under pressure from his backbenchers and the party rank and file to explain why no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
The YouGov survey puts Labour on 37 per cent, down three points, the Conservatives on 36 per cent, up four per cent, and the Liberal Democrats on 20 per cent, down one per cent.
A month ago, when the Government was enjoying a post-war rise in popularity - the so-called "Baghdad bounce" - the gap between Labour and Conservatives was eight points.
The Tories' recent pledge to abolish student tuition fees appears to be having a positive influence. Their proposals stand in contrast to Labour's plans to allow universities to charge up to £3,000 a year for courses.
Although 52 per cent of voters agreed that universities are "chronically underfunded", 43 per cent said they were "more sympathetic to the Conservatives" after their promise to scrap tuition fees. Among parents and students the figure was 53 per cent.
Even more worrying for Mr Blair is the dramatic fall in trust in his Government.
Just 29 per cent think that, on balance, the Government has been honest and trustworthy - almost half the level, 56 per cent, of the 2001 election. On the other hand, 62 per cent said it was not honest - more than double the 2001 level.
Mr Blair's personal ratings are also suffering - 38 per cent now think he would make the best prime minister, down five per cent on April and 14 per cent on 2001.
Strategists believe Labour's splits over the euro are harming the party in the same way that divisions dented Tory popularity during the later years of John Major's premiership.
Labour officials point out that the party is, in historical terms, still in a remarkably strong mid-term position. Most governing parties languish well behind the Opposition in mid-term. To maintain the momentum, Mr Duncan Smith is planning a major speech - entitled New Europe: Old Europe - next month in which he will outline his thinking on Britain's relations with the EU and Europe's relationship with America.
One aide to Mr Duncan Smith said the party was finally getting its ideas across. He said: "It's one thing to have the policies, quite another to communicate them. We are beginning to do that."
You may well prove correct in that view. I think my main point of disagreement with others rests on the basis that I do think this evidence should prove easy to locate. At least, that is, easy to locate now that we've occupied Iraq & removed the Ba'athist regime. If I am eventually proven wrong on that particular point, then it's conceivable I will be proven comprehensively wrong in my conclusions.
Thankyou. And if you admit this much, as you evidently do, it necessarily follows that the non-existence of significant caches of WMDs is not an "inescapable conclusion," but only one possibility.
Consider what I pointed out in post 99.
But he gave all this up. He lost huge potential profits and ran the distinct risk of overthrow, and for what? To my mind, there is only one reason that makes any sense. He had something to hide and that something was WMDs and related materials and documents.
And how much time have we had to search for these? A month at most? Iraq is a country of ~437,000 km2, roughly the size of California. In addition to its vast desert region, its topography is marked by ~200,000 km2 of often rugged mountains in the north and east (of which the Kurds occupy only a very restricted part). There are heavy snows up there. Blinding dust storms, sand storms, and massive flooding of the plains are not uncommon occurances. And Iraq's 58 km coastline extends its territorial waters by 12 nautical miles out to sea.
Were you conducting such a search, what would you consider a reasonable timetable, a realistic deadline, for such a logistical and engineering accomplishment? One month? Really? What manpower would you need to enlist in such an effort? 500? 10,000? How much of what kinds of heavy machinery would you need to use and what practical problems would you need to address when transporting it into mountainous areas, much of it under snow? Into the marshy areas in the south? With summer fast approaching, what effect would the scorching heat have on your operations? What sort of budget would you expect for all this?
One month? Really?
And what of the very real possibility of trans-shipment into Syria, Iran and possibly Jordan?
One month?
Are you sure?
Saddam was a very clever fellow who had many years to figure out the best ways to keep things hidden. And he was not without the resources for accomplishing these goals.
See post 104.
you wrote: "such as?"
I have no idea...I could theorize, but it would be just that, theory.
The real travesty here is that Joe Citizen really does not know. In a republic, war is carefully debated by free citizens who weigh the arguments pro and con. If war is chosen, everyone knows the reasons, because the grievances of the citizens ARE the underlying motive for the war.
An empire functions in a totally different manner. In an empire, you have a polyglot population presided over by a deracinated, cosmopolitan elite. There is no commonly agreed upon motive for war because there are no commonly agreed upon interests and beliefs.
Thus, war usually results from the arcane manipulations of various influential pressure groups. In this setting, Joe Citizen is unaware why his son is dying and why his house just got blown up. He may have heard the offician line, but he is usually smart enough to realize that the official line is bunk. As to what the real motives are, Joe Citizen can only speculate.
I do not believe that WMD were the real reason for this war. The evidence presented was off-the-cuff and somewhat amateurish. The reality of 6 weeks of occupation is that none have been found. We were told that the country was awash in tons of toxins and gases.
As for the other reasons, they are equally suspect. The connection to Osama was always tenuous at best. The fact that Hussein is a dictator was also somewhat phoney, since this didn't stop us from arming him in the 80's (and it doesn't stop us from allying ourselves with other regimes such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...both of which have more connections to Osama than Iraq did).
So....the bottom line is this: We went to war. I am unsure why. But I do know that the stated reasons are bogus. Past that, you'll have to ask someone who is privy to what is going on behind that imperial curtain.
A list of nations who put children in prison would be long indeed. China uses slave labor camps, and has a quite cozy relationship with american business. We are currently buddying up to the Sudan, despite the fact that they still practice slavery. Pakistan is our "friend", despite the fact that it is a fairly repressive military dictatorship. Turkey is our "friend" despite their persecution of the Kurds.
If Iraq has an oppressive dictatorship, then it is incumbent upon Iraqi patriots to overthrow that regime and replace it with a better one.
In either case, as John Q Adams once said "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy" and "We are the well-wisher of liberty everwhere, but the guardians only of our own"
Given the level of control Saddam had over that country, I don't think this is true, but I found it interesting speculation nonetheless.
Nice isolationist philosophy.
But the Arab world came to us on September 11, 2001. And with Afghanistan and Iraq, we took it to the Arab world.
It's really difficult to believe it was "oil." If it was it would have been far easier to cut a deal with Saddam - like we used to in the old days.
I think that one might argue that neo-cons like Wolfowitz might have had ulterior motives. Plausibly. Maybe. But I find it harder to believe that the likes of Powell and Blair could have been part of the con. More likely they were conned, save for the difficulty that both had plenty of access to the raw data. So you would have to assume that the intelligence agencies were very badly compromised.
If there was an ulterior motive I might speculate on what it was and argue that whether it was ulterior or not it wasn't exactly off the radar scope. There was a fair amount of talk in conservative policy circles about the need for regional transformation. That the status quo of corrupt kleptocracies presiding over stagnant economies run by police states with lots of young, very angry young Muslim men was a recipe for more 9/11s and even worse. Iraq, being at the middle of of the region, provided a perfect place to begin such an experiment, as its fall would provide pressure simultaneously on Syria and Iran to reform while allowing us to pull out our obnoxious presence of troops from Saudi Arabia.
All of which i would agree with but perhaps that would be a more difficult sell than "weapons of mass destruction" and "terror support."
In any case the failure to discover WMD's so far does not mean they were not there. Saddam obviously went to some lengths to hide *something.* So what was it? And what happened to it? And even given the quantities being talked about (30,000 liters, several thousand tons, etc.) are really not so large as they sound. Especially given that these agents can be stored and transported in small amounts. In a country the size of California that might be so difficult if Saddam went to some lengths before the war to hide them, destroy them, or spirit them away to, say, Syria.
Blair seems confident that it will come out soon. Well: we'll know soon enough.
Nice isolationist philosophy.
Especially since in Adams' day we had Britain and the Royal Navy to search out the monsters.
But the Pax Britannica is long over.
The alternative, alas, is Pax Americana or no "pax" at all.
Or worse yet: Pax Sinica.
This philosophy, which you call "isolationist" (I prefer the terms "non-interventionism" or "armed neutrality") is the foreign policy application of the American principle of limited government. George Washington, and every other major political leader of this country at the time of the founding, believed that we should avoid entangling alliances and imperial wars.
It is the new ideology of "pax americana" and "benevolent world hegemony" which is new and alien to America. I would go so far as to consider these ideologies, and there adherents, to be un-American.
I am devastated that our Republic is withering away and being replaced by an aggressive imperial hegemon.
I'll repost it below.
There is some plausibility here. Let us posit that Saddam was keen to acquire WMD's, the more destructive and numerous, the better. Let posit that the early 90's inspections and the first war wiped out much but not all of his stocks and programs. Then let us speculate that Saddam was deceived by his own people about how much success they were having rebuilding his weapons programs; that some stocks were acquired but not nearly so much as Saddam thought, and as Lacey suggests, he was not expert enough to detect the exaggerations and fabrications. And therefore perhaps that not only Saddam was deceived but so too were the Iraqi exile groups and the western intelligence agencies - both of which, perhaps, may have been vulnerable at times to seeing what they wanted to see.
And in the final weeks before the war Saddam and his sons made efforts to secure the stocks from preemptive US strikes, either by hiding them, disposing of them, or spiriting them off to Syria or other friendly states.
All of which is just as plausible as an administration conspiracy to manufacture a WMD danger out of nearly whole cloth.
--------------------------------
May 15, 2003, 10:30 a.m.
Where Are the WMDs?
Why we may not find them.
By Jim Lacey
National Review Online
After over a month of looking, Coalition forces have not come up with the WMD smoking gun yet. There are many possible reasons why. Saddam, after 20 years of practice, has become a master of disbursing and hiding things and it will take some time to root his WMD program out. Alternatively, it is possible that just before we invaded, large portions of Iraq's WMD program were sent to Syria for safekeeping. The nightmare scenario though, particularly for those who justified the war in terms of finding WMDs, is that WMDs do not exist and have not since the end of Gulf War I. Unfortunately, with every day that passes, that possibility looms larger.
It is likely that if Saddam no longer had a WMD program he did not know it. Why else would he endure over a decade of crippling sanctions? If Saddam had ended his quest for WMDs, it would have been in his best interest to open the doors wide and let the world see. By playing as the model citizen he would have regained control of his oil wealth and quickly been able to make Iraq a regional superpower again.
Instead, his henchmen did everything possible to obfuscate the true WMD picture and to thwart any inspection teams. If they had nothing to hide, they sure worked hard at trying to hide it. What if they were not just hiding a possible WMD program from inspectors, but also hiding from Saddam the fact that no such program existed?
Outlandish? Maybe not. Consider, for instance, that a WMD program is expensive. It has already been proven that the Saddam regime was siphoning off billions of dollars through black-market oil deals and other under-the-table methods. However, there were numerous claims on these funds. Buying the loyalty of the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard did not come cheap. Just trying to keep the military in good enough order to crush internal revolts was already prohibitively expensive. Throw in the cost of presidential palaces, reconstructing Babylon, paying off Bath-party loyalists, and it is not long before you would be scraping for nickels. Iraq was not even able to find money and parts to maintain oil-production levels. The golden goose was dying.
There are already reports that Saddam's family members had drawn down on the dictator's overseas wealth to the tune of $6 billion in order to finance palace construction — they would not have done this if there were other alternatives available. Consider, too, the system-wide corruption in Iraq. Saddam and his family may have been the biggest looters of Iraqi wealth, but they were not alone. At every level there were people with their hands out, siphoning off funds for their own private use.
On top of all of this, Saddam was making demands, probably on his sons, that a WMD program remain a top priority. If they loyally followed daddy's wishes they would have had to overcome a number of serious impediments. First off, they would have had to rebuild the program almost from scratch, after it was destroyed or mostly dismantled after Gulf War I. That would have required overcoming stringent import bans and dealing with a brain drain that witnessed five million of Iraq's best-educated citizens heading overseas. All of this would have to be done under the watchful eye of the U.S.
What was in it for Saddam's minions, including his sons, if they were to scrape up the billions of dollars needed to start and maintain a WMD program? All such a program did, from their perspective, is drain off funds they needed for other projects, and draw the unwanted attention of bombers and cruise missiles. In their corrupt minds, a new "love palace" would always be a priority over a WMD site that was likely to be turned into dust as soon as it was discovered. If they shortchanged Saddam on a palace or his Babylon reconstruction there was a strong chance he might notice. However, it would be easy enough to hide that he did not have a WMD program.
Saddam was unlikely to be able to tell the difference between nuclear-grade graphite and pencil lead. What are the chances that the uneducated dictator could tell a centrifuge from a cow-milking machine? By claiming that the program was disbursed at hundreds of different sites, it would ensure that Saddam was never able to visit more then a handful and therefore would not be able to uncover the fraud.
This would explain both why U.S. intelligence reportedly intercepted orders from the top, possibly Saddam himself, authorizing local commanders to use chemical weapons and also why they were not used. Saddam ordered their use because he was convinced he had them to use. However, commanders never fired any because they were not really available.
The recent discovery of two possible mobile bio-labs may be the exception that proves the rule. Of all the WMD programs possible, bio-weapons are by far the cheapest, and it does not come any cheaper than loading a few petri dishes into a trailer and driving them around the desert. Such a lab would have given Saddam's henchmen something to show their leader that was far above his ability to understand. By being mobile, the labs were unlikely to be targeted and turned into molten steel. But mobility would also allow people to tell Saddam the program was more extensive then it actually was. For all we know Saddam could have thought he had hundreds of such labs. He was unlikely to be able to differentiate one from another, and therefore easy to fool. Mostly though, creating a small stock of biological weapons would not have cost much more than the gold trim in one palace bathroom.
In the event that we do not find the WMD smoking gun this is the only explanation that would make any sense. Saddam wanted the program and was willing to endure crippling sanctions to have it. However, his henchmen were unable to deliver and, unwilling to be on the receiving end of Saddam's zero-defects program, they faked it. In the process of making Saddam believe he had a functioning program they could easily have sucked U.S. intelligence into the deception. In fact, deceiving U.S. intelligence in this way would have been important to them. It would not have been conducive to a long life if the United States had come to Saddam and told him they had discovered he had no WMD program and all of his most trusted advisers were lying.
— Jim Lacey, a New York-based writer, was a war correspondent for Time magazine embedded with the 101st Airborne Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom. http://www.nationalreview.com/comme...lacey051503.asp
Unfortunately geopolitics, like nature, abhores a vacuum.
Some power will dominate world affairs.
If it is not America, it will be someone else. Someone who may be hostile to American interests. China springs to mind. And there are worse possibilities than that.
In the old days Britain filled this role. They were the real reason the Monroe Doctrine was largely upheld through the 19th century.
But Britain's day vanished in World War II.
We would lose far more than you think by the kind of retrenchment you seem to have in mind.
In the meantime, I am still curious what kind of theories you might be entertaining about what Bush and his people really were motivated by in staging this war. It's speculation, I know. But I am curious. Indulge me.
I scrolled through this thread, hoping to find that the British Conservative Party was returning to its traditional principles, but found quite the contrary. That is sad. But then I stumbled on your little exchange, at the end, which perked me up.
You are, of course, correct. (For an essay on traditional Amerian Foreign policy, which was anything but isolationist, see An American Foreign Policy.)
I have Washington's Farewell Address posted at my web site, and it may be linked from the above essay. I do not yet have the Memorandum, which Jefferson prepared for Washington in 1793 on relevant issues, but will post that also one of these days. This policy was not intended for a time and place. It is the most practical and easily adaptable for all situations. It is premised upon basic fairness and respect. We treat all with respect. If they do not treat us with respect back, however; if they threaten our legitimate interests, we take whatever action is required. Meanwhile, we offer the hand of friendship and trade to all the peoples of the earth.
Those who scoff at that policy, either do not understand it--however easy it is to understand--or they have some sort of agenda that does not put American interests foremost. Obviously, you do not abandon a policy that has served us so well, in favor of policies that have failed others, if your objective is the same as that of our founders.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Blair has not been hurt by his stand on Iraq. The Tories were foursquare behind Blair on Iraq and they are up. The reason Blair and Labour are down is because of the unrelenting attacks on Blair from the left, including many in his own party. The Labour lefties are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by splitting their party and turning off independents.
The Dims in the U.S. ought to think about the contrasting fates of the loyal opposition in Britain and their own continuing unpopularity.
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