We did not expect Iraq fanatics, says Hoon (former UK Defence Secretary)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/24/nterr24.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/09/24/ixportal.html

Geoff Hoon, the former Defence Secretary, has admitted that Tony Blair and his ministers underestimated the level of fanaticism in Iraq when they declared war on Saddam Hussein.

Mr Hoon, who headed the Ministry of Defence throughout the conflict, said the result was that Britain and the US were unprepared for the violence perpetrated ever since by extremists bent on preventing democracy taking hold.

His comments, on the eve of Labour's annual conference in Brighton, added to a growing sense across the political divide - even among supporters of the invasion - that the current allied strategy in Iraq needs, urgently, to be reassessed.

Yesterday Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, said the policy being following by the United Kingdom, the US and their allies "doesn't seem to be working". He demanded that the interim government in Baghdad be told to do more to bring rebel militias to heel.

Our chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear. Our two chief weapons are surprise, fear, and a fanatical devotion to Zarqawi. Amongst our many weapons are: surprise, fear, a fanatical blah, blah, blah, and nice Arab headdresses. Which the British have nicked. Damn.

Shall I come back in and say this again?

hurricanes look like sissies.

What Hoon meant to say, was that no expected the Iraqis the be more intelligent than the occupiers.

The poodle and his pack

TOTAL ASS CLOWNS

Bush and Blair seem to be experts in not thinking things thru

I guess he thought that people in a country with a culture 3000 years old will welcome invadors who have come to steal their assets.
Get out of Iraq!

call it national pride/resistance, stupid. Of all people, the English should have known that Muslims would resist invasion. They kicked you guys out last time around, remember (1920s).

Someone needs to get this man Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth". He seems to not have read it, or its warning to Europe that the colonized will fight back with all the brutality they can muster. We saw it when they dragged those blackwater mercs in Fallujah.

The new all purpose excuse of Bush types for their fuck ups. And here, I thought we had to invade Iraq because they were a terrorist menace filled with extremists.:sarcasm:

"Nobody could have ever imagined that when we embraced the religious wingnuts that they would try to take over the whole country."

How about this is their _real_ policies? I don't think there's much mistakes made in Iraq, crimes against humanity alot of them yes, but not 'fuckups'.

Maybe if he had bothered to think, or had read history or had listened to what people were screaming all around the world....

"we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender"

People don't like it when you invade their country and kill them by the thousands, no matter how virtuous you claim your intentions are.

Is this a great surprise?

Katrina being a big dangerous hurricane

....Geoff Hoon, the former Defence Secretary, has admitted that Tony Blair and his ministers underestimated the level of fanaticism in Iraq when they declared war on Saddam Hussein.

There has been a decades-long struggle in the ME over the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, that has involved most Islamic countries in the area (and let's not debate that, the point is that it is perceived as an occupation in the Muslim culture). There had been many attacks on US targets as well (Lebanon, the Cole), for our perceived support of this occupation, and because of objection to our military bases in Saudi Arabia.

So, what do we do? WE OCCUPY a Muslim country. And then pretend we did not expect the reaction we got???? I am far from an expert on ME affairs, but if I could figure this out, why couldn't they?

invaded! It sounds as if that is what I was saying, but it wasn't what I meant to say. I hope everyone reading it understood what I meant, which was that if they HAD educated themselves, they wouldn't have invaded.

My apologies for my pre-coffee post! (It is too late to edit it.)

Edited for further clarification.

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.

The sins of commission are those of the British civil authorities in Mesopotamia (especially of three 'colonels') who were given a free hand by London. They are controlled from no Department of State, but from the empty space which divides the Foreign Office from the India Office. They availed themselves of the necessary discretion of war-time to carry over their dangerous independence into times of peace. They contest every suggestion of real self-government sent them from home. A recent proclamation about autonomy circulated with unction from Baghdad was drafted and published out there in a hurry, to forestall a more liberal statement in preparation in London, 'Self-determination papers' favourable to England were extorted in Mesopotamia in 1919 by official pressure, by aeroplane demonstrations, by deportations to India.

The Cabinet cannot disclaim all responsibility. They receive little more news than the public: they should have insisted on more, and better. They have sent draft after draft of reinforcements, without enquiry. When conditions became too bad to endure longer, they decided to send out as High commissioner the original author of the present system, with a conciliatory message to the Arabs that his heart and policy have completely changed.*
...
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lawrence.php

There are few rebel militias even.

There are however lots of covert operatives planting bombs, killing iraqis, killing iraqi police and causing havoc in the region to ensure the US presence.

Do you have some links to help with evaluating that possibility? I'm not disputing you, just trying to understand.

You can Google for more information on these events that were widely reported in the world press (stop reading the WAPost NY Times!). The British assault on a Basra jail to free a British death squad, for lack of a better way to describe them, has permanently ruptured relations between the British military and the Shia people.

Hopefully this will expedite the British withdrawal from Iraq, and leave Bush holding the bag in Iraq.

It hasn't been easy unlearning everything I knew before the 2000 coup and reeducating myself politically from scratch. :eyes:

some other rogue country under the guise of stealing its natural resources in a quest for global domination, would YOU go there for no pay, with no housing, with your own (apparently) weapons and with no food, for no actual, real, valid reason, and risk your life? Would a CANADIAN go there? Or a Peruvian? Or an Australian? Through no sanction of their government, just on their own?

Of course not. It's a completely absurd premise.

The people in the middle east are no different from you and I in any way, shape or form. To believe the lies and innuendo from those who have the most to gain from this illegal and disasterous invasion is for people who don't apply critical logic.

They went to fight a war for ideological reasons in another country, without government support. It's not at all absurd.

about their support of either the iraqis as a whole, the shi'ites or the sunnis to the point that they're willing to go and die for them?

And that was almost one hundred years ago...

There isn't a record anywhere of any organized group banding to assist the iraqis in any way, shape or form.

It sure isn't al queda, with as sloppy as their alleged pretext for existence is, considering the US troops or the pakistans or the arabs or the afghanis or whomever keeps 'catching' their Number 2 Man over and over and over and over again...

and those in Iraq have done the same thing.



Remember volunteers who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets there? Perhaps, just perhaps, the same motivations are getting the same kind of people to go to Iraq?

invalidate the American revolution?

The news report, written by Dominic Evans (Reuters) is somewhat confusing as to the findings of this report by "the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)"--whoever they are.

On the one hand, the CSIS report is quoted as saying that, "Analysts and government officials in the U.S. and Iraq have overstated the size of the foreign element in the Iraqi insurgency, especially that of the Saudi contingent."

And it says that: "Non-Iraqi militants made up less than 10 percent of the insurgents' ranks -- perhaps even half that..."

But the news report focuses on the Saudi participation in the Iraq insurgency--to the point that Saudis are actually fewer in number in the insurgency than "many officials have assumed," and that those participants were not militants before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and became radicals because of it.

The news report states: "The study... may offer further fuel to critics who say that instead of weakening al Qaeda, the 2003 invasion of Iraq brought fresh recruits to Osama bin Laden's network."

The news report also mentions that the Saudis fighting in Iraq are Sunnis who oppose the Shiites.

Take what you will from this (really--beware of sources--who are CSIS's funders? what is their record of objectivity? keep in mind they are "Washington-based," etc.): The insurgency is NINETY PERCENT IRAQI. And, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is radicalizing some foreign Arabs and Muslims.

This strikes me as similar to the Spanish civil war (majority Spanish leftists fighting back against Franco's rightwing coup--joined by some foreign fighters and believers in liberty, including Americans), and also French support of the American revolution--except for...

... the Sunni-Shiite conflict (which is not exactly about the liberty of Iraq, but rather about ancient religious and tribal conflicts), and

...except for what may be the Iraqi (and also Arab/Muslim) notion of liberty, which could be described as "self-determination," but which apparently does not include the "self-determination" of women (not exactly democracy), and which is rent with Sunni-Shiite-Kurd divisions (f.i., "Self-determination" for the Kurds is in conflict with "self-determination" for the Sunnis, etc.).

...also, that notion of "self-determination" seems to be underlain with the dream of a vast religious caliphate--that is, throwing the U.S. out of Iraq, and other actions of national "self-determination," are partly patriotic, but are also inspired by an overarching desire for a powerful Muslim empire (--with some similarities to the desires of leftists at the time of the Spanish civil war, who were still enamoured of Soviet Russia and inspired by the international communist workers' movement).

(Note: A similar division (similar to Sunnis-Shiites-Kurds) occurred in early America, between the industrial north and the slave-owning south--"self-determination" for white slave owners was in conflict with "self-determination" for the anti-slavery north--but did not erupt into war until a hundred years after the Revolution. And neither did America achieve anything like true democracy until women and former slaves were enfranchised, which took a long, long time--and indeed is not yet completed--and, if the fascist coup in this country has its way, will be undone.) (So, maybe we shouldn't sneer at Iraqi or Arab/Muslim notions of liberty and self-determination?).

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Upshot: Iraq and the Middle East are a very complex situation, into which the Bush Cartel has thrown a large bomb, so to speak. The bomb of U.S. invasion of an Arab/Muslim country, and continued bloody occupation. It's no wonder Iraqis are rebelling--and are being supported by some foreign fighters, who hold a common belief system, though they may have tribal rivalries. Continued bloodshed and chaos are guaranteed; civil war is quite possible. This disaster was all very predictable, and the only beneficiaries are....Halliburton, Bechtel and other war profiteers.

The great irony may be that western oil companies do not benefit at all, and in fact lose ground as to access to oil reserves. Israel may not even benefit, if it has to maintain itself forever as an armed fortress (totally untenable--what idiocy! You'd think the Israelis would have learned some diplomatic skills in 5,000 years!). The worst losers, though, are ordinary Iraqis and Americans, and all those who have lost their lives or suffered permanent injury. So many!

and is merely posted on Commondreams, an esteemable organization.

I don't find Cordesman to be a credible source. He surely seems to be just another paid propogandist of little merit.

No offense to you, by any means; I just apply critical logic to the news that's coming out and the events taking place.

I don't believe there are any foreign fighters in Iraq. There is no evidence to support the premise.

There IS plenty of evidence however, to support the fact that the US and the british are using covert ops -- and have since before the actual invasion -- to stir up trouble to make the case for the occupation.

Common Dreams probably published it because it said there were less foreign fighters than "many officials believed." But the truth is, there may be none. And the Bush Cartel actions there would certainly be sufficient to turn many a peaceful Iraqi into an "insurgent." The provocations are mind-boggling.

I still wonder about those mercenaries who were strung up and burned in Fallujah (I suspect they were expendable people, or people who knew too much, and may have been either set up or outright killed by "our side"), and I've also wondered about Nicholas Berg, who was in U.S. custody for about 10 days before he was beheaded, with video. (THAT story is just chock full of improbabilities, the most amazing being that Nick Berg's email account and password were found in Zacharias Moussaoui's computer after 9/11; he was questioned about it by the FBI after 9/11, then was permitted to wander freely around Baghdad after the invasion. I mean, what's with THAT?)

I've no doubt there are many black ops going on, and that we should be distrustful of EVERY WORD coming from any official or official-sounding or semi-official or U.S. "think tank" source. And I imagine that disinformation could be, and has been, planted at leftist web sites.

Okay, I just checked out the CSIS web site. Board members: Sam Nunn, William Cohen, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft...need I say more? Some of the chief architects of our War Profiteering Global Corporate Predator world.

These would be top of my list of people whose EVERY WORD should be distrusted.

---------

In my little analysis, above, I was taking at their word the assertion that there are SOME foreign fighters in Iraq. Now I'd say: Prove it! Thanks for making me look closer at this!

Tell me again how 'logic' tells you there are no foreign fighters in Iraq at all. I really can't follow your argument - it just seems to be your gut feeling.

Great stuff Geoff, it is easy to see why Blair picked you as his Minister for Defence.

the bad news is that the new defense secretary is John Reid.

Pretty well any country will resist invasion and occupation. I can't believe Blair and Hoon didn't know that - the British of all people should know this. They have seen this from both sides - as a colonial power and as a threatened island.

Even a half-wit would realize that you don't starve hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and then pretend to expect there to not be zealots and fanatics.

Our intelligence services - specifically the JIC - warned you that invading Iraq would increase terrorism. Stop trying to revise history Mr Hoon.

n/t

invasion, I guess.

I mean, what the hell have we been saying all along!

Goddammit - I hate to have been right, but...


WE TOLD YOU SO ASSHOLES!

welcome in Iraq. All humanity will defend themselves and their property (oil) when threatened. Didn't they know how other nations (except Europe) feel about our manipulation in this world? Long before the Iraq war the people of the nations we have been messing with have at the least resented us. In example, South Africa, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc. They have all distrusted our business representatives, our preachers and our aid/military "help". It is no secret to anyone who is even marginally educated.

I don't know whose pants Genghis Hoon was trying to get into in 2003, but he's now there with the results of his lies staring him in the face

Bomb, slaughter, torture, rape, burn, raze, humiliate. For what? They don't even know, changing their reasons as they go along. Fucking fanatics.

I don't know if I'm more proud or terrified. :shrug:

the Sunni heartland from the north - which resulted in too many "live Sunnis"?

I'm sure statements like that have done wonders.

"fanatics" when they attempted to colonize the entire planet.

it seems the sun has finally set on the British Empire..

They don't remember INDIA? Oh that's right the 'wogs' were serving them tea, and then all of a sudden QUIT serving them tea (Gandi told them not to) and so they left, taking their umbellas and crocquet mallets with them..

The funny part about this is that the Downing Street Minutes which THEY GAVE US show that they knew damn well what they were getting into, all they were waiting for was more Chimp Crap, and to have their lawyers make up more obfuscation..

of our election system--with SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code! That's why nothing seems to make sense--and why the shills for the war profiteers make such stupid statements. There is no sense to be made of this--not even as an oil venture. It's just the immediate handy billions and billions and billions of dollars, provided by law abiding poor and middle class U.S. taxpayers--ripe for the looting.

Here, we have 600,000 people in the streets of DC protesting the war--and we've had a nearly 60% majority against the war since before the invasion--and what do the war profiteers care? They have Diebold and ES&S with which to bleed this cash cow dry! Then they'll likely install a War Democrat to consolidate their enormous gains, manage the bread lines and shut people up.

We need to throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machine into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!