History > 2006 > UK > Wars > Iraq (V)

The Guardian        p. 32        30.12.2006

Obituary

Saddam Hussein

Brutal and opportunist dictator of Iraq,
he wreaked havoc on his country,
the Middle East and the world

Saturday December 30, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
David Hirst

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was executed this morning at the age of 69, may not yield many general biographies - he was personally too uninteresting for that - but he will be a case study for political scientists for years to come. For he was the model of a certain type of developing world despot, who was, for over three decades, as successful in his main ambition, which was taking and keeping total power, as he was destructive in exercising it.

Yet at the same time, he was commonplace and derivative. Stalin was his exemplar. The likeness came from more than conscious emulation: he already resembled him in origin, temperament and method. Like him, he was unique less in kind than in degree, in the extraordinary extent to which, if the more squalid forms of human villainy are the sine qua non of the successful tyrant, he embodied them. Like Stalin, too, he had little of the flair or colour of other 20th-century despots, little mental brilliance, less charisma, no redeeming passion or messianic fervour; he was only exceptional in the magnitude of his thuggery, the brutality, opportunism and cunning of the otherwise dull, grey apparatchik.

His rise to power was no more accidental than Stalin's. If he had not mastered Iraq as he did, someone very similar probably would have, and very probably also from Tikrit. Saddam's peculiar fortune was that, on his political majority, this small, drab town, on the Tigris upstream from Baghdad, was already poised to wrest a very special role in Iraqi history.

Saddam was born in the nearby village of Owja, into the mud house of his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, and into what a Tikriti contemporary of his called a world "full of evil". His father, Hussein al-Majid, a landless peasant, had died before his birth, and his mother, Sabha, could not support the orphan, until she took a third husband.

Hassan Ibrahim took to extremes local Bedouin notions of a hardy upbringing. For punishment, he beat his stepson with an asphalt-covered stick. Thus, from earliest infancy, was Saddam nurtured - like a Stalin born into very similar circumstances - in the bleak conviction that the world is a congenitally hostile place, life a ceaseless struggle for survival, and survival only achieved through total self-reliance, chronic mistrust and the imperious necessity to destroy others before they destroy you.

The sufferings visited on the child begat the sufferings the grown man, warped, paranoid, omnipotent, visited on an entire people. Like Stalin, he hid his emotions behind an impenetrable facade of impassivity; but he assuredly had emotions of a virulent kind - an insatiable thirst for vengeance on the world he hated.

To fend off attack by other boys, Saddam carried an iron bar. It became the instrument of his wanton cruelty; he would bring it to a red heat, then stab a passing animal in the stomach, splitting it in half. Killing was considered a badge of courage among his male relatives. Saddam's first murder was of a shepherd from a nearby tribe. This, and three more in his teens, were proof of manhood.

The small-town thug possessed all the personal qualifications he might need to earn his place in the 20th-century's pantheon of tyrants. And the small town of Tikrit, lying in the heart of the Sunni Muslim "triangle" of central Iraq furnished the operational ones, too. Orthodox Sunni Arabs are only a small minority, 15% at most, of Iraq's population, outnumbered by the Shias of the south, 60% at least, and the Kurds of the mountainous north. Yet they always dominated Iraq's political life.

Thanks partly to the decline of traditional river traffic, Tikritis had taken to supplying the British-controlled Iraqi state with a disproportionate number of its soldiers. With time and plentiful purges, they emerged within the army as a distinct group; a preponderance which had been fortuitous at first finally became so great they could deliberately enlarge it. A close-knit minority within the Sunni minority, they exploited ties of region, clan and family to seize control of the army, then the state. Saddam, perfect recruit to the sinister, violent, conspiratorial underworld that was Iraqi politics, positioned himself at the heart of this process.

He himself was never a soldier, but he used a formidable array of Tikritis who were, and Ba'athists to boot. Ba'athism was a radical, pan-Arab nationalist doctrine then sweeping the region. Though doubtless impelled in that direction by the extreme, chauvinist beliefs of his uncle Khairallah, who had been dismissed from the army and imprisoned for five years for his part in a 1941 attack on an RAF base near Baghdad, it was mainly out of convenience, not conviction, that Saddam joined the party; strong in Tikrit and the Sunni "triangle", dedicated to force not persuasion, it readily appealed to a man of his ambition and temper.

In theory he remained a Ba'athist to his dying day, but for him Ba'athism was always an apparatus, never an ideology: no sooner was command of the one complete than he dispensed entirely with the other. For next to brutality, opportunism was his chief trait. Not Stalin himself could have governed with such whimsy, or lurched, ideologically, politically, strategically, from one extreme to another with quite such ease, regularity, and disastrous consequences, and yet still, incredibly, retain command to the end.

The Ba'ath, and other "revolutionary" parties, had come into their own with the overthrow, in 1958, of the "reactionary", British-created Hashemite monarchy. They quickly fell out with General Kassem's new regime and with each other, rivalries that expressed themselves mainly in streetfighting and assassinations. That was the way of life that Saddam fell into as a street-gang leader, after going, in 1955, to live with his uncle in Baghdad to study at Karkh high school.

Saddam first achieved national prominence in 1959 with a bungled attempt to kill Kassem. He seems to have lost his nerve and opened fire prematurely. But though his role was less than glorious, it became an essential component of the Saddam legend - that of the dauntless young revolutionary extracting a bullet from his leg with his own hand, and, with security forces in hot pursuit, swimming the icy waters of the Euphrates, knife between clenched teeth, before galloping to safety across the Syrian desert; eventually fetching up in Cairo, where his university law studies were terminated by the next political convulsion back home - Kassem's overthrow in February 1963.

Securing a share in the new regime, the Ba'athists lost it the following November when they fell out with the other parties. Pushed back into the underground, Saddam took what subsequently turned out to be his first, concrete step towards supreme office. In 1964, he formed the Jihaz al-Hunein, the Instrument of Yearning, the first, embryonic version of a terror apparatus of which, in its full fruition, Stalin would not have been ashamed.

It was an outgrowth of the party. That meant that, through it, Saddam, though not an officer, could now see his way to the summit. But at this stage his main asset was his collaboration with his fellow-Tikriti, Brigadier Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Thanks to a combination of Bakr's traditional military means and Saddam's new, "civilian" ones, the pair pulled off the "glorious July 1968 Revolution".

At 31, as deputy secretary general of the Ba'ath party, Saddam was the power behind President Bakr's throne. But at first he assumed, like Stalin in his similar period, a disarmingly modest and retiring demeanour as he lay the foundations of what he called a new kind of rule; "With our party methods," he said, "there is no chance for anyone who disagrees with us to jump on a couple of tanks and overthrow the government." Gradually he subordinated the army to the party.

There was nothing modest about the Ba'athists' inaugural reign of terror; few knew it then, but it was chiefly his handiwork, and quite different from anything hitherto experienced in a country already notorious for its harsh political tradition. Saddam's henchmen presided over "revolutionary tribunals" that sent hundreds to the firing squad on charges of puerile, trumped up absurdity. They called on "the masses" to "come and enjoy the feast": the hanging of "Jewish spies" in Liberation Square amid ghoulish festivities and bloodcurdling official harangues.

That was the public face. Behind it were such places as the Palace of the End. So called because King Faisal died there in the 1958 Revolution, it was now more aptly named than ever. Saddam's first security chief, Nadhim Kzar, had turned it into a chamber of horrors. But Kzar, a Shia, nursed a grudge against his Sunni patrons; in 1973, he turned against them; Saddam, Bakr and a host of top Tikritis had a very narrow escape indeed.

Thereafter the badly shaken number two relied almost entirely on Tikritis; the more sensitive the post, the more closely related its incumbent would be to himself. Meanwhile, with guile and infinite patience, he worked his way towards his supreme goal. Purge followed judicious purge, first aimed at the Ba'athists' rivals, then the army, then the party, then influential, respected, or strategically located people whom he deemed most liable, at some point, to cry halt to his inexorable ascension.

When, in June 1979, all was set for him to depose and succeed the ailing Bakr, he could have accomplished it with bloodless ease. But he wilfully, gratuitously chose blood in what was a psychological as well as a symbolic necessity. He had to inaugurate the "era of Saddam Hussein" with a rite whose message would be unmistakable: there had arisen in Mesopotamia a ruler who, in his barbaric splendour, cruelty and caprice, was to yield nothing to its despots of old.

Only now did he emerge, personally and very publicly, as accuser, judge and executioner in one. He called an extraordinary meeting of senior party cadres. They were solemnly informed that "a gang disloyal to the party and the revolution" had mounted a "base conspiracy" in the service of "Zionism and the forces of darkness", and that all the "traitors" were right there, with them, in the hall. One of their ringleaders, brought straight from prison, made a long and detailed confession of his "horrible crime".

Saddam, puffing on a Havana cigar, calmly watched the proceedings as if they had nothing to do with him. Then he took the podium. He began to read out the "traitors'" names, slowly and theatrically; he seemed quite overcome as he did so, pausing only to light his cigar or wipe away his tears with a handkerchief. All 66 "traitors" were led away one by one.

Thus did the new president make inaugural use of that essential weapon of the ultimate tyrant, the occasional flamboyant, contemptuous act of utter lawlessness, turpitude or unpredictability, and the enforced prostration of his whole apparatus, in praise and rejoicing, before it. Those of the audience who had not been named showed their relief with hysterical chants of gratitude and a baying for the blood of their fallen comrades.

Saddam then called on ministers and party leaders to join him in personally carrying out the "democratic executions"; every party branch in the country sent an armed delegate to assist them. It was, he said, "the first time in the history of revolutionary movements without exception, or perhaps of human struggle, that over half the supreme leadership had taken part in a tribunal" which condemned the other half. "We are now," he confided, "in our Stalinist era."

But in one way he had actually surpassed his exemplar. Upon entering the Kremlin, the former Georgian streetfighter had at least kept himself fittingly aloof from his "great terror". Not Saddam. Newly exalted, he was to remain down-to-earth too; new caliph of Baghdad, but, direct participant in his own terror, very much the Tikriti gangster, too.

The "Leader, President, Struggler" now emerged as a regional and international actor with the disproportionate capacity for promoting well-being and order or wreaking havoc which Iraq's great strategic and political importance, vast oil wealth, relatively educated citizenry and powerful army conferred on him. With U-turns, blunders and megalomaniac whimsies, he chose havoc; he wreaked it on the region and the world, but above all on Iraq itself.

In September 1980 he went to war against Iran. It was known as "Saddam's Qadisiyah", after the Arabs' early Islamic victory over the Persians. His official, strictly limited war aims revolved round the Shatt al-Arab estuary and his determination to renegotiate the "Algiers agreement" he had concluded a mere five years before. A dire emergency had forced that humiliation on him: the Iraqi army had been close to defeat in its campaign to suppress the last great, Iranian-backed Kurdish uprising led by Mullah Mustafa Barazani. The quid pro quo for Algiers had been the American-inspired withdrawal of the Shah's support for Barazani.

His "Qadisiyah", first of his spectacular volte-faces, was now to avenge the humiliation. But he also had a higher, unofficial aim: to weaken or destroy the Ayatollah Khomeini's new-born Islamic Republic, or at least its subversive potentialities in Iraq itself. For Iraq's Shia majority now saw in their Iranian co-religionists a means of bringing down Sunni minority rule. Hitherto closely bound to the Soviet Union, Saddam now bid for the west's favour as the Shah's natural heir as the "strong man" of the Gulf.

In the terrible eight-year struggle that followed, the Ayatollah's Iran remorselessly turned the tables on the Iraqi aggressor, recovered all its conquered territory, and, in a series of fearsome "human wave" offensives, tried to conquer Iraq, and turn it into the world's second "Islamic Republic".

That would have been a geopolitical upheaval of incalculable consequences. To forestall it, the west, beneath a mask of outward neutrality, put its weight behind one unlovely regime because it found the other unlovelier still. While the frightened, oil-rich Gulf furnished cash, the west furnished conventional weapons, and the means to manufacture a whole array of unconventional ones: nuclear, chemical and biological. Almost miraculously, Saddam held out, until, in July 1988, Khomeini drank from what he called "the poisoned chalice" of a ceasefire.

Of course, Saddam hailed this, his "first Gulf war", as a victory. Though what possible victory there could have been in an outcome which, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded and captured, immense physical destruction and economic havoc, left Iraq on a permanent war footing, still seeking to renegotiate the status of the Shatt al-Arab?

Even if he could not officially admit it, he had good reason to give his people some recompense for their sufferings. He made as if to offer them two things, material betterment and some democratisation. But he cannot have been serious about either. Thanks to the ravages of his "Qadisiyah", he had no money for economic reconstruction. And, in another great volte-face, he staged a virtual counter-revolution against the one ideal of Ba'athism, its socialism, which he had made a passable attempt to put into practice. Worse, the main beneficiaries of the economic revisionism were the Tikriti pillars of his regime, now corrupt as well as despotic.

With the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the east European dictator he most closely resembled, Saddam abandoned talk of "the new pluralist trends" he discerned in the world. Indeed, he persisted, more surrealistically than ever, in the despot's law: the more disastrous his deeds the more they should be glorified. His cult of personality expressed itself most overbearingly in monumental architecture, where the public - an amazing array of bizarre or futuristic memorials to his "Qadisiyah" - merged with the private (his proliferating palaces) in grandiose tribute to all the attributes, bordering on the divine, ascribed to him.

It reflected a degree of control that enabled him, amazingly, to embark, within two years of the first, on his "second Gulf war", and then, more amazingly still, to survive that yet greater calamity in its turn. It was a resort to the classic diversionary expedient, a flashy foreign adventure, of the dictator in trouble at home. He cast himself once again as the pan-Arab champion, boasting that, having secured the Arabs' eastern flank against the Persians, he was now turning his attention westwards, with the aim of settling scores with the Arabs' other great foe, the Zionists. He threatened "to burn half of Israel" with his weapons of mass destruction, thrilling large segments of an Arab public desperately short of credible heroes.

But instead of Israel, it was Kuwait which, on the night of August 2 1990, Saddam attacked, or, rather, gobbled up in its entirety. Hardly had he done that than, to appease Iran, he unilaterally re-accepted the Algiers agreement on the Shatt al-Arab. It was the most breathtaking of his volte-faces; even as he dragged his people into another unprovoked war, he was in effect telling them that, in the first, they had shed all that blood, sweat and tears for nothing.

The Kuwait invasion was the ultimate excess, whimsy and Promethean delusion of the despot: the belief that he could get away with anything. Yet nothing had encouraged this excess like the west's indulgence of his earlier ones. Sure, it had never loved him. But neither had it protested at his use of chemical weapons against Iran. It had contented itself with little more than a wringing of hands when he went on to gas his own people.

In March 1988, in revenge for an Iranian territorial gain, he wiped out 5,000 Kurdish inhabitants of Halabja; then, the war over, he wiped out several thousand more in "Operation Anfal", his final, genocidal attempt to solve his Kurdish problem. In effect, the west's reaction had been to treat the Kurds as an internal Iraqi affair; exterminating them en masse may have briefly stirred the international conscience, but it tended, if anything, to reinforce the existing international order.

But now that he was so ungratefully, so shockingly threatening this order itself, the west finally awoke to the true nature of the monster it had nurtured. Before long, Saddam faced an American-led army of half a million men assembled in the Arabian desert.

He did not blench. And for a few months he won adulation as the latter-day Saladin, who, after Kuwait, would go on to liberate Palestine. He said his army was eagerly awaiting the coalition's great land offensive to reconquer Kuwait; in "the mother of all battles", Iraq would "water the desert with American blood".

But he stood no chance. For a month, allied aircraft rained high-tech devastation on his army, air force, economic and strategic infrastructure. He panicked, ordering his army's withdrawal from Kuwait. It was not enough for the allies. As their ground forces swept almost unopposed through Kuwait, then into southern Iraq, the withdrawal became a rout. They could have marched on Baghdad. He caved in utterly, accepting every demand that the allies made. Only then did they cease their advance.

They had shattered most of his "million-man army" except for its elite Republican Guards, held in reserve to defend the regime against the wrath of the people. And this time their wrath was truly unleashed. The two oppressed majorities, Shias and Kurds, staged their great uprisings. These began spontaneously, when a Shia tank commander, having fled from Kuwait to Basra, positioned his vehicle in front of one of those gigantic, ubiquitous murals of the tyrant and addressed it thus: "What has befallen us of defeat, shame and humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations and your irresponsible actions."

But the uprisings foundered on the rock of Saddam's residual strength, western betrayal and, in the south, their own disorganisation, vengeful excesses and failure to distance themselves from Iranian expansionist designs. Exploiting the Sunni minority's fear that if he went, so would many of them, in the most horrible of massacres, Saddam sent in his guards. Dreadful atrocities accompanied the slow reconquest of the south. And when the Guards turned north, the whole population of "liberated" Kurdistan fled in panic through snow and bitter cold to Iran and Turkey.

The television images of that grim stampede caught the measure of western betrayal. Four weeks previously, President George Bush senior had urged the Iraqis to rise up. But when they did so, he turned a deaf ear to their pleas for help. "New Hitler" Saddam might be, but he was also the only barrier against the possible break-up of Iraq itself. Saudi Arabia, for one, could not tolerate the prospect. It told the US it would work to replace Saddam with an army officer who would keep the country in safe, authoritarian, Sunni Muslim hands.

Saddam was saved again. And for 12 more years he hung on, as his people sank into social, economic and political miseries incomparably greater than those which had propelled him into Kuwait. Tikriti solidarity continued to preserve him against putsch and assassination. And never again would the people stage an uprising without assurance of success. Only the west could provide that. But the West, preoccupied with other crises, was paralysed.

It would, or could, not withdraw from what, after the Gulf war, it had put in place, a curious, contradictory amalgam of UN sanctions that penalised the Iraqi people, not its rulers, a moral commitment to safeguard "liberated" Kurdistan, an ineffectual "no-fly zone" over the Shia south.

But it also feared to go further in and, completing the logic of what it had begun, join forces with a serious Iraqi opposition that could bring the tyrant down and keep the country in one piece thereafter. This was inertia, which, the longer it lasted, the more dearly it would pay for in the end. Every now and then confrontations erupted between the world's only superpower and this most exasperating of "rogue states"; they arose out of Saddam's attempts to break out of his "box", via some renewed threat to Kuwait, an incursion into the western-protected Kurdish enclave, or - most persistently - showdowns over the UN's mission to divest Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

In the last of them, in 1998, his elite military and security apparatus took a four-day pounding from the air. Heavy though this was, it proved to be the last, symbolic flourish behind which the Clinton administration acquiesced in what, with the expulsion of the arms inspectors, was a diplomatic victory for Saddam.

In the end, it was less his own misdeeds that brought the despot down, but those of the man who, for a while, supplanted him as America's ultimate villain, Osama bin Laden. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, but he fell victim none the less to the crusading militarism, the new doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, the close identification with a rightwing Israeli agenda, that now took full possession of the administration of George Bush junior. Iraq became the first target among the three states (with Iran and North Korea) that it had placed on its "axis of evil", and with the launch of the invasion by the US, UK and their allies in March 2003, Saddam's days were numbered.

However, three years passed between his capture and his execution yesterday. In December 2003, following a tip-off from an intelligence source, US forces found him hiding in an underground refuge on a farm near Tikrit, where his life had begun. It was the middle of the next year before he was transferred to Iraqi custody, and in July 2004 the former president appeared in court to hear criminal charges. Another year passed before the prosecution was ready to proceed with counts related to the massacre in the small Shia town of Dujail in 1982. The trial at last opened in October 2005 and the proceedings were immediately adjourned. Saddam, who two months earlier had sacked his legal team, pleaded innocence. A second trial on war crimes charges relating to the 1988 Anfal campaign opened on August 21 this year. He refused to enter a plea, and episodes of black farce, which characterised his earlier appearances in court, recurred, with the judge switching of his microphone because of his interruptions, and ejecting him from the court four times. The trial was adjourned on October 11, but on November 5 the court handed down a guilty verdict and sentenced Saddam to death by hanging.

Saddam married Saida Khairallah in 1963. Their sons Uday and Qusay (obituaries, July 23 2003) were killed by American forces; they had three daughters.

· Saddam Hussein abd al-Majid, politician, born April 28 1937; died December 30 2006.

    Saddam Hussein, G, 30.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1980293,00.html

11.30am update

Saddam Hussein executed

Saturday December 30, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

Saddam Hussein was executed at dawn today following his conviction by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity.

The death sentence was carried out at a former military intelligence headquarters in a Shia district of Baghdad at 6am local time (3am GMT).

One of those who witnessed the hanging, Sami al-Askari, an adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, said Saddam struggled when he was taken from his cell in a US military prison but was composed in his last moments. He expressed no remorse.

The former dictator, dressed in black, refused a hood and said he wanted the Koran he carried to the gallows to be given to a friend. "Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted. 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab'," Mr Askari told the Associated Press.

Another witness, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor, said Saddam was "strangely submissive" in the execution chamber. "He was a broken man," he said. "He was afraid. You could see fear in his face."

In a prepared statement, George Bush cautioned that Saddam's execution would not stop the violence in Iraq but said it was "an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror."

The office of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, released a statement that said Saddam's execution was a "strong lesson" to ruthless leaders who commit crimes against their own people. The Iraqi state broadcaster, Iraqiya, later aired film of the lead-up to the execution but not the hanging itself.

Saddam's execution was followed by reports of a car bombing with as many as 30 dead in the Shia city of Kufa.

In Sadr City, a major Shia area in Baghdad, people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted.

The execution, which became imminent after his appeal was this week rejected, brought to an end the life of one of the Middle East's most brutal dictators.

Launching the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, campaigns against the Kurds and putting down the southern Shia revolt that followed the 1991 Gulf war - triggered by his invasion of Kuwait - put the casualties attributable to his rule into the hundreds of thousands.

But the conviction that led to his hanging was for a relatively lower figure - the deaths of 148 men and boys from the Shia town of Dujail, where members of an opposition group had made a botched attempt to assassinate him in 1982.

In Iraq opinion was divided sharply along sectarian lines, with Sunni Muslims warning of "bloodbaths in the streets".

Even among Shia Muslims, terrorised for decades by Saddam, there was a sense of hopelessness. "They can kill him 10 times but it won't bring safety to the streets because there is no state of law," said one Shia taxi driver who gave his name as Shawkat.

In the Kurdish north, jubilation was tempered by the fear of deeper sectarian tensions and disappointment that Saddam would now not be able to stand trial for other charges including the gas attack on the town of Halabja that killed 5,000 people in 1988.

"It would have been much better for the execution to have taken place in Halabja, not in Baghdad," said Barham Khorsheed, a Kurd.

Many critics dismissed the conduct of the trial and Saddam Hussein's defence team had accused the Iraqi government of interfering in the proceedings. The latter complaint was backed by the US-based Human Rights Watch.

The process that ended with his execution began with the launch of the 2003 US-led war to disarm Iraq's claimed weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Bush committed the US to a policy of regime change and Saddam was ousted within weeks of the invasion. Just over eight months later, US forces captured him from his hiding place in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit.

Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, told a press conference: "We got him". For the first time, he showed video footage of a dishevelled former dictator, with unkempt hair and beard, being inspected by military doctors.

His rise was through the Ba'ath party. The party, which had participated in previous coups against Iraqi governments, took complete power in 1968.

Saddam was deputy president and regime strongman, responsible for internal security. But used his position to build a powerbase allowing him to supplant Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr as president in 1979. On taking power he launched a massive purge of the party.

Iraq under Saddam was under the thuggish rule of the dictator and, frequently, his relatives and cronies from Tikrit.

Saddam Hussein's half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, and Iraq's former chief judge, Awad Hamed al-Bandar, were also sentenced to death at the close of the Dujail trial.

Iraqiya television initially reported the two were also hanged today but officials later said only Saddam was executed.

    Saddam Hussein executed, G, 30.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1980290,00.html

Saddam executed

End of tyrannical era as former dictator is hanged for crimes against humanity

Saturday December 30, 2006
Guardian
Brian Whitaker, Michael Howard, Ghaith Abdul Ahad and agencies in Baghdad

Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi despot who menaced neighbours and murdered his own people during a quarter century of wretched tyranny, died ignominiously on the gallows shortly before dawn this morning at the hands of his former enemies.

Saddam, who was convicted last month of crimes against humanity in one of many episodes of brutality laid at his door and ordered to hang on Boxing Day, was executed at around 6am (3 am GMT) at an undisclosed location, according to local television reports.

The execution removed one of the great hangovers of 20th century brutality, a dictator with more than just a physical resemblance to Stalin who ruled through fear, vengeance, cunning and terror.

But the death of Saddam, 69, promised little respite for a country breaking along sectarian lines. With thousands dying each month and occupation forces at a loss to stop the bloodshed, the execution of the self-styled "hero of national liberation" was seen at best as an irrelevance and at worst as a possible catalyst for deeper civil strife.

Opinion divided sharply along sectarian lines, with Sunni Muslims warning of "bloodbaths in the streets". Even among the Shia, terrorised for decades by Saddam, there was a sense of hopelessness. "They can kill him 10 times but it won't bring safety to the streets because there is no state of law," said one Shia taxi driver who gave his name as Shawkat.

In the Kurdish north, jubilation was tempered by the fear of deeper sectarian tensions and disappointment that Saddam would now not be able to stand trial for other charges including the Anfal attack on the town of Halabja that killed 5,000 people in 1988.

"It would have been much better for the execution to have taken place in Halabja, not in Baghdad," said Barham Khorsheed, a Kurd.

In the end, the final act was as swift as the legal procedure mounted against Saddam had been protracted. After more than three years in detention and following a tortuous trial that oscillated between farce and high drama and back again, the execution was expedited ahead of a religious holiday that starts today.

The prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki signed Saddam's death sentence yesterday and officials accelerated the paperwork, including a sinister "red card" handed to the convict to inform him of his impending execution.

The Americans were wary of handing him over before the final moment, lest he be humiliated or mistreated in such a way as to provoke reprisal attacks and a new cycle of sectarian bloodshed. US forces in Iraq were already on high alert for a surge in violence following the execution. A four-day curfew had reportedly been imposed in Saddam's home town and erstwhile power base, Tikrit.

Details of the execution were still emerging early this morning. The authorities had rejected the idea of hanging him before a live audience in a Baghdad football stadium, but senior officials insisted that public confirmation of the success of his execution was "very important". A source in the justice ministry said the proceedings would be recorded by a video-cameraman and a stills photographer. "It is probable that clips and images may be broadcast on national TV," the official said, adding: "Iraqis must see for themselves that the man who oppressed them for so long is dead ... But we will not turn the whole thing into a circus."

Also to be hanged were Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the revolutionary court.

It was unclear if Saddam would have gone to the gallows with a cone-shaped hood over the head, as is customary. Previous convicts have been allowed a final meal, cigarette and moment for prayer before facing the hangman's noose. Death is normally instantaneous.

Saddam reportedly faced his final hours in good spirits. Two of Saddam's half brothers had already visited him in his jail cell where he gave them his will, according to Iraqi officials.

Khalil al-Dulaimi, who led Saddam's defence team until he was sentenced on November 5, said yesterday that the Americans had called and "asked me to pick up the personal effects".

Another lawyer, Badie Aref, said Saddam had been "in very high spirits and clearly readying himself" during the meeting with his half-brothers. "He told them he was happy he would meet his death at the hands of his enemies and be a martyr, not just languish in jail."

Saddam's execution puts a fullstop to a life that was steeped in violence from beginning to end, a life epitomised by the iconic image of a man in a dark suit and black homburg hat impassively letting off a volley of rounds from a shotgun.

His hardy upbringing at the hands of a thuggish step-father in 1940s rural, British-controlled Iraq exposed him to the meaner side of human nature. After unexceptional studies, he began elbowing his way up the ranks of Ba'athism, the pan-Arab nationalism that served as a convenient vehicle for his singular ambitions.

He was instrumental in a botched attack on the military ruler General Kassem in 1958, and spent the next five years in Cairo, returning only when Kassem was overthrown in 1963. Five years later, the Ba'athists pulled off a coup and Saddam remained the power behind the throne until he deposed his fellow Tikriti, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr in 1979.

Saddam immediately led his country in an eight-year war with Iran, a campaign that might have failed if it had not been for covert western support. Within two years of the ceasefire, he marched his troops into Kuwait, triggering the first gulf war that almost drove him from power.

His last decade in power was dominated by the cat-and-mouse game of avoiding UN sanctions, which ruined the economy and the prosperity of ordinary Iraqis, while Saddam, his family and their cronies grew wealthier and wealthier. And the paranoia deepened. There were at least a dozen intelligence agencies, mostly spying on each other and all spying on the Iraqi population. Saddam's image towered over a cowed society, daubed on vast concrete hoardings across the country in various poses: an army general, a tribal leader, an observant Muslim.

The beginning of the end came eight months after US forces rolled into Baghdad, when he was pulled, hirsute and disoriented from a hidey-hole in the ground in December 2003. There were times during the legal procedure when his enemies must have doubted that the outcome they sought would come. Today it did.

    Saddam executed, G, 30.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1980225,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

12.45pm

British soldier killed in Iraq

Friday December 29, 2006
Press Association
Guardian Unlimited

A British soldier was killed today in Basra, southern Iraq, when a roadside bomb hit the vehicle he was travelling in, the Ministry of Defence said.

The soldier, from the 2nd Battalion Duke of Lancaster's Regiment, was taking part in a routine patrol in a Warrior armoured fighting vehicle when it was targeted, the MoD said.

He suffered serious injuries and was airlifted to the field hospital at Shaibah logistics base but later died. There were no other casualties.

The death takes the number of UK service personnel who have died in Iraq since the start of the war in 2003 to 127.

    British soldier killed in Iraq, G, 29.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1979948,00.html

Iraq's shallow justice

Saddam's trial has been a missed opportunity for the government to respect human rights

Friday December 29, 2006
Richard Dicker
The Guardian

The imminent execution of Saddam Hussein and two other former Iraqi officials marks a further step away from respect for human rights and the rule of law in a deeply polarised and violent Iraq. For 15 years Human Rights Watch and other organisations documented rights violations committed by the former government. There is no question that Saddam and his cohort were responsible for horrific practices. But by ratifying the execution order the tribunal's appeals chamber has compounded the serious errors committed at trial and further undermined the credibility of the process.

The trial judgment was not finished when the verdict and sentence were announced on November 5. The record only became available to defence lawyers on November 22. According to the tribunal's statute, the defence attorneys had to file their appeals on December 5, which gave them less than two weeks to respond to the 300-page trial decision. The appeals chamber never held a hearing to consider the legal arguments presented as allowed by Iraqi law. It defies belief that the appeals chamber could fairly review a 300-page decision together with written submissions by the defence and consider all the relevant issues in less than three weeks.

This follows a trial whose serious flaws rendered the verdict unsound. The trial was undermined from the start by persistent political interference from the Iraqi government. Furthermore, the rights of the defendants were systematically denied by failures to disclose key evidence to the defence. There were also serious violations of the defendants' rights to confront witnesses testifying against them. Most disturbing were the frequent lapses of judicial demeanour by the trial's second presiding judge. In January, the first chief judge resigned in protest over the public criticism of his trial management practices by leading officials.

These failures contrast with the seriousness of the cases before the tribunal. For the first time since the postwar Nuremberg trials, almost the entire leadership of a repressive government faced trial for gross human rights violations. It offered the chance to create a historical record of some of the regime's unspeakable rights violations and to begin the process of accounting for the policies and decisions that gave rise to them. Trials conforming to international standards of fairness would have been more likely to ventilate and verify the historical facts, contribute to the public recognition of the experiences of victims, and set a more stable foundation for democratic accountability. Instead, unlike the Nuremberg trials, the proceedings have fallen far short of creating the reference point that could clarify for Iraqis what happened and why.

The death sentence is a further step away from respect for human rights. The death penalty, regardless of the crimes involved, is tantamount to cruel and inhuman punishment. For an Iraq where, one hopes, human rights and the rule of law will one day be respected, Saddam's punishment is an important benchmark. The execution order signals the shallowness of the government's commitment to basic human rights in meting out punishment.

The momentary elation over Saddam's demise among those who suffered under his regime will not outweigh or outlast the loss of a unique opportunity to establish a clear record of his regime's criminality. The flawed trial and a fast-track execution send a clear signal that political interference is still very much a feature of the judicial process in the new Iraq.

· Richard Dicker is the international justice director of Human Rights Watch

    Iraq's shallow justice, G, 29.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1979726,00.html

British Soldiers Storm Iraqi Jail, Citing Torture

December 26, 2006
The New York Times
By MARC SANTORA

BAGHDAD, Dec. 25 — Hundreds of British and Iraqi soldiers assaulted a police station in the southern city of Basra on Monday, killing seven gunmen, rescuing 127 prisoners from what the British said was almost certain execution and ultimately reducing the facility to rubble.

The military action was one of the most significant undertaken by British troops since the 2003 invasion, British officials said, adding that it was an essential step in any plan to re-establish security in Basra.

When the combined British and Iraqi force of 1,400 troops gained control of the station, it found the prisoners being held in conditions that a British military spokesman, Maj. Charlie Burbridge, described as “appalling.” More than 100 men were crowded into a single cell, 30 feet by 40 feet, he said, with two open toilets, two sinks and just a few blankets spread over the concrete floor.

A significant number showed signs of torture. Some had crushed hands and feet, Major Burbridge said, while others had cigarette and electrical burns and a significant number had gunshot wounds to their legs and knees.

The fetid dungeon was another example of abuses by the Iraqi security forces. The discovery highlighted the continuing struggle to combat the infiltration of the police and army by militias and criminal elements — even in a Shiite city like Basra, where there has been no sectarian violence.

As recently as October, the Iraqi government suspended an entire police brigade in Baghdad on suspicion of participation in death squads. The raid on Monday also raised echoes of the infamous Baghdad prison run by the Interior Ministry, known as Site 4, where more than 1,400 prisoners were subjected to systematic abuse and torture.

The focus of the attack was an arm of the local police called the serious crimes unit, which British officials said had been thoroughly infiltrated by criminals and militias who used it to terrorize local residents and violently settle scores with political or tribal rivals.

“The serious crimes unit was at the center of death squad activity,” Major Burbridge said.

A little over a year ago, British troops stormed the same building seeking to rescue two British special forces soldiers who had been captured by militants. A mob of 1,000 to 2,000 people gathered in protest, and a widely circulated video showed boys throwing stones at a burning British armored fighting vehicle parked outside the station. The soldiers, who were being held in a nearby building, were eventually freed.

Although some local officials, including Basra’s police chief, publicly condemned the action, local residents privately said they were grateful, and described what they said was an organization widely feared for its brutality.

“They are like savage dogs that bite when they are hungry,” said one resident, who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution. “Their evaluation of guilt or innocence is how much money you can pay.”

Residents said that people were afraid to challenge the officers because they were backed by powerful militia groups, including the Mahdi Army, which is led by the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, though the extent of his control is unclear.

“Everyone wants to avoid the mouth of the lion,” one resident said. “From this, they became stronger and stronger.”

Major Burbridge said that the dismantling of the serious crimes unit had been planned for months.

As far back as 2004, he said, there was a growing realization that the police had been widely infiltrated by members of various militias and elements of organized crime. To combat their influence, the British have been trying to cull them from the forces in a campaign that began in September.

After trying to determine who was fit to serve in the police, the British began outfitting trusted officers with sophisticated identification cards meant to limit the access of impostors to police intelligence, weapons and vehicles.

In late October, gunmen — believed by the British to have been connected to the serious crimes unit — ambushed a minibus carrying 17 employees of a new police academy and killed them all. Their mutilated remains were dumped in the Shuaiba area of the city in an effort to intimidate the local population.

“It had simply gone beyond the pale and it was clear it was time for the serious crimes unit to go,” Major Burbridge said in an interview.

While they had planned to take over the station on Monday, British forces had to speed up the operation by several hours. “We received information late last night,” Major Burbridge said Monday, “that the crimes unit was aware this was going to take place and we received information that the prisoners’ lives were in danger.”

More than 800 British soldiers, supported by five Challenger tanks and roughly 40 Warrior fighting vehicles, began their assault at 2 a.m. on Monday. They were aided by 600 Iraqi soldiers.

The British force faced the heaviest fighting as it made its way through the city, coming under sporadic attacks by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Of the seven guerrillas killed, six were gunned down as the unit made its way to the police station.

Upon reaching the station, British troops killed a guard in a watchtower who had fired on the approaching forces, but there was little other resistance.

The members of the serious crimes unit who had been occupying the building, several dozen, according to the British military, fled and were not caught. The British forces turned over the prisoners to the regular Iraqi police, who put them in a new detention facility.

The two-story building, once used by Saddam Hussein’s security forces, was then demolished, in an attempt to remove all traces of the serious crimes unit, Major Burbridge said.

The battle lasted nearly three hours. There were no British casualties, but the streets around the station were littered with bombed-out cars and rubble.

The violence in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, is different from that in Baghdad to the north or Anbar Province to the west, Major Burbridge said.

The killing in Baghdad in recent months has primarily been the result of sectarian violence, as Shiites have sought to drive Sunnis from mixed neighborhoods and Sunnis have retaliated. On Monday, at least 10 civilians were killed and 15 were wounded when a car bomb exploded in the mixed neighborhood of Jadida.

In northeastern Baghdad, a suicide bomber with explosives tied to his body blew himself up on a crowded bus, killing 2 people and wounding 20 others.

An American soldier also died Monday in Baghdad in a roadside bomb attack.

In Sunni-controlled Anbar Province, where the fighting is mainly between insurgents and American troops, two American soldiers were killed in fighting on Sunday.

In southern cities like Basra, dominated by Shiites, the fighting is a combination of battles between rival militias vying for power, warring tribes and organized crime, Major Burbridge said.

“In northern Basra, the fighting is mainly between three warring tribes,” he said. “The death squads are typically related to political maneuvering and tribal gain. Then there are rogue elements of militias aiming attacks on the multinational forces. You throw all those elements into a melting pot and you get a picture of the complexity of what we are facing.”

    British Soldiers Storm Iraqi Jail, Citing Torture, NYT, 26.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/world/middleeast/26iraq.html?hp&ex=1167195600&en=b4422a867f23d2af&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Send more troops to Baghdad and we’ll have a fighting chance

December 24, 2006
The Sunday Times
Frederick Kagan

A decisive moment in world history is at hand. If the United States, Britain and their allies fail in Iraq the result will almost certainly be a regional maelstrom. If the coalition succeeds, then the West will regain the initiative against radical Islam in Iran and throughout the Muslim world.

The current trajectory in Iraq is poor: rising sectarian violence threatens to rend Iraqi society and destroy America’s will to continue the struggle.

The choices are bleak: nobody has yet developed a convincing plan to resolve this conflict through diplomacy, politics or any other form of soft power. Hopes for success now rest on the coalition’s willingness to adopt a strategy of bringing security to the Iraqi population and confronting the sectarian violence directly as the prerequisite for subsequent political, economic and social development.

Embracing such a strategy would mark a dramatic change from the approach that the US military has pursued since April 2003. Since the beginning of the counter-insurgency effort US central command has focused on training Iraqi soldiers and police to establish and maintain security on their own. America’s own military efforts to establish security have been reactive, sporadic, under-resourced and ephemeral.

The creation of an Iraqi army that now numbers more than 130,000 troops is an impressive accomplishment, but that army has proved unable to stem the violence on its own. On the contrary, as its size and quality have increased the violence has grown even more.

Those well versed in the art of counter-insurgency will not be surprised by this phenomenon, since providing security to the population is a core task for any counter-insurgent force — as the recently released US military doctrinal manual on the subject emphasises.

It is now time to abandon the failed strategy of “transition” and return to the basics of counter-insurgency and stability operations by bringing peace to the Iraqi people.

Baghdad is the centre of gravity of the struggle in Iraq today. The United States, the government of Iraq and the insurgents have all identified it as the place they intend to win or lose. It is also the largest mixed community in Iraq.

Any hope for keeping Iraq together as a unitary state — thereby avoiding a genocidal civil and probably regional war — rests on keeping Baghdad mixed.

However, sectarian strife is leading rapidly to sectarian cleansing and many of Baghdad’s mixed communities are being forcibly purified. Bringing peace to those areas and ending the violence must be the primary task of coalition strategy.

Establishing security is a military task in the first instance. Troops must move through Baghdad’s neighbourhoods, examining every house and building, finding weapons caches and capturing insurgents and armed militias.

American forces have conducted many such operations in the past, including Operation Together Forward II as recently as the autumn.

In all previous operations the clearing of embattled neighbourhoods was followed by a rapid withdrawal of US forces. Insurgents of both sects then swarmed back in to the cleared areas to demonstrate the failure of the exercise by victimising the helpless inhabitants.

Success in such operations requires persistence. Once a neighbourhood has been cleared, US and Iraqi forces must remain to maintain security.

Partnered at the platoon or company level, they must live in the neighbourhoods and man permanent checkpoints. This approach was used with great success in Tal Afar in September 2005 and thereafter and is being used even now in some districts of Baghdad.

Units that remain in neighbourhoods rapidly gain the trust of the locals, who volunteer more information about troublemakers from within the neighbourhood and interlopers from outside.

The presence of US and Iraqi troops brings greater security, which enables the start of economic and political development. It is unfortunate that this basic counter-insurgency approach has been neglected so far, but it is not too late to undertake it.

Clearing and holding the critical mixed and Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad would require approximately nine American combat brigades, or about 45,000 soldiers. There are now five brigades operating in Baghdad, so America would have to add four more — about 20,000 soldiers.

In the past, central command generated surges in security in parts of Iraq by drawing forces from elsewhere. This approach created opportunities for the insurgents in the denuded areas. It would be wiser instead to couple a surge in Baghdad with an increase of troops in the other key hotbed of the insurgency, Anbar province.

There are now the equivalent of three brigades of US troops in Anbar. An additional two (about 10,000 troops) there would not allow the United States to clear and hold the province but would prevent insurgents fleeing the fight in Baghdad from destabilising Anbar further.

It would also place greater pressure on Al-Qaeda and the Sunni Arab insurgency, whose violent assaults on Shi’ite areas are a principal cause of the growth of Shi’ite militias.

Military action by itself will not lead to success, of course. The clearing of neighbourhoods must be accompanied by immediate reconstruction efforts.

These efforts should take two forms. All cleared neighbourhoods should receive a basic reconstruction package aimed at restoring essential services. But reconstruction can also be used as a form of incentive.

Neighbourhoods that co-operate with coalition efforts to maintain security could be rewarded with additional reconstruction efforts to improve their overall quality of life. These efforts should be channelled through Iraqi local (not central) government structures as much as possible.

The insurgents, particularly the Shi’ite Mahdi army, have begun imitating Hezbollah by providing services to the population of Baghdad in return for loyalty and support.

By offering reconstruction assistance through local Iraqi leaders, the coalition would get Iraqis used to looking to their own government for essential services.

Combining these efforts with the establishment and maintenance of real security would reduce the strongest recruiting tools that the Sunni and Shi’ite militias now have and would make possible future reconciliation and political progress.

The coalition forces can succeed in the end only if they can turn the responsibility for maintaining security over to the Iraqi forces; the training of the Iraqi army must also continue.

If a plan of this variety were adopted, in fact, the training of the Iraqis would improve dramatically. Embedding trainers in Iraqi units is a good start, but it is not as effective as partnering Iraqi units with coalition troops in planning and conducting missions.

This plan would also solve another critical problem: instead of presenting the growing Iraqi army with an ever-increasing security challenge, this strategy would lower the level of violence even as it expanded the Iraqis’ capabilities. Such an approach is the only way to make a successful transition to an independent and secure Iraq.

The increase in US troops cannot be short-term. Clearing and holding the critical areas of Baghdad will require all of 2007. Expanding the secured areas into Anbar, up the Diyala River valley, north to Mosul and beyond will take part of 2008.

It is unlikely that the Iraqi army and police will be able to assume full responsibility for security for at least 18 to 24 months after the beginning of this operation.

This strategy will place a greater burden on the already overstrained American ground forces, but the risk is worth taking.

Defeat will break the American army and marines more surely and more disastrously than extending combat tours. And the price of defeat for Iraq, the region and the world in any case is far too high to bear.

Frederick W Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq

Simon Jenkins is away

    Send more troops to Baghdad and we’ll have a fighting chance, STs, 24.12.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2517657,00.html

The betrayal of a soldier: Coroner in blistering attack on ministers at inquest

Published: 19 December 2006
The Independent
By Ian Herbert
 

The first British soldier to die in combat in Iraq was killed by friendly fire because of the Army's "unforgiveable and inexcusable" failure to equip him with body armour, an inquest has found.

Sgt Steven Roberts went into battle lacking "the most basic piece of equipment", the coroner examining his death concluded. "To send soldiers into a combat zone without the appropriate basic equipment is, in my view, unforgivable and inexcusable and represents a breach of trust that the soldiers have in those in government," concluded Andrew Walker, Oxfordshire's assistant deputy coroner, at the end of an inquest which uncovered a litany of flaws in Britain's preparations for the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Mr Walker's damning conclusions further expose a British military struggling desperately to equip its forces to deal with the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Scores of troops have been killed in aged Land Rover vehicles which offer inadequate protection against roadside bombs, while there is a shortage of helicopters and doubts about the effectiveness of the SA80 rifle.

The Army is experiencing major recruitment problems - its size has fallen below 100,000 for the first time since the Victorian era - and ministers face criticism over the poor salaries of troops serving overseas.

Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said Sgt Roberts' death was "utterly inexcusable and in a more honourable Government would have resulted in resignations". He added: "We still hear stories which reinforce the point that Tony Blair's Government is all too willing to commit our forces to battle without committing the appropriate resources to our armed forces."

At Oxford Coroner's Court, Mr Walker said he had heard "justification and excuse" during six days of evidence about Sgt Roberts' death, which has centred on the army's decision to take back the soldier's enhanced combat body armour (ECBA) three days before he died because there were not enough of the sets to go around. "I put these to one side as I remind myself that Sgt Roberts lost his life because he did not have that basic piece of equipment," he said.

When he died just after dawn on 24 March, 2003, Sgt Roberts, 33, from Shipley, west Yorkshire was clad in makeshift armour which he had made by stuffing pieces of padding into his fatigues and sticking them together with black masking tape. After leaving one of three British Challenger tanks patrolling a vehicle checkpoint east of Az Zubayr, in southern Iraq, he came under attack from a stone throwing insurgent wearing white face paint, which seemed to mark him out as a martyr.

Sgt Roberts'Browning pistol jammed in the dust - as have many others carried by the British forces. Then, a machine gun in a tank also failed, so the co-axial machine gun was turned on the Iraqi instead. But the young gunner who fired the fateful round had not been trained in the use of co-axial. He did not know it was a long-range weapon which, at short range, hit objects to the left of the sights - where Sgt Roberts happened to be.

The coroner last week asked former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to appear before him after hearing how the minister delayed for eight weeks before approving a request for extra ECBA kits in 2002. An MoD director, David Williams, appeared in the minister's place yesterday and gave evidence which revealed why military staff working for a Board of Inquiry into Sgt Roberts' death, earlier this year, had failed to unearth answers about the eight-week delay.

Mr Williams said that an urgent written request for 37,000 extra sets of ECBA, sent to Mr Hoon by an MoD logistics team on September 13, 2002, was returned by the minister with the annotation "further advice required" because any approach to manufacturers would have telegraphed the fact that Britain was preparing for war while diplomacy continued at the UN.

Mr Hoon finally allowed officials to place an order for the £167 ECBA kits (the cost is equivalent to two days' pay for an Army private) on 13 November. But the kits did not reach Iraq until 31 March, 2003 - eight days too late for Sgt Roberts, who was serving with the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment Cyclops Squadron.

The lack of equipment was exacerbated by the coalition's decision, in January 2003, to invade Iraq from the south, rather than the north. Though an additional 4,000 troops were needed for the southern approach, the combat gear order had not been increased accordingly. A total of 2,200 troops lacked ECBA kits.

Mr Roberts' widow, Samantha discovered some of these shortcoming when she heard audio tapes recorded by her husband in the days before his death, describing preparations as "a joke".She said: "The loss of Steve to us cannot be measured. This has been the driving force behind our quest for answers, some of which we feel could have been provided earlier."

The grievances

By Nigel Morris

* Pay/allowances

Levels of pay are a constant grumble, as Tony Blair discovered when visited Afghanistan last month. Several soldiers told the Prime Minister that a basic marine, who is paid just over £12,000, could have earned double in the fire service.

* Recruitment/retention

Levels of recruitment are holding up, but 9,200 left last year before their period of engagement was up. The armed forces are 5,170 under strength.

* Mental illness

According to MoD figures, 1,897 soldiers have returned from Iraq with mental health problems, of which 278 have post-traumatic stress disorder, while others suffer depression, acute anxiety or turn to drink or drugs to cope with their problems.

* Equipment

The standard-issue army rifle, the SA80 A2, has been dogged by problems, particularly when salt-water and sand interfered with its mechanism. The rifle has been upgraded but complaints persist.

* Vehicles

A quarter of British soldiers killed by hostile action in Iraq were travelling in "snatch" Land Rovers - vehicles designed for Northern Ireland rather than the arid conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan. They are bullet-proof, but provide no protection from improvised roadside bombs.

    The betrayal of a soldier: Coroner in blistering attack on ministers at inquest, I, 19.12.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2086707.ece

Soldier killed because of 'inexcusable' supply delay

December 18, 2006
Times Online

A British tank commander who died in Iraq because he did not have any body armour was the victim of an "unforgivable and inexcusable" failure by the Government, a coroner ruled today.

Sergeant Steve Roberts, 33, died manning a checkpoint outside Az Zubayr in southern Iraq in March. He was killed by friendly fire after a fellow tank crew started shooting at an Iraqi man who was attacking him with a stone.

A subsequent Army Board of Inquiry found that Roberts would have survived if he had been wearing standard issue body armour, but he had been forced to hand his in three days before his death because of the chaotic state of supply to British forces in the opening weeks of the Iraq war.

Today, Oxfordshire assistant deputy coroner, Andrew Walker, blamed the Ministry of Defence for leaving around 2,000 soldiers in Iraq without the Army's enhanced combat body armour, which costs £167 per set.

"To send soldiers into a combat zone without the appropriate basic equipment is, in my view, unforgivable and inexcusable and represents a breach of trust that the soldiers have in those in Government," he said, recording a narrative verdict in the death of Roberts.

"This Enhanced Combat Body Armour was a basic piece of protective equipment. I have heard justification and excuse and I put these to one side as I remind myself that Sergeant Roberts lost his life because he did not have that basic piece of equipment.

"Sergeant Roberts’s death was as a result of delay and serious failures in the acquisition and support chain that resulted in a significant shortage within his fighting unit of enhanced combat body armour, none being available for him to wear."

During the hearing, witnesses, including the former Secretary of Defence, Geoff Hoon, were called to explain an eight-week delay in late 2002 that caused the shortage of body armour and other supplies during the invasion of Iraq. The court also heard recordings made by Roberts for his wife, in which he described the state of his equipment as "a bit of a joke".

"We’ve got nothing, it’s disgraceful what we’ve got out here. It’s pretty demoralising," he said.

Speaking after the hearing today, Roberts’s widow Samantha said the verdict and changes in military procedures would be her husband’s legacy.

"The policy on enhanced combat body armour has changed — this is Steve’s legacy — but we must ensure that these failures are not repeated with other basic kit. We have heard from Steve himself, who said it is disheartening to go to war without the correct equipment."

"The coroner found failing in training and command in the run-up to and after the shooting, but the single most important factor was the lack of enhanced combat body armour. If Steve had had that, he would be with us today."

    Soldier killed because of 'inexcusable' supply delay, Ts, 18.12.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2510786,00.html

Diplomat's suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war

Published: 15 December 2006
The Independent
By Colin Brown and Andy McSmith

The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."

Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been "effectively contained".

He also reveals that British officials warned US diplomats that bringing down the Iraqi dictator would lead to the chaos the world has since witnessed. "I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said.

"At the same time, we would frequently argue when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

He claims "inertia" in the Foreign Office and the "inattention of key ministers" combined to stop the UK carrying out any co-ordinated and sustained attempt to address sanction-busting by Iraq, an approach which could have provided an alternative to war.

Mr Ross delivered the evidence to the Butler inquiry which investigated intelligence blunders in the run-up to the conflict.

The Foreign Office had attempted to prevent the evidence being made public, but it has now been published by the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs after MPs sought assurances from the Foreign Office that it would not breach the Official Secrets Act.

It shows Mr Ross told the inquiry, chaired by Lord Butler, "there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical warfare], BW [biological warfare] or nuclear material" held by the Iraqi dictator before the invasion. "There was, moreover, no intelligence or assessment during my time in the job that Iraq had any intention to launch an attack against its neighbours or the UK or the US," he added.

Mr Ross's evidence directly challenges the assertions by the Prime Minster that the war was legally justified because Saddam possessed WMDs which could be "activated" within 45 minutes and posed a threat to British interests. These claims were also made in two dossiers, subsequently discredited, in spite of the advice by Mr Ross.

His hitherto secret evidence threatens to reopen the row over the legality of the conflict, under which Mr Blair has sought to draw a line as the internecine bloodshed in Iraq has worsened.

Mr Ross says he questioned colleagues at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence working on Iraq and none said that any new evidence had emerged to change their assessment.

"What had changed was the Government's determination to present available evidence in a different light," he added.

Mr Ross said in late 2002 that he "discussed this at some length with David Kelly", the weapons expert who a year later committed suicide when he was named as the source of a BBC report saying Downing Street had "sexed up" the WMD claims in a dossier. The Butler inquiry cleared Mr Blair and Downing Street of "sexing up" the dossier, but the publication of the Carne Ross evidence will cast fresh doubts on its findings.

Mr Ross, 40, was a highly rated diplomat but he resigned because of his misgivings about the legality of the war. He still fears the threat of action under the Official Secrets Act.

"Mr Ross hasn't had any approach to tell him that he is still not liable to be prosecuted," said one ally. But he has told friends that he is "glad it is out in the open" and he told MPs it had been "on my conscience for years".

One member of the Foreign Affairs committee said: "There was blood on the carpet over this. I think it's pretty clear the Foreign Office used the Official Secrets Act to suppress this evidence, by hanging it like a Sword of Damacles over Mr Ross, but we have called their bluff."

Yesterday, Jack Straw, the Leader of the Commons who was Foreign Secretary during the war - Mr Ross's boss - announced the Commons will have a debate on the possible change of strategy heralded by the Iraqi Study Group report in the new year.

    Diplomat's suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war, I, 15.12.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2076137.ece

The full transcript of evidence given to the Butler inquiry

Supplementary evidence submitted by Mr Carne Ross, Director, Independent Diplomat

Published: 15 December 2006
The Independent

I am in the Senior Management Structure of the FCO, currently seconded to the UN in Kosovo. I was First Secretary in the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York from December 1997 until June 2002. I was responsible for Iraq policy in the mission, including policy on sanctions, weapons inspections and liaison with UNSCOM and later UNMOVIC.

During that time, I helped negotiate several UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq, including resolution 1284 which, inter alia, established UNMOVIC (an acronym I coined late one New York night during the year-long negotiation). I took part in policy debates within HMG and in particular with the US government. I attended many policy discussions on Iraq with the US State Department in Washington, New York and London.

My concerns about the policy on Iraq divide into three:

1.The Alleged Threat

I read the available UK and US intelligence on Iraq every working day for the four and a half years of my posting. This daily briefing would often comprise a thick folder of material, both humint and sigint. I also talked often and at length about Iraq's WMD to the international experts who comprised the inspectors of UNSCOM/UNMOVIC, whose views I would report to London. In addition, I was on many occasions asked to offer views in contribution to Cabinet Office assessments, including the famous WMD dossier (whose preparation began some time before my departure in June 2002).

During my posting, at no time did HMG assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests. On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained. I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed). (At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that "r¿gime change" was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos.)

Any assessment of threat has to include both capabilities and intent. Iraq's capabilities in WMD were moot: many of the UN's weapons inspectors (who, contrary to popular depiction, were impressive and professional) would tell me that they believed Iraq had no significant mate"riel. With the exception of some unaccounted-for Scud missiles, there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW, BW or nuclear material. Aerial or satellite surveillance was unable to get under the roofs of Iraqi facilities. We therefore had to rely on inherently unreliable human sources (who, for obvious reasons, were prone to exaggerate).

Without substantial evidence of current holdings of WMD, the key concern we pursued was that Iraq had not provided any convincing or coherent account of its past holdings. When I was briefed in London at the end of 1997 in preparation for my posting, I was told that we did not believe that Iraq had any significant WMD. The key argument therefore to maintain sanctions was that Iraq had failed to provide convincing evidence of destruction of its past stocks.

Iraq's ability to launch a WMD or any form of attack was very limited. There were approx 12 or so unaccounted-for Scud missiles; Iraq's airforce was depleted to the point of total ineffectiveness; its army was but a pale shadow of its earlier might; there was no evidence of any connection between Iraq and any terrorist organisation that might have planned an attack using Iraqi WMD (I do not recall any occasion when the question of a terrorist connection was even raised in UK/US discussions or UK internal debates).

There was moreover no intelligence or assessment during my time in the job that Iraq had any intention to launch an attack against its neighbours or the UK or US. I had many conversations with diplomats representing Iraq's neighbours. With the exception of the Israelis, none expressed any concern that they might be attacked. Instead, their concern was that sanctions, which they and we viewed as an effective means to contain Iraq, were being delegitimised by evidence of their damaging humanitarian effect.

I quizzed my colleagues in the FCO and MOD working on Iraq on several occasions about the threat assessment in the run-up to the war. None told me that any new evidence had emerged to change our assessment; what had changed was the government's determination to present available evidence in a different light. I discussed this at some length with David Kelly in late 2002, who agreed that the Number 10 WMD dossier was overstated.

2.Legality

The legality of the war is framed by the relevant Security Council resolutions, the negotiation and drafting of which was usually led by the UK.

During the negotiation of resolution 1284 (which we drafted), which established UNMOVIC, the question was discussed among the key Security Council members in great detail how long the inspectors would need in Iraq in order to form a judgement of Iraq's capabilities.

The UK and US pushed for the longest period we could get, on the grounds that the inspectors would need an extensive period in order to visit, inspect and establish monitoring at the many hundreds of possible WMD-related sites. The French and Russians wanted the shortest duration. After long negotiation, we agreed the periods specified in 1284. These require some explanation. The resolution states that the head of UNMOVIC should report on Iraq's performance 120 days once the full system of ongoing monitoring and verification had been established (OMV, in the jargon). OMV amounts to the "baseline" of knowledge of Iraq's capabilities and sites; we expected OMV to take up to six months to establish. In other words, inspectors would have to be on the ground for approximately ten months before offering an assessment. (Resolution 1441, though it requested Blix to "update" the Council 60 days after beginning inspections, did not alter the inspection periods established in 1284.) As is well-known, the inspectors were allowed to operate in Iraq for a much shorter period before the US and UK declared that Iraq's cooperation was insufficient.

Resolution 1441 did not alter the basic framework for inspections established by 1284. In particular, it did not amend the crucial premise of 1284 that any judgement of cooperation or non-cooperation by Iraq with the inspectors was to be made by the Council not UNMOVIC. Blix at no time stated unequivocally that Iraq was not cooperating with the inspectors. The Council reached no such judgement either.

Resolution 1441 did not authorise the use of force in case of non-cooperation with weapons inspectors. I was in New York, but not part of the mission, during the negotiation of that resolution (I was on Special Unpaid Leave from the FCO). My friends in other delegations told me that the UK sold 1441 in the Council explicitly on the grounds that it did not represent authorisation for war and that it "gave inspections a chance".

Later, after claiming that Iraq was not cooperating, the UK presented a draft resolution which offered the odd formulation that Iraq had failed to seize the opportunity of 1441. In negotiation, the UK conceded that the resolution amounted to authority to use force (there are few public records of this, but I was told by many former colleagues involved in the negotiation that this was the case). The resolution failed to attract support.

The UN charter states that only the Security Council can authorise the use of force (except in cases of self-defence). Reviewing these points, it is clear that in terms of the resolutions presented by the UK itself, the subsequent invasion was not authorised by the Security Council and was thus illegal. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that the UK sought an authorising resolution and failed to get it.

There is another subsidiary point on the legality question. During my spell at the UN, the UK and US would frequently have to defend in the Security Council attacks made by our aircraft in the No-Fly Zones (NFZs) in northern and southern Iraq. The NFZs were never authorised by the Security Council, but we would justify them on the grounds (as I recall it, this may be incorrect) that we were monitoring compliance with resolution 688 which called for the Iraqi government to respect the human rights of its people. If our aircraft bombed Iraqi targets, we were acting in self-defence (which was in fact the case as the Iraqis would try to shoot down our aircraft).

Reading the press in the months leading up to the war, I noticed that the volume and frequency of the attacks in the NFZs considerably increased, including during the period when UNMOVIC was in country inspecting sites (ie before even the UK/US declared that Iraq was not complying). I suspected at the time that these attacks were not in self-defence but that they were part of a planned air campaign to prepare for a ground invasion. There were one or two questions in Parliament about this when the Defence Secretary claimed that the NFZ attacks were, as before, self-defence. His account was refuted at the time by quotations by US officials in the press and by later accounts, including Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack", which confirmed that the attacks did indeed comprise a softening-up campaign, of which the UK was an active part.

3.Alternatives to war

I was responsible at the UK Mission for sanctions policy as well as weapons inspections. I had extensive contacts with those in the UN responsible for the oil-for-food programme, with NGOs active in Iraq, with experts in the oil industry and with many others who visited Iraq (I tried to visit on several occasions but was denied a visa by the Iraqi government). I read and analysed a great deal of material on Iraq's exports, both legal and illegal, sanctions and related subjects, such as the oil industry.

Much of my work and that of my close colleagues was devoted to attempting to stop countries breaching Iraqi sanctions. These breaches were many and took various forms.

The most serious was the illegal export of oil by Iraq through Turkey, Syria and Iranian waters in the Gulf. These exports were a substantial and crucial source of hard currency for the Iraqi regime; without them the regime could not have sustained itself or its key pillars, such as the Republican Guard. Estimates of the value of these exports ranged around $2 billion a year.

In addition, there were different breaches, such as Iraq's illegal and secret surcharge on its legal sales of oil through the UN. Iraq would levy illegal charges on oil-for-food contracts. The regime also had substantial financial assets held in secret overseas accounts. The details of these breaches and our work to combat them are complicated.

On repeated occasions, I and my colleagues at the mission (backed by some but not all of the responsible officials in London) attempted to get the UK and US to act more vigorously on the breaches. We believed that determined and coordinated action, led by us and the US, would have had a substantial effect in particular to pressure Iraq to accept the weapons inspections and would have helped undermine the Iraqi regime.

I proposed on several occasions the establishment of a multinational body (a UN body, if we could get the Security Council to agree it) to police sanctions busting. I proposed coordinated action with Iraq's neighbours to pressure them to help, including by controlling imports into Iraq. I held talks with a US Treasury expert on financial sanctions, an official who had helped trace and seize Milosevic's illegal financial assets. He assured me that, given the green light, he could quickly set up a team to target Saddam's illegal accounts.

These proposals went nowhere. Inertia in the FCO and the inattention of key ministers combined to the effect that the UK never made any coordinated and sustained attempt to address sanctions busting. There were sporadic and half-hearted initiatives. Bilateral embassies in Iraq's neighbours would always find a reason to let their hosts off the hook (the most egregious example was the Embassy in Ankara). Official visitors to the neighbours always placed other issues higher on the agenda. The Prime Minister, for example, visited Syria in early 2002. If I remember correctly, the mission sent a telegram beforehand urging him to press Assad on the illegal pipeline carrying Iraqi oil through Syria. I have seen no evidence that the subject was mentioned. Whenever I taxed Ministers on the issue, I would find them sympathetic but uninformed.

Coordinated, determined and sustained action to prevent illegal exports and target Saddam's illegal monies would have consumed a tiny proportion of the effort and resources of the war (and fewer lives), but could have provided a real alternative. It was never attempted.

Carne Ross

Pristina, Kosovo

9 June 2004

    The full transcript of evidence given to the Butler inquiry, I, 15.12.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2076142.ece

Iraq Study Group

Bush-Blair split over report's key proposals

President rejects talks with Iran and Syria

Friday December 8, 2006
Guardian
Julian Borger in Washington

George Bush yesterday rejected key recommendations made by the Iraq Study Group, revealing important differences with Tony Blair, who embraced the proposals put forward by the US bipartisan commission.

Those differences became clear after the two leaders met at the White House.

President Bush flatly contradicted the ISG's proposal that Iran and Syria be included in regional talks aimed at ending Iraq's worsening civil war. He restated the White House position that talks with Tehran were conditional on the Iranians stopping uranium enrichment, while contacts with Damascus would depend on an end to Syrian destabilisation of Lebanon and a cessation of arms and money flows over the border to Iraqi insurgents.

"We've made that position very clear. And the truth of the matter is that these countries have now got the choice to make," the president said.

"If they want to sit down at the table with the United States, it's easy. Just make some decisions that'll lead to peace, not to conflict."

Mr Blair, by contrast, welcomed the regional peace initiative put forward by the ISG, saying only that the basis for those discussions should be acceptance of UN resolutions on Iraq.

A Downing Street spokesman confirmed the British position of demanding a halt to uranium enrichment while continuing to talk to Iran on other issues. "In terms of our position, we continue to have diplomatic relations with Iran and have always done so," the spokesman said.

The difference in tone between the two leaders was also evident when they talked more generally about the report, which also called for a withdrawal of combat troops by early 2008, a switch in the use of US troops to an advisory role, in tandem with a comprehensive Middle East peace conference.

Mr Blair enthusiastically embraced the ISG's regional approach and the link it made between resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bringing peace to Iraq. "There is a kind of whole vision about how we need to proceed that links what happens inside Iraq with what happens outside Iraq. And the report put this very simply and very clearly," he said. "I think the report is practical, it's clear, and it offers also the way of bringing people together."

President Bush praised the commission, headed by the retired politicians James Baker and Lee Hamilton, for its bipartisan approach, but appeared to put more emphasis on a separate assessment of the situation in Iraq expected in the next few days from the joint chiefs of staff.

"Baker-Hamilton is a really important part of our considerations," the president said. "But we want to make sure the military gets their point of view in. After all, a lot of what we're doing is a military operation."

The military report is not expected to propose substantial troop withdrawals and may even advocate a brief surge in the US military presence in Iraq. President Bush yesterday made it clear he was more likely to listen to that kind of advice. He said: "Our commanders will be making recommendations based upon whether or not we're achieving our stated objective."

He added that another political assessment was being readied by the state department and that after he had absorbed all the reports he would make a major policy speech announcing a new strategic direction.

Mr Bush has been under rising pressure since last week when the incoming defence secretary, Robert Gates, contradicted his assertion that the US was winning the war. Pressed by journalists, the president yesterday admitted "it's bad in Iraq", adding: "I do know that we have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed. I do understand that process is not as rapid as I had hoped." But his rhetoric otherwise remained defiantly unchanged, and he continued to talk of eventual "victory".

The ISG members appeared before the Senate yesterday in an attempt to increase pressure on the president to accept the group's proposals.

Mr Baker, a close adviser and friend of the president's father, said that the ISG report "is probably the only bipartisan report [the president is] going to get and it's extremely important that we approach this issue in a bipartisan way".

"If the Congress could come together behind supporting - let's say, utopianly - all of the recommendations in this report, that would do a lot toward moving things downtown," he added, referring to the White House at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mr Baker also flatly contradicted the president's claim that the ISG authors did not expect him to accept every recommendation. "I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad, saying, 'I like this, but I don't like that,'" he said. "It's a comprehensive strategy designed to deal with the problems in Iraq, but also to deal with other problems in the region. These are interdependent recommendations."

In his remarks yesterday, the president did appear to give some hints on future military strategy, suggesting that the initial emphasis would be on a final effort to contain the sectarian violence centred in Baghdad, which may allow US troops then to concentrate on al-Qaida groups, which would be more palatable to US public opinion.

"We'll continue after al-Qaida. Al-Qaida will not have safe haven in Iraq. And that's important for the American people to know. We got special operators. We've got, you know, better intelligence," he said.

"The strategy now is how to make sure that we've got the security situation in place such that the Iraqi government's capable of dealing with the sectarian violence, as well as the political and economic strategies as well."

    Bush-Blair split over report's key proposals, G, 8.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1967285,00.html

5.30pm update

Bush: victory still important in Iraq

Thursday December 7, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Mark Tran

A defiant George Bush today said he and Tony Blair agreed that "victory" in Iraq was important, just one day after the Iraq Study Group delivered a withering critique of his current policy.

In a joint press conference with the prime minister in Washington, Mr Bush said the recommendations from the ISG were "worthy of serious recommendation".

But the president sent out a clear signal to his critics that he thought victory was still possible, despite what the bipartisan panel described as a "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq.

"We will stand together and defeat the extremists and radicals and help a young democracy prevail in the Middle East," Mr Bush said in a long statement at the start of the press conference.

Mr Blair thanked the president for the "clarity of [his] vision" and called Iraq a "mission we have to succeed in and can succeed in". Both men portrayed the war in Iraq as part of a wider battle between the "forces that are reasonable" and extremists.

Mr Bush pointed out that the ISG report was not the only one before the White House, mentioning reviews from the Pentagon, the state department and the national security council. Asked whether the ISG report should carry more weight because of its bipartisan nature, Mr Bush ducked and weaved.

"It is certainly an important part of our deliberations," Mr Bush replied.

Even as Mr Blair and Mr Bush outlined their response to the ISG report, which called on the US to chart a new course, opposition MPs back in London were pressing for a Commons statement from the prime minister.

The Tory former defence spokesman Bernard Jenkin said Mr Blair was not involved in a "routine bilateral". He added that it was not acceptable for the prime minister to return to the UK without giving a statement to the House of Commons "about what amounts to a substantial change in public policy".

The Commons leader, Jack Straw, however, refused to promise either a statement or debate on the ISG report before Christmas. He told MPs to quiz the prime minister about it at question time next week, but was warned by some members of the opposition that this was unacceptable and would look bad to voters.

Mr Bush and Mr Blair find themselves increasingly isolated on Iraq, now that the US foreign policy establishment - embodied by the ISG co-chairmen former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton - has declared that the "current approach is not working and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing".

The Democratic senator Charles Schumer said the key question was whether Mr Bush was ready for a change of course.

"All eyes now are on this president," Mr Schumer said.

Mr Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has said Bush will make his decision within weeks.

The ISG report made two key recommendations. The first was for the US to shift military priorities from combat to training Iraqi troops and start withdrawing combat troops early next year. The second was for the US to launch a diplomatic effort that would involve direct talks with Iraq's neighbours, Iran and Syria.

Mr Bush, however, has stubbornly stuck to his position that there will be no talks with Tehran unless it suspends its uranium enrichment programme. The administration is also in no hurry to talk to Damascus, accusing it of allowing insurgents to cross into Iraq from Syria.

Mr Blair last month used a high-profile speech to offer "partnership" to Damascus and Tehran if they stopped supporting terrorism and met international obligations not to pursue nuclear arms. The prime minister also wants the US to devote some energy to dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

On arriving in the US last night, Mr Blair went straight into a meeting on climate change with senators who included possible 2008 presidential candidate John McCain.

Mr Blair is also due to meet congressional leaders and members of the Senate armed services and foreign relations committees to discuss Iraq, the Middle East, trade, Darfur and Africa in general.

The group is likely to include the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, and the rising star in the Democratic party, the black senator Barack Obama.

Downing Street said Mr Blair would stress the importance of maintaining momentum towards a post-Kyoto agreement on climate change after 2012 and on delivering on promises on aid and debt relief made to Africa at last year's G8 summit in Gleneagles.

    Bush: victory still important in Iraq, G, 7.12.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1966554,00.html

British troops may stay in Iraq until 2016

November 28, 2006
The Times
Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor

Thousands of British troops could remain in Iraq for another decade, Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, said yesterday.

Speaking at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Mr Browne said that he expected to withdraw a substantial number of the 7,200 British Armed Forces in southern Iraq by the end of next year.

The reduction will be possible when British soldiers hand over responsibility for Maysan and Basra, the last two provinces under their direct control. Maysan is due to be transferred in January and Basra in April. “If both these go to plan, we will be able to start drawing down our forces,” he said. “By the end of next year I expect the numbers of British Forces in Iraq to be significantly lower, by a matter of thousands.”

Whitehall officials expect the number to be halved but British Forces will remain at brigade strength with armour and air support at Basra airport and the Shaiba logistics base south of the city.

Yesterday’s announcement did little to satisfy demands at home and in Iraq for American and British forces to set a timetable for a complete withdrawal. “Des Browne will have to try much harder if he wants to satisfy calls for a detailed plan for withdrawal,” Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, said. “Vague assurances are not enough.”

Italy, once a significant contributor with 3,000 troops in southern Iraq, said yesterday that the last of its forces would leave the country this week. Poland said that all its 900 soldiers would be home by the end of next year. Japan withdrew this year and many other states plan to follow suit.

Mr Browne insisted, however, that reducing the size of the British contingent in Iraq did not mean that Britain was withdrawing, and said that there was no timetable for a full pull out. “We need to be clear: the handover does not mean withdrawal,” he said.

British Forces will remain to back up the Iraqi police and Army and help to protect the vulnerable supply routes from Kuwait used by US forces to bring food, fuel and ammunition to their bases in central and northern Iraq.

For the first time Mr Browne also suggested that the British could embark on a new role that would last for five to ten years. This would be to bolster the Iraqi armed forces until they are capable of maintaining order at home and of defending the country’s borders.

“Our long-term relationship with Iraq will depend on the Iraqi Government’s position and on the circumstances,” he said. “I am not at this stage seeking to set out what the level of troop deployment will be in five or ten years’ time.”

One crucial factor shaping Iraq’s future could be the role of its powerful neighbours, Iran and Syria, who are blamed for stoking the violence by helping Iraqi insurgents and militants. The Iraq Study Group, an influential American review panel, is expected to recommend to President Bush next month that he open talks with Damascus and Tehran to help to stabilise the situation in Iraq.

Mr Browne said that Syria had recently “shown signs of constructive engagement” in Iraq by sending its Foreign Minister to Baghdad to announce the full restoration of diplomatic relations. He added, however, that Iran’s behaviour remained a cause of deep concern and he accused Tehran of backing groups attacking British Forces.

    British troops may stay in Iraq until 2016, Ts, 28.11.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2475107,00.html

UK troops in Iraq to be reduced by 'thousands'

November 27, 2006
Times Online
By Devika Bhat and agencies

The number of British troops in Iraq will be "significantly" reduced by a "matter of thousands" by the end of next year, Des Browne has pledged.

The Defence Secretary insisted that he would not "allow a single one of the 7,200 total British soldiers, sailors and air personnel to stay in Iraq longer than necessary".

He added: "I can tell you that by the end of next year, I expect numbers of British forces in Iraq to be significantly lower, by a matter of thousands."

Although he did not give exact numbers or further details, the announcement is the clearest indication yet of the Government’s strategy on the future of Iraq.

Speaking at a defence policy briefing in London, Mr Browne reiterated comments expressed last week by Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, saying that she hoped UK troops would pull out of Basra – a focal point of British presence - by next spring.

This would, he said, follow the handover of Maysan province in January. The two other provinces under British control – Muthanna and Dhi Qar – were handed over earlier this year.

But he insisted that the handover of the conflict-torn nation did not mean a total pull-out, admitting that as troops started to "draw down", the number of insurgent attacks could rise, requiring the help of UK forces to combat such assaults.

Although Nouri Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, wanted the transition to happen quickly, Mr Browne said, he was aware that an immediate withdrawal would produce "catastrophic" results.

"As we move towards handover, perversely, the number of attacks on us may increase," he said. "We need to be clear that handover does not mean withdrawal."

Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor for the The Times, said that the comments raised the issue of how long the forces left in Iraq for reinforcement purposes would have to remain.

But Mr Browne refused to be drawn on this matter, suggesting that the Iraqis may need help from the coalition in building up a navy and an air force as well as the army.

"Our long-term relationship with Iraq will depend on the Iraqi government’s position and on the circumstances," he said. "I am not at this stage seeking to set out what the level of troop deployment will be in five or 10 years.

"That will be a function of changes which, at this stage, I think it would be pointless to try to predict."

Mr Browne acknowledged that the priority in Iraq was the security situation, followed by politics and economics. Once security had stabilised, he said, local forces would take control "province by province, city by city" while British troops would be available on standby to offer reinforcement if necessary.

He also issued a warning to Iran, saying while most of Iraq’s neighbours were offering support, the behaviour of Tehran – widely suspected of aiding insurgent groups in Iraq - had raised deep concerns.

"It has the influence and power to turn up or down the heat and to turn on or off the dialogue," he said. "It is not using its influence well... It is unacceptable and counter-productive.

"Be a constructive partner, help yourselves and the wider region, or face increasing isolation."

He dismissed the idea of splitting Iraq along Shia, Sunni and Kurdish lines, saying that such a divide would exacerbate rather than resolve sectarian tensions, and that "even Syria" was showing signs of support having re-established diplomatic links with Iraq.

"A divided Iraq would threaten regional stability," he said. "It is vital now that Iraq’s neighbours give it their full, undivided support."

The Defence Secretary said he was aware the British people were concerned that little progress was being made. "I accept that we can do better in articulating our security strategy together with stating realistic ambitions over the coming years."

But he stressed that security for those troops on the ground was paramount and meant that some information could not be made available to the public.

But Nick Harvey, Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, criticised Mr Browne for being too vague in his promises. "Des Browne will have to try much harder if he wants to satisfy calls for a detailed plan for withdrawal," he said.

"Vague reassurances are not enough. The Government must urgently lay out its plan for a phased withdrawal of troops and the transfer of security to the Iraqi security forces."

    UK troops in Iraq to be reduced by 'thousands', Ts, 27.11.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2474203,00.html

3.30pm update

UK may hand over Basra control by spring

Wednesday November 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Mark Tran and agencies

British forces could hand responsibility for security in Basra over to Iraqi forces by the spring, the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said today.

"The progress of our current operation in Basra gives us confidence that we may be able to achieve transition in that province ... at some point next spring," she told parliament during a foreign affairs debate on the Queen's speech.

Mrs Beckett's announcement - the first firm indication of a timetable for a significant troop withdrawal, albeit hedged with conditions - came as the monthly death toll of Iraqi civilians reached a new high of 3,709 in October.

She denied Britain was abandoning the Iraqi government as it sought to control increasing sectarian violence.

"There is no question of us cutting and running from Iraq - to do so would be an act of gross irresponsibility, abandoning the Iraqi people to bloodshed perhaps even worse than we see today," she said.

Mrs Beckett's comments come as the US conducts its own debate on future strategy on Iraq.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by Bush family confidante James Baker, is expected to reports its findings next month, with the resurgent Democratic party in Congress pushing for a phased withdrawal.

However, leaks from a secret Pentagon review indicate that the favoured option is a troop increase of 20,000 to 30,000 on the current level of 140,000 for "one last big push".

Meanwhile, regional efforts to contain the violence in Iraq are moving ahead.

This week, Iran invited the leaders of Iraq and Syria to talks in Tehran at the weekend. The summit - an initiative of the president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, coincided with a decision by Iraq and Syria to restore diplomatic ties after a 25-year break.

Critics of the British presence in Iraq said the Blair government was making a political, not military, withdrawal".

The Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews, a critic of the war, said it was no coincidence that Mrs Beckett's announcement had come as Tony Blair was preparing to step down as prime minister.

The foreign secretary's comments followed earlier signals that Britain would be reducing its military presence in Iraq.

Last month, the defence secretary, Des Browne, said Britain was "quite far down the process" of transferring responsibility to the Iraqis.

British officials have recently spoken of cutting troop numbers in Iraq from their current level of 7,200 to between 3,000 and 4,000 by mid-2007. However, no firm date for withdrawal has been set.

Most UK troops are stationed in and around Basra, in southern Iraq. The city, Iraq's second biggest, remains dangerous, with Shia factions battling for control and British troops sometimes targeted.

Britain has already handed over to Iraqi forces control of Muthanna and Dhi Qar, two of the four southern provinces it was assigned to run after the US-led invasion in 2003. The province of Maysan is scheduled to meet the conditions for a handover in January.

Four British soldiers were killed and three seriously wounded in an attack on a patrol boat in Basra earlier this month.

Ms Beckett last month said there would be no "rash" deadlines, adding that UK troops would only leave once the Iraqi government could "cope".

The head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, sparked a furore when he was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying British forces "exacerbated" Iraq's security problems and should withdraw "some time soon".

In her statement today to the House today, Mrs Beckett said: "... There is a clear forward perspective, notwithstanding the obvious difficulties that Iraq faces, but it continues to demand our wholehearted attention and our unwavering support.

"The appalling reports of killings and kidnappings which we continually hear are a clear sign that the fate of that country is hanging in the balance.

"As I have said to this House before, we owe it to our own forces, and to the Iraqi people, to hold our nerve in this critical period."

    UK may hand over Basra control by spring, G, 22.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1954350,00.html

Iraq war 'pretty much a disaster', Blair concedes

The admission came as a close ally of his was said to have expressed the same opinion

November 18, 2006
The Times
By Philip Webster

TONY BLAIR went close last night to admitting that the invasion of Iraq had been disastrous. Challenged in an interview on al-Jazeera’s new English-language channel that the Western intervention in Iraq had “so far been pretty much of a disaster”, he gave a brief agreement before swiftly moving on.

He said: “It has, but you see what I say to people is, ‘Why is it difficult in Iraq?’ It is not difficult because of some accident in planning, it is difficult because there is a deliberate strategy, al-Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other, to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war.”

Mr Blair’s frank remarks came on the day that one of his most loyal ministers was reported to have described the war as “his big mistake in foreign affairs”. Margaret Hodge was said to have accused Mr Blair of espousing “moral imperialism”, remarks that she denied through an aide but which were recalled by people who attended the private meeting at which she was alleged to have made them.

Mr Blair was speaking to Sir David Frost on the first edition of his Frost over the World programme on al-Jazeera International, which was launched on Wednesday. His appearance is a boost for the network, which was once denounced as propaganda by Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, and is perhaps best known in Britain for broadcasting tapes from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

After his apparent admission that the intervention had been a disaster, he insisted: “We are not walking away from Iraq. We will stay for as long as the Government needs us to stay.

“And the reason for that is that what is happening in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, as elsewhere in parts of the Middle East, is a struggle between the decent majority of people, who want to live in peace together, and those who have an extreme and perverted and warped view of Islam, who want to create war. In those circumstances, our task has got to be to stand up for the moderates and the democrats against the extremists and the sectarians.”

Mr Blair also rejected as absurd suggestions that his readiness to work with Iran and Syria in the search for Middle East peace amounted to appeasement. He repeated his appeal to the two countries described by President Bush as part of an “axis of evil” to become partners for peace.

He said that he had a message for Tehran and Damascus: “If you are prepared to be part of the solution, there is a partnership available to you. But at the moment, and this is particularly so in respect of what Iran is doing in supporting terrorism throughout the Middle East and acting in breach of its nuclear weapons obligations, you are behaving in such a way that makes such a partnership impossible.”

Mrs Hodge, a Trade and Industry minister, also allegedly told a branch meeting of the Fabian Society that she had doubted Mr Blair’s approach to foreign affairs since 1998. According to the Islington Tribune newspaper, she singled out Mr Blair’s “moral imperialism” — exporting British attitudes and ideas to other countries — for criticism. She had accepted the Prime Minister’s argument about the dangers posed by Iraq before the March 2003 invasion because “he was our leader and I trusted him”.

The Islington Tribune said that Eric Gordon, its editor, sat in on the meeting of Islington Fabian Society, which was held last Friday at the London Resource Centre in Holloway Road. Mark Blunden, a reporter for the paper, said that Mr Gordon had taken a shorthand note of the alleged remarks and that the story had been checked thoroughly.

There were no questions over her future particularly after Mr Blair’s remarks.

    Iraq war 'pretty much a disaster', Blair concedes, Ts, 18.11.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2459168,00.html

Intervention in Iraq 'pretty much of a disaster' admits Blair, as minister calls it his 'big mistake'

· Downing Street plays down slip in TV interview
· Hodge criticises 'moral imperialism' in speech

Saturday November 18, 2006
Guardian
Tania Branigan, political correspondent

Tony Blair conceded last night that western intervention in Iraq had been a disaster. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV station, the prime minister agreed with the veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost when he suggested that intervention had "so far been pretty much of a disaster".

Mr Blair said: "It has, but you see, what I say to people is, 'why is it difficult in Iraq?' It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy - al-Qaida with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other - to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war."

Downing Street tried to downplay the apparent slip. "I think that's just the way in which he answers questions," said a spokesman. "His views on Iraq are documented in hundreds of places, and that is not one of them."

Mr Blair's remarks came hours after his trade and industry minister, Margaret Hodge, was reported to have described Iraq as his "big mistake in foreign affairs" and criticised his "moral imperialism".

John McDonnell, the leftwing MP who has pledged to challenge for Labour's leadership, said the prime minister's concession was "staggering" and urged him to bring forward Britain's exit strategy.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said: "At long last the enormity of the decision to take military action against Iraq is being accepted by the prime minister."

Earlier, Ms Hodge had told a private dinner organised by the Fabian Society that she had doubted Mr Blair's approach to foreign affairs as far back as 1998, because of his belief in imposing British values and ideas on other countries. According to the Islington Tribune, she said she had accepted Mr Blair's arguments on the threat posed by Iraq because "he was our leader and I trusted him" - before adding: "I hope this isn't being reported."

Ms Hodge was unavailable for comment yesterday, but a spokesman told the Evening Standard that she had not made the remarks. Asked if they reflected her opinions, he added: "I'm not in a position to comment on her private views."

A Downing Street spokesman said he knew nothing of the reported comments. "Margaret Hodge voted for military action in Iraq. Since then, she has always spoken in favour of it. We have a prime minister, a government, that is trying to bring the country together," he said, but added that nobody was disputing "the difficulties there are in Iraq". The Islington Tribune said its editor, Eric Gordon, had taken a shorthand note of the meeting in London, and it had checked the story thoroughly.

Pat Haynes, secretary of the Islington Fabian Society, did not recall the word "mistake", but added: "She said that if she knew then what she knows now, she would not have voted for the war." He did not realise a journalist was at the meeting, he added. But Chris Roche, the Labour member who took Mr Gordon to the meeting, told Sky News: "Everyone knew there was a journalist there."

In May Ms Hodge was criticised by Labour activists after telling a newspaper that eight out of 10 of her constituents were considering voting for the BNP.

    Intervention in Iraq 'pretty much of a disaster' admits Blair, as minister calls it his 'big mistake', G, 18.11.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1951267,00.html

Abuse of Iraq prisoners ' officially cleared'

November 16, 2006
From Times Online
By Times Online and PA news

Seven soldiers who are on trial for abusing Iraqi detainees were acting on official guidelines when they used pre-interrogation techniques banned under the Geneva Convention, a court was told today.

The soldiers, from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, are being tried at a court martial in Bulford Camp, Wiltshire accused of detaining Iraqis for 36 hours, and keeping them cuffed, hooded and deprived of sleep.

It is also alleged they beat them for failing to maintain stress positions - the pre-interrogation "conditioning" methods that the prosecution says are banned under international law.

Baha Musa, a 26 year old detainee, died during the alleged mistreatment of the 11 Iraqi civilians arrested as suspected insurgents in Basra in September 2003.

One of the men on trial is Major Michael Peebles, 35, who was at the time the QLR’s internment review officer, in charge of handling detainees prior to and after they were tactically questioned, and until they were either imprisoned long term or released.

He denies a charge of negligently performing the duty of ensuring the Iraqi detainees were not mistreated.

Major Antony Royce, the QLR’s internment review officer before Peebles, told the court he was instructed by those higher up the chain of command in Basra to use conditioning techniques, including stress positions and hooding, to prepare detainees for tactical questioning.

In this role Major Royce attended regular brigade briefings and relayed orders back to his regiment. He said that after being put in charge of internment he was told by Major Mark Robinson, a brigade intelligence adviser, to condition prisoners.

Worried that this could contravene what he had been taught about prisoner -handling he told the court he then checked with Major Russel Clifton, the brigade’s legal adviser, and was again told that conditioning and hooding were acceptable.

"He (Robinson) instructed me to use conditioning as part of the tactical questioning process," he said. "I then contacted Major Clifton to make sure that what I had been told was right."

Julian Bevan QC, prosecuting, put it to Major Royce that Majors Clifton and Robinson both deny having said that conditioning was acceptable.

"They washed their hands of it, and left us to it," Major Royce said.

Major Clifton, a barrister formerly of the Army Legal Service, sent a statement to the court today clarifying that he could not recall being asked if he had been asked in Basra about the use of conditioning, but he added that "in certain situations ... the use of stress positions to maintain the shock of capture prior to tactical questioning would have been acceptable."

Detailing further what had occurred, Major Royce said that Colonel Jorge Mendonca, the QLR’s former commander, who is on trial on the same charge as Peebles, visited the regiment’s Basra detention centre and saw the Iraqis being conditioned.

"He asked why it was taking place. I explained that I had cleared it with the chain of command. He was happy that the chain of command and legal advisers had given us that clearance," he said.

Cpl Donald Payne, 35, formerly of the QLR, which is now the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, became Britain’s first war criminal when he admitted the charge of treating Iraqi detainees inhumanely.

Payne denies two further charges, the manslaughter of Baha Musa, and a third charge of perverting the course of justice.

His six co-defendants all deny the matters facing them.

The case continues.

    Abuse of Iraq prisoners ' officially cleared', Ts Online, 16.11.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article638900.ece

Remembrance Sunday Special: Remember the war of words

In Iraq, troops fight on as those who sent them beat an ignoble retreat

Published: 12 November 2006
The Independent on sunday

Then (September 2002)
What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.

Now (July 2004)

I have to accept that we have not found them and we may not find them. He [Saddam] may have removed or hidden or even destroyed those weapons.
Tony Blair, BRITISH PM

Then (May 2003)
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended ... the United States and our allies have prevailed. And Now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

Now (October 2006)
We cannot allow our dissatisfaction to turn into disillusionment about our purpose in this war.
George Bush US PRESIDENT

Then (March 2003)
We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people ... show respect for them.

Now (October 2006)
Three years into the occupation, with no real improvement, it is time to admit failure ... British failure in Iraq may be seen by history as "ill-conceived and without enough effort".
Col Tim Collins FORMER BATTLE GROUP LEADER

Then (July 2002)
Support for Saddam including within his military will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder. It isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going to be months either.

Now (November 2006)
If I had ... seen where we are today ... I probably would have said, "Let's consider strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, Saddam supplying WMD to terrorists".
Richard Perle LEADING AMERICAN NEOCON

Then (March 2003)
It will mean enforcement of the will of the UN ... to make the world a better place for the removal of Saddam Hussein and ... make the world better for the Iraqis he oppresses.

Now (November 2006)
The thing was a disaster from the moment we invaded ... we need to understand why, why, why we were so mad as to attack without working out the consequences.
Boris Johnson MP AND EX-EDITOR, 'SPECTATOR'

Then (March 2003)
Iraqi lives saved by this military action will far exceed the number who, sadly, will be killed. It is a terrible calculation ... but one you have to make if there is to be a proper justification for military action.

Now (September 2006)
The current situation is dire. I think many mistakes were made after the military action - there is no question about it - by the US administration.
Jack Straw EX-FOREIGN SECRETARY

Then (August 2004)
Mr Blair has 18 months to show that Iraq is a success. If Iraq in 2006 looks very little better than under Saddam, Then the whole thing was a waste of lives, money and effort.

Now (October 2006)
There are only bad options for the coalition from Now on ... I never thought we would have produced the kind of mess in the post-invasion phase that has Now transpired.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock EX-AMBASSADOR TO UN

Then (March 2003)
From the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is that we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

Now (October 2006)
It's been a little over three years Now since we went into Iraq, so I don't think it's surprising that people are concerned ... It's still very, very difficult, very tough.
Dick Cheney VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Then (March 2003)
There is no doubt that the regime ... has weapons of mass destruction ... those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them.

Now (December 2005)
No one was more surprised than I that we didn't find them. I suspect that the President of the United States probably had the same reaction that I did.
Gen Tommy Franks IRAQ INVASION COMMANDER

Then (March 2003)
Tony Blair has taken a brave decision, that the only hope of influencing American behaviour is to share in American actions.

Now (November 2006)
President Bush's achievement has been to convert an almost impregnable American position in the world after 9/11 into a grievously damaged one today.
Max Hastings HISTORIAN AND COLUMNIST

Then (January 2003)
Weapons of mass destruction have been a central pillar of Saddam's dictatorship since the 1980s. Iraq was found guilty 12 years ago. Yet they lied and lied again.

Now (January 2005)
Following the conclusions of the comprehensive report ... the Iraq Survey Group is no longer conducting an active programme of field investigations into weapons of mass destruction..
Geoff Hoon FORMER DEFENCE SECRETARY

Then (December 2002)
The goal is disarmament - the elimination of Iraq's [weapons] programmes... Disarming Saddam and fighting the war on terror are not merely related: the first is part of the second.

Now (June 2003)
The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was WMD as the core reason.
Paul Wolfowitz EX-DEPUTY US DEFENCE SECRETARY

Then (August 2002)
I will be blunt: demolishing Saddam's power and liberating Iraq militarily would be a cakewalk.

Now (October 2006)
What I would have said: that Bush's arguments are right, but ... you have to put them in the drawer marked "can't do" ... that's very different from "let's go" ... We're losing in Iraq.
Kenneth Adelman LEADING US HAWK

    Remembrance Sunday Special: Remember the war of words, IoS, 12.11.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1963417.ece

Remembrance Sunday Special: Remember Jamie Hancock

He was a lively teenager, always joking, but in his wallet the dedicated soldier carried a picture of the Queen to remind him of his duty.

Published: 12 November 2006
The Independent on Sunday
By Cole Moreton

Jamie Hancock was a charmer, a good-looking boy with the physical confidence of someone who loved to box. Last time he was home in Lancashire he made the girls at Barbarella's nightclub giggle with his usual armoury of flirtatious one-liners, then showed them pictures of himself in uniform. "He's not a gob, but he can get on with anyone," said his father Eddie yesterday, before stopping himself. "I have to talk as if he is still alive. I have to think he is just on a tour of duty. I can't cope any other way."

Kingsman Jamie Hancock of the Second Batallion, Duke of Lancaster Regiment, was shot dead in Basra six days ago. He was 19 years old. He had been in Iraq less than two weeks.

Today he is remembered alongside the other 120 British troops who have died since the invasion of 2003, and the fallen of every conflict since the First World War. The Queen will lay the first wreath at the Cenotaph in London as services of remembrance take place around the country, and at military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yesterday, army cadets only a little younger than Jamie Hancock were selling poppies on the streets of Hindley Green, near Wigan, where he lived. One of the crosses on the local war memorial was for a private killed long ago, in 1915. "We have lions led by donkeys," said Eddie Hancock yesterday, consciously using the language of the slaughter of the First World War to describe the death of his son. Eyes reddening with emotion he called for the Prime Minister to resign because of "outright lies and treason" that led to the war in Iraq. "On a day when we remember I would say to the British people, for God's sake wake up and see what is happening now."

Mr Hancock was speaking in the conservatory of the quiet house where Jamie and his brother Joey were raised. Out in the garden was a deflated football. By his side was a mini-fridge stacked with cans of lager the boys drank, chatting away with him on these sofas, when they were home. "They have always been my pride and joy," he said, holding a photograph of the two as youngsters.

Joey joined the Army first. He is a corporal at Catterick in North Yorkshire. It was he who called on Monday evening, only hours after Jamie was shot by a brief burst of machine-gun fire. He had been standing sentry in a heavily fortified watchtower made of sandbags, and wearing body armour and his combat helmet. None of it saved him from a bullet in the chest.

Eddie was just home from his job as a joiner when the phone went. "Joey was distraught," he said yesterday, his voice breaking. "He was saying, 'Dad, dad, I've got terrible news,' then I couldn't make out what he was saying. He could hardly speak. As this was happening I looked out through the front window and saw three people coming up the path, in army and police uniforms. I knew then."

Eddie Hancock is a slender, bearded, bespectacled man. He is also a dan at jujitsu, who raised his boys to have a boisterous sense of respect. "Jamie would come in the house behind me while I was doing the washing up or something, and the next thing you know you would be wrestled to the ground. Then there'd be a kiss on the old bald forehead and he'd say, 'Let's make a brew then, slaphead.'"

They tussled like that one day in the summer and Jamie's wallet fell out of his pocket. "I bent down to pick it up for him. There among the credit cards and condoms was a picture of the Queen, just the head and shoulders cut out from somewhere. I said to him, 'Jamie, what's this about?' It was a side of him you didn't see, the serious side. He said, 'That, Dad, is to remind me of what I am and what I do.' For a young man to say that, in this day and age, I thought was extraordinary."

Jamie was born on 30 January 1987 and went to St John's Primary School. "He was a cheeky lad," said his father. "You'd get the phone call from the teacher and you'd say, 'Oh no, what has he done this time?'"

The funeral service will be held at St John's once Jamie's body has arrived back in England on Thursday. "It's the usual thing with the Hercules and the flag," said Mr Hancock. "They will not give us his body until towards the end of the month."

Eddie separated from Jamie's mother a decade ago, and she lives in Glossop with her new husband. "She is devastated by all this. They are both still really close to Lynda."

Unusually, Jamie was raised as a crack shot. His father has had an air rifle for more than three decades, and took the boys down to private land on a local farm to practise. "He had a natural talent. A lolly stick takes some hitting at 30 yards, but he could knock those sticks down."

Jamie was at Hesketh Fletcher secondary school when Britain and America invaded Iraq in March 2003. He left in the summer of 2003, and got a job at the local factory. Rivington Foods makes 200 million biscuits a year, including Pink Panther wafers. "A group of us used to eat together at work and go out to the pubs in Leigh at night," said Stephen Todd, who is now 26 and works as a karaoke DJ. "Jamie was young when he came but he was one of the lads. He used to have us in stitches in the canteen."

"He used to cheer me up at work," said Natalie Grimes, who was 20 when she met him at Rivingtons. "When I was pregnant and down he would pull daft faces or tell lame jokes, but they would always make me laugh."

In the Leigh Arms, a popular pub with the boys, older men with the wide shoulders and broken noses of rugby players stand together drinking; around them, at a respectful distance, are teenagers with gelled hair, sharp young blades like Jamie and his friends. "There is not much for them lot, to be honest," said one of the older men. "It was a mining town but the mine went, so there's just the rugby. A lot of lads sign up. But what happened is right bloody tragic."

Eddie Hancock's passionate knowledge of Middle Eastern politics was clearly not formed in the last week, but he did not oppose his sons joining the Army. "A lot of squaddies have come through this house, and I have seen a grand bunch of lads. You can send a lout to Catterick at 16 and six months later what comes out is unrecognisable. It brings a tear to my eyes." Jamie signed up in May 2005. "That six months was the biggest and most significant transformation of his life."

This summer, Jamie Hancock volunteered for a six-month tour of Iraq. His commanding officer said he was a quick learner who had only just been taught to drive a Warrior armoured vehicle but was already among the best. "When I heard that I laughed," his father said. "He has written three cars off in the last 18 months, just driving around."

In his last letter to his mother, posted 10 days before he died, Jamie described being left behind by a convoy when his Warrior would not start. "He said they could hear pinging on the outside, from the bullets. There was a loud cheer inside the tank when he got it going."

On 21 October he flew to Iraq as part of the batallion advance party. At noon on Monday he was on sentry duty at the Old State Building, the only British base in the heart of Basra, and for that reason probably the most vulnerable. About 100 British troops are stationed in the compound, a forward operating base from which they can dominate the centre of the city. Kingsman Hancock was on sentry duty in a sangar, a tower erected from sandbags, above the main gate. Sangars are designed in such a manner that while the sentry has a clear view and a clear field of fire, would-be attackers in the street below cannot easily target anyone in them. Jamie's attackers, however, managed to gain access to a building opposite the compound and fired directly into the sangar. "There was no firefight, just a single burst of fire in which he was unfortunately hit," said an MoD spokesman in London.

Jamie Hancock was a bold, strong, passionate soldier of the sort who has given the British Army victory throughout history. He was a teenager from an army family and an army town. Jamie Hancock could have died at Dunkirk, the Somme or even Waterloo. But he didn't. "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time," said his father. "I understand that sometimes people who serve have to die. That is not what gets me. It is that the reasons for his being there, for any of them being there and dying, seem so totally pointless."

Additional reporting by Lauren Veevers

Remember: The poet who inspired the wearing of poppies also didn't make it home

The poem that inspired the wearing of poppies was written by a Canadian, Dr John McCrae (below). A senior physician and academic, he was 42 when he volunteered for active service within weeks of the war's start. By 1915 he was at a field station in Belgium trying to cope with casualties of the second Battle of Ypres, and officiating at burials, too.

More than half of McCrae's brigade were killed. One was his student, Lt Alexis Helmer of Ottawa. His remains were gathered up, placed in two empty sandbags (their flaps held together with safety pins), and brought for burial. On the night of 2 May 1915 and in total darkness - no lights were allowed this close to the front - the body of his young friend was laid in the ground.

The following day, in a brief interlude from mending comrades' battered bodies, McCrae sat in the back of an ambulance north of Ypres, notepad and pencil in hand. As he looked out over the lines of makeshift graves, and upon Helmer's in particular, he composed these lines:

He showed them to a passing soldier, and later, almost as if he was ashamed of his own sentiments, jettisoned the poem. His senior officer, Lt Col Edward Morrison, retrieved it and sent it off to The Spectator in London. They rejected it. Morrison tried again with Punch, and the poem was printed on 8 December 1915. Its fame grew, and when reprinted by the American Ladies' Home Journal in 1918, it captivated a YMCA helper from Georgia called Moina Michael. Two days before the Armistice was signed, she was at a conference in New York. She went to Wanamaker's store and bought red paper poppies, which she handed out to delegates in memory of the fallen. In France, Anne Guerin had the same idea.

John McCrae never lived to see the poppies of his poem worn by millions of people each year. He caught double pneumonia and meningitis, died on 28 January 1918, and was buried in the earth of a foreign field - the same earth from which those poppies sprang, and still spring every year.

David Randall

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place: and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch: be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

    Remembrance Sunday Special: Remember Jamie Hancock, IoS, 12.11.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1963462.ece

Cole Moreton: A just cause is a hero's right

Published: 12 November 2006
The Independent on Sunday

Where do we look for heroes, today of all days? Not at the war memorial. They have almost all gone away. There used to be soldiers, sailors, airmen, Waafs and Wrens everywhere, even if they were mostly invisible. The elderly gent shuffling home from the supermarket with a budget meal for one, a survivor of the Somme. The bank manager polishing his car on Sunday, dogged by memories of D-Day. The headmaster who thrashed the same boys repeatedly and who was taken away in the end. Manhandled out of the school. He had gone funny in the head, they said, thanks to a war wound he never mentioned. Silence was a characteristic of most of those old soldiers. The battles were as close then in history as Live Aid is now, but the combatants kept mum.

Except on Remembrance Sunday. Then they polished medals and cap badges, dusted down regimental blazers and marched with the Scouts and Guides . The Last Post was played hesitantly by a bugler from the Boys' Brigade, the Mayor led the hymn singing and hundreds turned up to join in. The scene will be repeated all over the country today, but in many places the old soldiers will be older and fewer, the uniformed organisations down to the stragglers, and the crowds absent. War is what happens far away, or long ago, or on the PlayStation.

Those of us who grew up in the Seventies were the last to tell tales of the Second World War. Victor Book for Boys or Commando taught us what heroism was. And while it was the boys who obsessed about all this, the folktales of wartime were everywhere, and some of the heroes (as in the film A Town Called Alice or the TV series Tenko) were heroines. That was before Star Wars and its successors provided fantastical substitutes for war; before the primal urge to form a tribe and beat the crap out of the other lot was sublimated into football or video consoles.

Those of us whose parents and grandparents had fought were ignorant and romantic about the reality of soldiering, but we had a sense that those who fought had done it for a good reason. The further you are from a conflict, historically, the easier it is to see in simple terms. Regardless of the shades of contemporary opinion, the Second World War is now seen as Good versus Evil.

The invasion of Afghanistan seemed nostalgically simple and right, until it went wrong. Still, many of the troops there still have the sense that it is the Right Thing To Do. That is harder in Iraq. How easy would it have been to bend over the body of Kingsman Jamie Hancock, a teenager shot while on sentry duty in Basra on Monday, and wonder what the hell it was all for?

Today he is remembered along with the teenagers who died in the mud of Flanders nearly a century ago. At the Menin Gate memorial to the battles of Ypres a few years ago a survivor of that slaughter hauled himself to his feet, gripped my arm and saluted. He was 106. When asked why he had come, at risk to his life, he wheezed and coughed and thought a while and said: "Because they can't." He meant the teenage boys whose bodies were blown to bits or lost. He wore his medals to say he had been there, and so had they. They were not around to stand like this in the cold and remember, but he would keep doing it until the day he died. For Billy, Ernie, Chalky. All the boys. His mates. The dead.

For most of us, soldiers are strangers. The closest we get is in the town square of a garrison town on a Saturday night. For most of the time they do whatever it is they do out on the moors, behind fortified walls or in the desert. Then, when it is time to hand out medals, as is being considered at the moment, tales emerge of men - always men - storming the enemy single-handedly. This version of heroism is sometimes rehearsed in the tabloids: last week a British soldier was photographed with bullet belts criss-crossing his chest next to the account of how he had personally fired 40,000 rounds.

But the Strong Man is deadly because he fights for both sides. He allows the man who feels so aggrieved and powerless that he straps explosive to his body and blows up the enemy along with himself to claim to be a hero. The cult of the Strong Man leads us to the suicide bomber.

He has a modern brother, the Rescuer. Private Johnson Beharry won the first Victoria Cross in 40 years for saving his platoon from an ambush. What he did was heroic and deserved recognition. But the Rescuer is a PR-friendly hero. It was undeniably helpful to the Government to award our highest military honour to a young black Briton when the nation was struggling with multiculturalism and beginning to doubt the war in Iraq. But the VC has often been awarded for strategic reasons in its 150-year history.

Over that time our notions of heroism have changed dramatically. During the past decade, in museums, oral history projects or just quiet living rooms, that generation of men and women who kept silent after the last world war have been sharing their stories. As a society we have also learned to value the experience of civilians. The war memorials may be less crowded, but the internet throbs with stories.

Superb online projects such as the BBC's People's War website, have helped ordinary people take heroism back from the powerful and the victorious. My grandmother raised children among rat-infested ruins during the Blitz, surviving on adrenalin and very little food, and with nerves shredded by the screaming bombs. She lived alongside women who watched for fires from buildings that were themselves on fire. She saw a mother lay down on top of a child to save it, taking the force of an explosion. She saw nurses brave flying timbers and incendiary bombs. None of them got a medal for it, nor did they boast about it.

They did what they had to. That is what our servicemen and women do now. That they are volunteers does not lessen their sacrifice. Nor does our doubt about the wars they are fighting.

Those who revisit wartime memories today know a truth, deep down in their aching bones. It is that if a country asks a man or a women to give their life it should - it must - be in a good cause. Not for oil, or Bush family revenge or some ultimately pointless geopolitical power game. At the going down of the sun, here and in Basra and Camp Bastion, we should remember that.

    Cole Moreton: A just cause is a hero's right, IoS, 12.11.2006, http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article1963435.ece

Leading article: Stop the clocks

Published: 12 November 2006
The Independent on Sunday

Who knows if silence is the mother of truth, as Benjamin Disraeli alleged? But this Remembrance Sunday's pause is at least a chance to put aside the argumentative tone of much of the debate about current affairs, and to contemplate the heroism of the men and women who risk their lives on our behalf in the armed forces.

As a liberal newspaper that supported military intervention in Afghanistan and opposed it in Iraq, we have nothing but admiration for the members of the armed forces who do the best they can in the often testing situations to which they are sent. They have sometimes been given dangerous missions without adequate planning or equipment, but their professionalism has never been in question. The intensity of the criticism of the case for war in Iraq is unprecedented - and it continues to be the dominant issue of our public realm, three and a half years after the invasion. That has had an effect on morale in Afghanistan too, where, five years after the conflict began, the situation is far from having been stabilised. Yet British troops continue to serve with discipline in both countries. They respect the decisions of the House of Commons even as the debate outside the chamber rages on.

At 11am today, therefore, we should put aside all differences over why our forces are in Iraq, and try to appreciate the sense of loss felt by the parents of Kingsman Jamie Hancock, killed in Basra last week, and the parents of all those that fell before him. Even in the Second World War, almost universally accepted as a just war and one of national survival, there was a terrible unfairness about any individual death, and no lesser sense of loss felt by families and friends.

    Leading article: Stop the clocks, IoS, 12.11.2006, http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article1963440.ece

Saddam sentenced

to death by hanging for massacre

November 05, 2006
From Times Online
By Ned Parker, of The Times, in Baghdad

Live from Baghdad: Inside Iraq weblog

Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging today for crimes against humanity as Baghdad’s Shia population deafened the city with celebratory gunfire at the demise of their nemesis.

Inside Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone, the ageing leader, with a touch of grey in his hair, and his seven co-defendants appeared in an austere courtroom, with a scale of justice behind the judge’s bench.

The man, who ruled Iraq with an iron fist for 35 years, was visibly shaking as he waited to learn his fate in what some had billed the trial of the century over the execution of 148 Shia villagers from the town of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt on Saddam’s life.

Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman ordered: "Make him stand," as Saddam pleaded to guards: "Don't bend my arms. Don't bend my arms."

Saddam, dressed in a dark jacket and white shirt, harangued the tribunal’s chief judge as the judgment was read.

"You can’t decide. You are slaves. God is great. Life is for us and death for our enemies. Life for the nation, death for the enemies of our nation," Saddam said, visibly shaking, his face wrapped tightly in a scowl.

A court official held Saddam's hands behind his back as Rahman, shouting to be heard over the defendant, declared: "The highest penalty should be implemented."

One of his lawyers shouted bitterly that marshal in the visitors gallery was chewing gum and laughing at Saddam’s reversal of fortune.

Next, Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and Iraq’s intelligence chief at the time of the Dujail killings, appeared in court. He stood quietly as the judge sentenced him to death.

Before Saddam and Barzan Ibrahim appeared, Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of the Revolutionary Court that issued the execution orders against Dujail residents, was sentenced to death. He screamed "Allahu Akhbar" (God is Great) as Rahman delivered his verdict. The judge flicked his wrist and ordered the guards to drag Bandar back to his cell.

Saddam’s former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan received a life sentence, while three Baath party officials from Dujail received up to 15 years each and a fourth, more junior figure, was cleared.

An appeals process is due to start within 30 days. It will be heard before a chamber of nine judges and could take several months to reach a conclusion.

If they agree that Saddam should be sentenced to death, the former leader will have to be executed within 30 days of that decision.

Reaction to the verdict mirrored Iraq’s sharp sectarian divide, which many Iraqis believe has dragged the country into civil war.

In the Shia slum of Sadr City, fighters from radical cleric Moqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, blamed for much of the sectarian violence in Baghdad, cruised a victory lap in seven cars and pick-up trucks.

One fighter, lugging a rocket-propelled grenade, said: "Today the big head is finished. And today we will kill all the Sunni Baathists and we will kill all the small heads."

On the state’s official television channel Iraqiya, a song was broadcast of children singing "Judge you must execute Saddam Hussein, the persecutor," even before the verdict was announced.

Hundreds protested in Saddam’s hometown Tikrit, yelling "Our heart, our soul, our blood for Saddam," "Saddam is the owner of Iraq," and "the government is American."

One man, named Sheikh Ahmed Jabouri, cursed the Americans. "There will be more than 300 to 400 Americans killed in the next month."

The US military’s armoured Stryker vehicles rumbled through the Sunni bastion of Dura in Baghdad.

Clashes broke out between police and protesters in the Sunni enclave of Adhamiyah, the last place Saddam was seen in April 2003 before Baghdad fell to the Americans.

    Saddam sentenced to death by hanging for massacre, Ts, 5.11.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article625743.ece

Diary boast of soldiers

who abused detainees

November 03, 2006
The Times
By David Sanderson

A Territorial Army soldier alleged to have sold fake photographs of British troops urinating on an Iraqi prisoner kept a diary within which he boasted about the violence meted out to Iraqi civilians during his tour of duty.

But Private Stuart Mackenzie, 28, who was appearing as a prosecution witness at the court martial of seven men from The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, refused to incriminate himself yesterday by answering questions on the alleged abuse scandal.

Private Mackenzie handed the pictures to the Daily Mirror in May 2004, the hearing at Bulford Camp in Wiltshire was told. The photographs, which purportedly showed soldiers abusing Iraqis, led to the sacking of Piers Morgan as Editor of the newspaper. Private Mackenzie was asked whether he was the soldier urinating on a hooded “Iraqi” in a picture that went on the front page.

“Do I have to answer that question?” Private Mackenzie asked the judge, Mr Justice McKinnnon, who replied that he did not if he felt that if he did he would incriminate himself. “In which case, I refuse to answer that question,” he said.

Julian Knowles, for Corporal Donald Payne, one of the seven soldiers from the regiment on trial, said that Private Mackenzie’s colleagues immediately recognised him as the soldier with his face blacked out in the photographs.

Distinctive moles on his forearms, his posture and the way that his shirt was tucked in made him instantly recognisable, Mr Knowles said. Private Mackenzie chose not to answer, though he did say that he had faced a court martial over the photographs. But the case had been dropped, he added.

The seven soldiers are facing charges relating to the alleged abuse of 11 Iraqi civilians, one of whom, Baha Musa, 26, died.

Private Mackenzie, who was guarding Mr Musa and the other detainees, boasted of violent incidents in his diary later found by police. In it he described Mr Musa, who was allegedly killed by a corporal now on trial, as “a fat bastard”.

Corporal Donald Payne denies the manslaughter of Mr Musa. Mr Knowles exhibited a diary entry for September 15, 2003, the day that Mr Musa died. It said: “The fat bastard . . . stopped breathing, then we could not revive him. What a shame.”

Payne, 35, denies the manslaughter of Mr Musa and perverting the course of justice. He became Britain’s first convicted war criminal when he earlier admitted that he had treated Iraqis inhumanely.

Lance Corporal Wayne Crowcroft, 22, denies a charge of inhumane treatment, as does Private Darren Fallon, 23, of the same regiment. Sergeant Kelvin Stacey, 29, denies assault occasioning actual bodily harm, with an alternative count of common assault.

Major Michael Peebles, 35, and Warrant Officer Mark Davies, 37, both of the Intelligence Corps, each deny a charge of negligently performing a duty, namely failing to ensure that detainees were not mistreated. Colonel Jorge Mendonca, MBE, 42, former commander of The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, also denies negligently performing a duty.

The hearing continues.

Diary boast of soldiers who abused detainees, Ts, 3.11.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article624276.ece