Iraq war

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the betrayal of British Muslims and the new Iraq war

Do we need to take more action to tackle the Islamist threat in British schools? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, The Spectator’s Douglas Murray and Matthew Parris debate this week’s cover feature on whether the Birmingham ‘Trojan Horse plot’ is the results of years of weak policy and inaction. Should we wait until there is more concrete proof before taking drastic actions? Is the promotion of British values the right solution, and how can the government go about defining and teaching these values? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss how the West Lothian Question will be addressed at the next election. Where do all of the parties

Ed West Ed West

Now that Iraq really is threatened by jihadists, should we intervene?

The war on terror has gone not necessarily to our advantage. For the second time in a dozen years the land of Abraham has been invaded by a partly-British army, although this time it is composed not of regular soldiers but of bearded lunatics from Crawley. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an Islamist offshoot so extreme that even al-Qaeda thinks they’ve taken things a bit too far, now controls a huge swathe of Syria and Iraq, roughly in the region of 40,000 square miles, or 4.0 Wales on the International Wales Scale. That makes Sunnistan larger than an independent Scotland and with a great deal more oil.

Monday

Alex Massie

Does Boris Johnson really want to see Tony Blair tried for war crimes?

What are we supposed to make of Boris Johnson? I mean, are we supposed to pay attention to what Boris actually says? Or is he permitted to play the game of politics by different rules? That is, the sort of stuff that applies to other politicians does not apply to Boris because the Mayor of London is a great entertainer and thus granted some kind of relief from the usual rules of responsibility. Just asking, you know. Consider his recent remarks about Tony Blair and the Iraq War. During an appearance on LBC last week, the Mayor appeared to endorse the fashionable daft idea that Mr Blair should be tried

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The Unknown Known: Errol Morris tries to trip up Donald Rumsfeld – and fails

Before getting onto the film I should make a few disclaimers. There is a popular view that Donald Rumsfeld was a catastrophic US secretary of defence. I do not share that view. There is also a view that his most famous phrase – about known knowns, known unknowns and so on – was a display of laughable ignorance.  I think it one of the best descriptions anyone has ever produced of the challenges posed by intelligence. And finally I suppose there is a school of people out there who shudder at the name. I’m not among them. As well as being a great public servant – both the youngest and oldest

Wednesday

Steerpike

Rebekah Brooks’s ‘Hutton style’ email

People pay Tony Blair handsomely for his PR advice; but, today, thanks to the hacking trial at the Old Bailey, we allegedly get to see a glimpse of the Great Man in action for free. The court was shown this email sent by Rebekah Brooks on the day after the last ever edition of the News of the Screws went to press; it is an account of a conversation she claims to have had with Tony Blair: Only got 10 minutes before I see Charlie for confiscation! I had an hour on the phone to Tony Blair. He said: 1. Form an independent unit that has an outside junior counsel,

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Chilcot Inquiry is a pointless endeavour. Tony Blair’s critics will never be satisfied.

I never really saw the point of the Chilcot Inquiry and nothing that has happened in the years since it first sat has persuaded me I was wrong to think it liable to prove a waste of time, effort and money. Dear old Peter Oborne pops up in today’s Telegraph to confirm the good sense of these suspicions. Chilcot, you see, is most unlikely to satisfy Tony Blair’s critics, far less provide the “smoking gun” proving that the Iraq War was a stitched-up, born-again conspiracy promoted by George W Bush and eagerly, even slavishly, supported by Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. This is not an argument about truth. If Chilcot fails

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

After Saddam

‘The problem is why,’ said the health project officer of a British charity working in the marshlands of southern Iraq close to Basra. ‘No one answers why?’ He was talking to the BBC journalist Hugh Sykes about the state of Iraq, ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He agreed that the Americans and British had done ‘a good job’ in getting rid of the dictator but said that this had changed nothing in Basra, whose economy had been destroyed by Saddam as he drained the marshes, turning a landscape that was vivid green into burnt ochre. We also heard from the farmers who in the hours after Saddam’s

Friday

Fraser Nelson

What if the stop the war protesters had got their way?

It’s the 10th anniversary of the Stop the War protest today, which led me to think about a point Christopher Hitchens once made: how the world would look if the ‘stop the war’ protests – in their various forms – had their way? Saddam Hussein would be lord and master of the annexed Kuwait, his terrorised citizens living in a country once described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below it. The Kurds may not have held out against him, the Shi’ite south still brutally repressed. Slobodan Milosevic would be a European dictator, having made Bosnia part of a Greater Serbia and ethnically cleansed Kosovo. Afghanistan

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

15 February 2003: What Do They Want? Victory for Saddam

Ten years ago today, Lloyd Evans joined the anti-Iraq war march in London. Evans had an open mind about the war, until he joined the peace movement and met Bianca Jagger. Here is the piece in full from our archive. I’m bursting with excitement. I can hardly get the words down fast enough. There was an amazing occurrence in Hackney last week at a meeting of the Stop the War coalition. I swear this happened. A protester said something perceptive. You don’t believe me? No, really, I was there. He was an old guy with white hair and a lovely crinkly face. ‘The bigger the march,’ he said ruefully. ‘The