Myth Of The Surge

Foreign Policy In Focus |

In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.
The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi’a insurgents.
In reality, of course, that’s not what happened at all. It’s time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus narrative which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted.
The Sunni decision to cooperate in the suppression of al Qaeda in Iraq had nothing to do with the surge. The main Sunni armed resistance groups had actually turned against al Qaeda in 2005, when they began trying to make a deal with the United States to end the war.
At an Iraqi reconciliation conference in Cairo, November 19-21, 2005, leaders of the three major Sunni armed groups (one of which was a coalition of several resistance organization) told U.S. and Arab officialsthey were willing to track down al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and deliver him to Iraqi authorities as part of a negotiated agreement with the United States. The Sunni insurgent leaders were motivated not only by hatred of al Qaeda but by the fear that a Shi’a-dominated government would consolidate power and exclude the Sunnis permanently unless the United States acted to rebalance its policy in Iraq.
Two months later, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad actually entered into secret negotiations with the three major Sunni insurgent groups 2006, as later reported by the Sunday Times and confirmed by Khalilzad. The Sunni leaders even submitted a formal peace proposal to Khalilzad. They insisted on a “timetable for withdrawal” as part of the deal, but it was “linked to the timescale necessary to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces and security services,” according to Sunday Times.  
Khalilzad cut off the negotiations in February 2006, because such an agreement would have conflicted with a broader strategy of standing up a Shi’a army to suppress the Sunni insurgency.  
The major Shi’a factions, determined to eliminate any possible threat to its power from the Sunnis in Baghdad, unleashed death squads, mostly from the Mahdi Army, in Sunni neighborhoods across the entire city in 2006 and early 2007.
The result was the defeat of the Sunni insurgents’ political-military bases in Baghdad, and the transformation of the capital from a mixed Sunni-Shi’a city into an overwhelmingly Shi’a city, as shown dramatically in this series of maps, based on U.S. military census data.  
As a result, by late 2006, the Sunni leaders were feeling much more vulnerable to Shi’a power.  Col. Sean McFarland, U.S. Army brigade commander in Al Anbar province throughout 2006, found Sunni sheiks expressing “[a] growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias….”
It was that fear of the Shi’a power that drove local Sunni decisions to join U.S.-sponsored Sunni neighborhood armed groups in Anbar.
The sectarian violence in Baghdad began to abate by August 2007, but not because of additional U.S. troops as the official narrative of the war suggests. It was because the Shi’a had accomplished their aim of confining the Sunni population to relatively small enclaves in Baghdad. That relationship between the achievement of that aim and the reduced violence was noted by the September 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.  
The main Petraeus conceit about his strategy in Iraq is that it defeated a Shi’a insurgency that represented an Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq. But the main premise on which that claim was based -- that Iran was backing “rogue elements” of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army -- was simply a psywar ploy by Petraeus and his staff. The objective of the “rogue elements” line was to divide the Mahdi Army, as military and intelligence officials admitted to pro-war blogger Bill Roggio.
The official narrative suggested that Iran exerted political influence in Iraq by supporting armed groups opposing the government. In fact, however, Iran’s key Iraqi allies had always been the two Shi’a factions with which the United States was allied against Sadr -- the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party. They had both gotten Iranian support and training during the war against Saddam, and the fiercely nationalist Sadr had criticized SCIRI leaders as Iranian stooges.
The al-Maliki government had no problem with Iranian training and financial support of the Mahdi Army in 2006, when the Mahdi Army was eliminating the Sunni threat from Baghdad. But once it was clear that the Sunnis had been defeated, the historical conflict between Sadr and the other Shi’a factions reemerged in spring 2007. 
The Iranian interest was to ensure that the Shi’a-dominated government of Iraq consolidated its power. Iran’s “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei told al-Maliki in August 2007 that Iran would support his taking control of Sadr’s strongholds. Later that same month, al-Maliki went to Karbala and gave the local police chief “carte blanche” to attack the Sadrists there. After two days of violence, Sadr declared a six-month “freeze” on Mahdi Army military operations August 27, 2007.
By late 2007, contrary to the official Iraq legend, the al-Maliki government and the Bush administrationwere both publicly crediting Iran with pressuring Sadr to agree to the unilateral ceasefire – to the chagrin of Petraeus.  
Al-Maliki launched the attack on Mahdi Army forces in Basrah in March 2008 in the knowledge that Iran would back him against Sadr. And when it went badly, he turned to Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard official in charge of day-to-day Iraq policy, to force a ceasefire on Sadr. Soleimani told Iraqi President Talibani that Iran supported al-Maliki’s efforts to “dismantle all militias”, and Sadr agreed to a ceasefire within 24 hours of Iran’s intervention.
So it was Iran’s restraint -- not Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy -- that effectively ended the Shi’a insurgent threat.
It was Soleimani who had presided over the secret April 2006 meeting of Shi’a leaders that had chosen al-Maliki as Prime Minister, after having been smuggled into the Green Zone without telling the Americans. And that was only one of a several trips Soleimani made to the Green Zone over a two-year period without U.S. knowledge.
But Biden doesn’t want to know this and other historical facts that contradict the official narrative on Iraq. For the Democratic foreign policy elite, staying ignorant of the real history of the Iraq War allows them to believe that deploying U.S. military forces in Muslim countries can be an effective instrument of U.S. power. 

Iraq Metrics At A Glance

All figures at at the conservative end of the scale, except the military ones, which the Americans took the trouble to count.

Death of The Labour Party

Who would ever have thought after all these years the demise of the Labour Party would be presided over by five comedians who look for all the world like a (small) Star Trek convention? Not with a bang but a whimper, sure enough. And, appropriately, in the year which saw the deaths of Michael Foot and Jimmy Reid.

Planting The Stars and Stripes On A Mountain of Corpses

Loud noises from Washington about a US pull-out from Iraq are a poor disguise for America’s determination to keep waging war. And the same sort of spin is at work here in Britain.

Link To Jon Pilger Piece

Blair's Fantasy Memoirs On Sale In Crime Sections of Bookstores

Link To Facebook Campaign

God 'A Crock of Shit' - Stephen Hawking

The worlds of religion and cosmology were rocked to their foundations on Thursday when Stephen Hawking said there was no necessity for a God to explain the origin of the universe. I telephoned Professor Hawking at his Oxford office and asked what he thought of the rebuttals of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
'Fuck him', he said 'He's as gay as a fucking Christmas Tree'. When I expressed my disappointment at these sentiments he replied 'Fuck off and don't phone this number again, you Scotch cunt.' I never got the chance to ask him if he believed, as I do, that there is the possibility of circular balance within a closed system of transitions. His shocking outburst serves to confirm my view about Professor Hawking's pretentiousness. I mean why does he speak with an American accent when he was born in Kent?

Wolves In The City Footnote - Some of Professor Hawking's comments above have been paraphrased.

Blair Pelted In Dublin

Blair, Blair, Bush's man. Blood, blood on their hands.

The British Legacy In Iraq By Felicity Arbuthnot

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.” (Tony Blair, speech as newly elected Prime Minister, 1997.)

August is seemingly Spotlight on Illegal Invasion month. President Obama has made his Mission-Lost-Cause speech about US., Iraq fantasy "withdrawal" - leaving behind 50,000 troops, perhaps 50,000 mercenaries, and some have suggested 100,000 "advisors."

In context: "Last month, the Congressional
Research Service reported that the Department of Defense workforce has 19 percent more contractors (207,600) than uniformed personnel ... in Iraq and Afghanistan, making these wars ... the most outsourced and privatized in US history. Worse, the oversight of contractors will rest with other contractors. As has been the case in Afghanistan, contractors will be sought to provide "operations-center monitoring of private security contractors (PSCs) as well as PSC inspection and accountability services."(1)

Tony "I would do it again" Blair, announced, on 16th August, he is to give his entire £4.6 million advance on his book: "My Journey", to the Royal British Legion, for support of British soldiers in need. As the ungracious calls for his "journey" to be to The Hague get louder - with some suggesting a far less civilized ordeal - it seems timely to assess British "achievements" in Iraq.

The British, of course, having come in flying the St George's flag on their vehicles (the Crusaders' flag) slithered out of Basra city, under cover of darkness, to hunker down at the fortified airport, some distance outside the town, in September 2007, much as US units did from other parts of Iraq, last week, fleeing in the night, over the border to Kuwait.

UK Forces, who had also illegally squatted in Basra Palace, as did their US counterparts in palaces throughout the country, taking over Iraq's cultural properties, additionally pillaging them, in defiance of the 1954 and 1977 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. To use such buildings in support of military effort or as a command centre is specifically prohibited. The full extent of pillaging is unlikely to ever be documented, since no one was guarding the guards. An early British example was the theft of a statue of Saddam Hussein from Basra, for which the British tax payer paid the transport for its journey to the Unit's base in southern England.

Basra Palace was, however, handed back, after four and a half years, in a furtive ceremony at I a.m., local time. Most of the troops had already left, creeping out, to head for the desert road to the airport, from 10 p.m.

Alleged British atrocities began as Iraq had barely been declared "liberated." One of their first recorded acts (after securing Basra oil installations) was less than a month after the invasion, in May 2003, when fifteen year old Ahmed Jaber Karheem, drowned, after allegedly being forced in to a canal in the former "Venice of the Middle East", by Guardsmen Martin McGing, Joseph McCleary and Colour Sergeant Carle Selman.

The alleged action was to "teach him a lesson", for suspected looting. Ahmed Jaber could not swim. In a case which took three years to come to court, Guarsdman McCleary whinged that: "We were told to put looters in the canal. I was the lowest rank and we were told we weren't paid to think. Just follow orders. I don't know why the army went ahead with the prosecution ... We were scapegoats." Nuremberg's Principles apparently now irrelevant, and Iraqi lives presumably being cheap, they were acquitted.

Whilst there was undisputedly looting of food after the invasion, the population of Basra were almost entirely reliant on the government distributed rations. The British army "secured" the food warehouses, but distributed none.

Children were begging for any sustenance and for water, throughout the south, in a near famine situation for many. So people looted. No doubt the opportunist joined the desperate, but the situation created by the food-secure occcupiers, was shameful. Looters were also shot by troops. Fathers, brothers, sons, faced death for trying to feed their families, or to make a bit of money in the reigning, invasion-generated, chaos.

When the British finally requested a shipment of water for the desperate population, delivered by the unfortunately named naval ship, "Sir Galahad", they called in tankers, rather than deliver themselves. The water filled the tankers - to be contaminated with whatever it had previously transported - and was sold to those who could afford to buy. It is not known whether members of Her Majesty's navy or army, also profited from this nice little earner.

The canal drowning Court case was finally heard in June 2006. That month, the army was being accused of shooting dead a thirteen year old, in a crowd accused of throwing stones.

Casual killing started early in the invasion. Corporal Russ Aston, who later died in an assault on a police station in Al Majar, wrote, in March 2003 : " I've shot 4-5 Iraqis and one of them were quite young, about 14-15 ... I felt bad at the time, but I'm OK now." In a call to his mother he reportedly said: "It's just killing for killing's sake out here ... I don't know how I am going to cope with what I've seen." (2)

A colleague talked of being on a night patrol and: "this f… flip flop had come out", so he shot him dead. According to Amnesty, Wa'el Rahim Jabar: ".. was walking along the main street, with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his right shoulder, accompanied by two (unarmed) friends", it was dark, they did not realise there was a British patrol near by and he was shot in the chest and neck and killed instantly.

Carrying an ancient family weapon was a norm in rural areas, which had often become increasingly dangerous, even before the invasion, due often to embargo-generated desperation or criminality.

Iraqis were referred to by Britain's "boys", as: "stinking Arabs,", "yip-yaps", towel-heads", "flip-flops", and "crusties." Beautiful, battered Basra, where very small children sold fruits they had picked themselves, from the earliest light, along the Corniche, was referred to as a "viper's nest", by Major General Brims.

Aston's colleague, Sergeant Simon Hamilton-Jewell, who was also to die at Al Majar, wrote home, with excitement, of capturing three: "Ba'ath Party members." Ignorance clearly reigned. It was near impossible to get work in Iraq, during Saddam Hussein's leadership, without signing up, whatever the individual's views on Ba'athism (pan-Arabism.) "I had them lying on the floor (of a vehicle) handcuffs, sandbags on their heads and my shooter pointing straight at their heads ..." So much for the Geneva Convention.

It is not known whether two of those, were the men, arrested by Hamilton-Jewell in March 2003, accused, but never tried by the British, held in solitary confinement, allegedly subject to sleep deprivation, extreme heat, arbitrary body searches and physical abuse. A full three years after they were arrested, they were accused of the deaths of two British soldiers, and finally handed over to the Iraqi authorities for trial in 2008, at risk of torture and hanging.

In March 2010, due to the tireless work of Phil Shiner, of the UK's Birmingham based Public Interest lawyers, the two were unanimously awarded compensation for their: "mental suffering, fear of execution (amounting to) inhuman treatment", by the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg. The British government and Foreign Office came in for some salutary criticism.

Just after the US-dominated, UN Security Council, approved the US and UK having interim control of Iraq, on 22nd May 2003, the deliverer of the "fine document" of fictional claims - cited by Colin Powell, at the UN, to justify the invasion - Attorney Anthony Blair, pitched up in Basra, the first "coalition" leader to visit troops.

The: "minimum loss of civilian life", their superb restraint, was now: "famous around the world .. " he said. The troops actions were, he continued: " ... a model of how armed forces anywhere in the world should conduct themselves ...".

By this time, the family of eleven year old Memmon Salam al-Maliki, had been looking for him for three weeks. On the 29th April 2003, Memmon was injured by unexploded munitions abandoned by the British, near his Basra home, which locals had begged them to remove, piles scattered everywhere. He lost one hand, fingers of the other and injured his right eye. Picked up by a passing British patrol, it seems he was given first aid, then transferred to the British base hospital at Shuaiba. Memmon was among numbers of children reportedly injured by this lethal, casually abandoned legacy. His parents have not seen him since the British army's intervention.

The British in Basra, told his father he had been transferred to an American military hospital in Kuwait. They had, apparently, neither documentation, or knowledge of the location of the hospital. Without his parents knowledge and permission, they seemingly admit that Memmon was transferred, across an international border, to another country - and vanished. The US authorities, however, deny all knowledge of him or any paper trail. Seven years later, his family are still looking, still distraught.

In their last letter from the Ministry of Defence, dated October 2005, the department's chief claims officer told their lawyer that the British consulate in Basra had also failed to locate the boy. "I am sorry to say that the subsequent investigation was inconclusive and the whereabouts of your client's son remain unknown, following his transfer to an American field hospital in Kuwait", according to papers seen by the (London) Guardian

The British Ministry of Defence: "began to regard the family's appeals as claims for compensation", expressing sympathy, but denying all liability. Seven and a half years later, Liam Fox, Britain's current Defence Minister - latest in a woeful bunch - has ordered: "an urgent enquiry."

Perhaps the most detailed account of the treatment of Iraqis by the British forces can be found in the legal Inquiry (3) in to the death of Baha Mousa (26) a receptionist at Basra's Haitham Hotel. The father of two, whose 22 year old wife had recently died of cancer, was arrested with nine others, on 14th September 2003, by personnel of the 1st Battalion, The Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Two days later he was dead, with "at least" ninety three injuries to his body, including fractured ribs and a broken nose.

A post-mortem found he had suffered cardio-respiratory arrest, i.e., : he had been asphyxiated. When his father Daoud Mousa, a Colonel in the Basra Police Force, saw the state of his son's body, "horrified", he burst in to tears. Light shone in the darkest places, again, the result of the deceptively mildly mannered, bull terrier-like lawyer, Phil Shiner.(4) Shiner is currently acting for seventy Iraqis claiming torture and mistreatment by British soldiers. His legal practise is not alone.

A former fellow detainee with Baha Mousa alleged, at London's High Court, that soldiers had competed to see who could kick them the furthest. Another survivor, Kifa Taha al-Mutari, in a witness statement, said he and others were "beaten, hooded and our hands were wired."

Hooding was deemed to constitute torture, by the United Nations Committee Against Torture in 1997, a fact brought to the attention of the relevant British personnel in Basra by 4th April 2003. Baha Mousa was held hooded for over twenty three hours. (See 3 .) Britain is both a signatory to the UN Commission and banned hooding under domestic law in the 1970's.

Whilst looters could be shot, the Inquiry transcript shows some questionable commandeering by the liberators. "The first arrest operation had yielded three Ba'athists who had 11 million dinars in three large bags in their house. Whilst I was keen to follow Geneva Convention rules and allow them to take this with them to the interrogation centre, I decided I could borrow a few thousand for use in the local market -- to demonstrate an element of trust and willingness to restore normality!"

Iraqis know instability, and in times of turmoil, expecting looting, all cash and life's savings are removed from banks and taken home for safer keeping. Three bags may well have represented all the three men had, equivalent of a few thousand pounds, to keep them and their families for however long the chaos lasted.

At the Al Haitham Hotel, as well as rounding up Mr Mousa and his colleagues, Britain's finest, reportedly, rounded up the contents of the safe.

In another incident, is was recorded that : "He was interrogated along with his associates ... after some very disconcerting 'conditioning.' Marines bashed corrugated iron with sticks for several hours. This was to maintain the shock of capture and encourage them to talk. It became apparent just how frightened these men must have been, when two of them pissed themselves."

One young Iraqi was subject to a mock execution, by soldiers pouring what they said was petrol over him, from a jerry can, and threatening to set him alight. Another youth had a gun forced in to his mouth.

Deaths at the hands of the army, disputed by the Ministry of Defence, include twenty Iraqis, which witnesses claimed were taken to the British base at Amara, on 14th May 2004. Undisputed is that the next day twenty bodies were returned to their families. Injuries alleged included evidence of torture, mutilation, removal of eyes, and stab wounds, according to lawyers.

Further: "There were several instances of prisoners ... being injured after capture ... it rendered the prisoner unfit for tactical questioning." Quite some injuries, if they were rendered speechless, it is possible to speculate. Detainees were held in a "prisoner of war cage." Chillingly : "Prisoners should arrive .. 'bagged and tagged.' " (i.e.: hooded and handcuffed.) So much for the United Nations Committee on Torture.

In all, prisoner handling was cited as : "Abysmal" and : "Fundamentally flawed." Communication was problematical: they lacked interpreters.

Numerous claims, seemingly week on week, year on year, of British occupation inhumanity, include a twenty three years old security guard, Adil Abba Fadhil Mohammed, who alleges beating with rifle butts, kicking and sexual abuse by male and female soldiers, being made to strip, and being photographed by laughing male and female soldiers. Claims by others include rape, electrocution and sexual humiliation, descriptions of which, should carry a health warning.

Another claim is of the alleged torture and execution of sixty two year old Sabiha Khudur Talib, claimed by her son to be taken away by British soldiers, hit on her back with a rifle butt, and bundled in to a personnel carrier. Her body was found on Basra's al-Zubayr highway, in a British army body bag. Basra police describe: "traces of torture and a bullet wound to the abdomen." "The evidence points to a brutal murder ..", says Phil Shiner.

In October 2009, an army whistle-blower spoke to investigative reporter Donal MacIntyre, he had spent much of his career in the Royal Military Police Special Investigations Branch. He finally left believing that he was: "serving something that was party to covering up quite serious allegations of torture and murder", he commented.

"I've seen documentary evidence that there were incidents, running in to the hundreds, involving death and serious injury to Iraqis. It is the actions of a few who have shown to be bad apples. But the system in so flawed, and some of the decision making has been so perverse, that it is fair to say that the barrel is probably rotten."

In 2009, when the British finally left Iraq, their Commanding Officer saluted their bravery and told them: "We have prepared the ground for continued success ... We leave knowing that Basra is a better place now than it was in 2003."

It takes, as ever, William Blum on Iraq, to cut through this and the rest of the delusional nonsense, including that from "Peace Envoy" Blair, and utterly unworthy Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Obama, this week. Britain and America:

"... killed wantonly, tortured ... the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ...

More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up ... a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again." (5)

H/T to Reality Zone

Ron Paul On The Peace of Obama's Speechwriters

The President’s announcement that all U.S. combat troops have left Iraq is no more believable than the ‘Mission Accomplished’ declaration was in 2003. Once again, we are being told the mission has been accomplished and our brave men and women are coming back home. Though the people are hopeful they remain skeptical, and rightfully so.
The biggest problem is that success in Iraq is undefinable since the mission was never defined. The reasons given for the invasion were based on misinformation. Now, the war has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and this has contributed significantly to our economic woes.
Forty-four hundred Americans are dead, thirty thousand severely wounded, and more than a hundred thousand are suffering from serious health problems related to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. This alone should tell us that it was not worth the investment and the needless sacrifice of our young people and the taxpayers.
It is deceitful to imply we will avoid hostilities with this new policy. We still have to contend with:
–the 50,000 troops carrying weapons remain in Iraq
–the 100,000 contractors that remain, with more expected to go to Iraq
–the 9,000 special ops personnel trained in assassinations that remain in Iraq
–a huge embassy, bigger than the Vatican, that will remain
–dozens of military bases that will stay
–the al Qaeda organizations that did not exist in Iraq before the war
–Muqtada al Sadr, a strong nationalist, has gained much political power
–the fact that Iran benefits tremendously with the Shiites now in power in Iraq and is a close ally of al Sadr
Osama bin Laden wins by ‘proving’ that America has an agenda of occupation in the Middle East. And, we continue to walk into his trap and hand him up his best recruitment tool in his efforts to incite hatred and terrorism against the United States.
What’s worse, President Obama made it clear last night that the troops and resources leaving Iraq will not come home to defend our country or ease our economic woes. They will instead be diverted to Afghanistan, perhaps also Pakistan and, I fear, even Iran.
From my viewpoint we are the losers in this fool’s errand of endless war. Tragically, this new policy is not one of peace but merely a charade that will severely undermine our national security and continue us down the path to bankruptcy—a threat that we best not long ignore.

The False Flag of Victory Planted on Iraqi Graves

Tony Blair - A Journey

Blair's book was published today to almost universal execration. Hard to know where to start or finish. Here's a few of my own thoughts:

- The pic on the cover: aren't police mugshots supposed to have a profile shot of the suspect as well?

- 'I didn't understand it and shouldn't have supported it' - not Blair on Iraq or neoconservatism, but Blair on foxhunting.

- 'I didn't foresee the disaster which followed the invasion...' I did.

- 'Gordon Brown was always going to be a disaster as PM.' Not what you said during the election. You were either lying then or lying now.

- Blair is being hired privately by Ariel Sharon as a motivational speaker. No comment needed.

- he is devoting "a large part of the life left to me" to Middle East peace and interfaith reconciliation with the Muslim world.- A bit like a crocodile offering you dentistry lessons after having bitten your arm off.

- He mentions "a son-in-law" of Saddam Hussein who fell out with the dictator in 1996, fled abroad, exposed the Iraqi government's interest in developing weapons of mass destruction, and then went back to Iraq, where he was shot dead. Actually, there were two sons-in-law, not one, who defected and then returned and were murdered. A good indicator of his attention to accuracy.

- Regrets? I've had few, but then again……. Only the FOI Act and the foxhunting ban were cited by Blair as regrets. About the only 2 decent things New £abour delivered.