Exiting the Vampire's Arsehole

Twenty years on, the British press and wider media are still making the same stinking excuses for the Iraq War and those who started it.

Previously: Tony Blair brand blinkers (20-year guarantee)
The British media wants you to think it's learned the lessons of Iraq; it hasn't...

Note: This post was completed on 20/03/23 but not published until the 21st.

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The Gulf War in 1990. The Iraq War in 2003. We know and discuss these events fairly frequently, but there is a rarely discussed American intervention that superseded them and which played a key role in what was to come:

1988: The Iran/Iraq War is entering its final stages; the US has intelligence from satellite imagery that indicates Iran is about to exploit a hole in Iraq’s defences.

US intelligence officials pass the location of Iranian forces to Iraq. They are fully aware that Saddam Hussein has used chemical weapons, including the lethal nerve agent sarin, and will use them again.

The US give the Iraqis details of Iranian troop movements, logistics facilities, and air defences. That intelligence leads directly to four major offensives by the Iraqi forces, each one preceded by the use of mustard gas and sarin.

The US intervened to tilt the war in Iraq’s favour; Iran agrees to a ceasefire and comes to the negotiating table.

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During the Iran/Iraq War, Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and used them. In mid-1988, he threatened the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini with a new full-scale invasion and attacks on Iranian cities with WMD. Hussein had shown his willingness to do so throughout the conflict: Most notably in March 1988, with the Halabja massacre when 5,000 civilians were killed in a mustard gas and nerve agent attack.

In 2013, Colonel Rick Francona, military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 offensives, who was later part of the Pentagon military analyst program (a group of 75 retired military officers recruited to ‘sell’ the Iraq War), told Foreign Policy:

The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew. 

The use of chemical weapons was banned under the Geneva Protocol (1925). The US ratified the protocol in 1975. Iraq never did. But by signing up to the agreement, the US agreed to “exert every effort to induce other states to accede to [the agreement]”. Instead, it colluded — by proxy — with Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian armed forces and civilians.

Iran alleged at the UN in November 1983 that Iraq had used chemical weapons in the conflict. A UN specialist team visited the country in March 1984 and saw hospital patients suffering with side effects of sulfur mustard gas. A forensic analysis of Iraqi bombs dropped on Iran suggested that the country’s military had used both mustard and tabun nerve gas.

The US Defense Department proposed intelligence-sharing with the Iraqis in 1986. But, according to Francona in his Foreign Affairs interview, it was blocked at the CIA’s insistence. He claimed the agency viewed Hussein and his officials as “thugs”, which is more than a bit rich.

The following year, the CIA changed its mind after satellite images showed that Iran was concentrating troops and equipment near Basrah. Francona, who was serving in the Defense Intelligence Agency, said its analysts believed Iran had discovered a “gaping hole” in the Iraqi lines.

They produced a Top Secret Codeword¹ report with a Lord of the Rings-assed title ('At The Gates of Basrah') which warned that Iran's 1988 spring offensive would be larger than its previous attempts and could break through Iraqi lines to take Basrah. The analysts claimed that if the city fell, the Iraqi military would collapse and Iran would win the war. According to Francona, President Reagan wrote in the margins:

An Iranian victory is unacceptable. 

How did the US know so much about Iraq’s development and use of chemical weapons when it made the case for the war in 2003? It had offered a helping hand before. The same went for the country’s more conventional weapons. Bill Hicks summed it up well in his Revelations set, recorded at London’s Dominion Theatre in November 1992, just over 10 years before George W. Bush produced the sequel to daddy’s war:

You know we armed Iraq. I wondered about that too, you know during the Persian Gulf War those intelligence reports would come out: “Iraq: incredible weapons – incredible weapons.” How do you know that? 

“Uh, well… We looked at the receipts. Hah! Ah, but as soon as that cheque clears, we’re going in. 

What time’s the bank open? 8? We’re going in at 9. We’re going in for God and country and democracy and here’s a foetus and he’s a Hitler. Whatever you fucking need, let’s go. Get motivated behind this, let’s go!”

The UK had also been in the Selling To Saddam business: In 1991, the ‘Arms to Iraq’ scandal began with the trial of four directors of the “machine tools” firm Matrix Churchill who were accused of shipping components and machinery to Iraq for use in its weapons programme, in defiance of the UN embargo. The trial collapsed when Alan Clark, the former Minister for Defence Procurement, admitted in court that he had been “economical with the actualité” (Tory MP for “lying your arse off”).

The Economist reported that documents released at the trial indicated that the MoD had advised Matrix Churchill on how to apply for export licences to conceal that the materials could be used to make munitions. It emerged that Paul Henderson, the company’s managing director, had been an unpaid asset — a volunteer spook! — for British intelligence for 15 years.

Hicks joked about the affair:

Ohoh! Looks like Mr. Major was on the hot seat there for a second too. Little Iraqgate, little rapscallion he is: “Did we send, did I… did… I’ll have to check Maggie’s old calendar.”

What’s funny about this. Every one of your papers says that you guys sold Iraq “machine tools”… which Iraq then converted into military equipment. 

I have news for you folks, a cannon is a machine tool. Your Orwellian language notwithstanding, it’s a fucking machine, it’s a tool.

Our papers in the States have the same thing. We sold Iraq “farming equipment” which Iraq then “converted”.

It took 4 years for the British establishment to come to approximately the same conclusions; the 1,806-page Scott Report — the product of picking through 13,000 official documents, many of which were only handed over under sufferance — was published in February 1996.

After multiple reports on the Iraq War and the events that surrounded it — The Hutton Inquiry, The Butler Report, The Chilcot Inquiry (2.5 million words of it) — the state (both the permanent elements and the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians) which committed to war and the elements of the British press and wider media that cheered for it are still lying.

There are various flavours of bullshit on offer, from those that ‘concede’ the war was “a mistake” to those who say, with crocodile tear-filled eyes, that it’s a shame but it had to be done, to those who just stamp their feet and demand we all shut up about it now. To borrow from Bill Hicks again: The crucifixion was a long time ago but people are still banging on about it.

John Rentoul, the vampiric scribbling Renfield to Tony Blair’s Dracula, wrote for The Independent this weekend that:

The Iraq war has faded. Most people, if they think about it at all, think that “Blair lied” and that the war was terribly and obviously wrong; but it no longer carries as much emotional weight as it did.

That’s the columnist variant of the pronoun “we” at work; it requires powerful blinders and unshakable confidence; a kind of ignorance that vibrates at high velocity, producing a sound so loud that no doubts can scream above it.

Commissioned in the Columnist Corps and a veteran of nothing more than the Twitter forever war, Rentoul immediately calls for reinforcements:

As Janan Ganesh wrote in the Financial Times, it has not defined a generation in the way that Vietnam did. It has not left a cultural mark in film and music. Partly, that is because Vietnam was a conscript war in which tens of thousands of Americans died; but it scarred Europe too, when no European country took part. As each cohort of students passes through the “Blair Years” course at King’s College London that I have helped teach since Tony Blair left office 16 years ago, their objections to the war become more formulaic. They are more interested in how Blair won elections than in why he fought a bad war.

Rentoul referencing Ganesh is the undead quoting the unbearable. It is only the high paywall at the Financial Times that saves the latter from being constantly in contention for the title of Britain’s worst columnist. He writes:

The number of American troops in Vietnam peaked in 1969. Twenty years later, Born On the Fourth of July, which dramatised the maiming and political awakening of one soldier, came out. Even after Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, even after the protest songs of Edwin Starr and Creedence Clearwater Revival, artists weren’t done with the subject.

Now consider the Iraq war. Twenty years on, its cultural footprint consists of . . . what? The Hurt Locker? A sub-theme in some passable novels?

Both men attempt to argue that Iraq ultimately changed very little; Ganesh confines the consequences for Iraqis — at least 186,736 of whom died as a result of the war (many estimates are much higher) — to a dismissive paragraph at the very end of his piece, while Rentoul gives them a sentence that functions as little more than an aside:

Obviously, it changed Iraq and left thousands dead in the sectarian strife that followed.

Looking only at the pair’s off-hand comments about culture, you can see how myopic their worldview is; The Hurt Locker was nominated for nine Oscars and won six. A brief list of other US/UK films and TV shows about or highly influenced by the Iraq War that I am just listing off the top of my head includes: Generation Kill; Three Kings; The Government Inspector; 24; Spooks; Over There; Shock and Awe; Vice; Cherry; In The Loop; Jarhead; Homeland; The Kill Point; The Trial of Tony Blair; House of Saddam; The Punisher; American Sniper; War Dogs; The Yellow Birds; In the Valley of Elah; Green Zone.

If Rentoul and Ganesh were interested in talking about films by Iraqis on the war and its aftermath, they might have mentioned Underexposure (2005) by Oday Rasheed; We Iraqis (2004) by Abbas Fahdel; or Our River… Our Sky by Maysoon Pachachi to name three. Expand into music, theatre, and literature and I could fill the remainder of this newsletter with suggestions.

Back in what passes for reality though, even Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary in the cabinet that nodded through the decision to take part in the Iraq War, does not agree with Rentoul and Ganesh’s glibness. In Episode 9 of the BBC podcast Shock & War: Iraq 20 Years On, he says²:

The 2005 General Election was not a particularly pleasant experience, particularly if you’d been in the position that I had been. Bearing in mind, I had a large Muslim population in my constituency of Blackburn. 

Interestingly, however, Tony Blair still won that election. But it had a sort of… it was like having a grumbling appendix in the body politic of the Labour Party… it undermined trust in public life; if you think of the other things that happened in that decade — including the MPs’ expenses scandal 2008/9 — the instinct for trusting politicians is in a different and much worse place from where it had been. 

In the same episode, another former Labour Cabinet minister, Clare Short, who resigned after the war had started and left the party entirely, directly connects the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 to the shockwaves from Iraq. And the supremely self-satisfied former head of Mi6, Sir Richard Dearlove, offers up a perfect encapsulation of elite contempt for the public³:

Sir Richard Dearlove: [Bush and his allies] have absolutely no regrets; they don’t have any of this angst…  

Gordon Carera: … people feel misled. 

Sir Richard Dearlove: Maybe, but they weren’t. They just don’t have a thorough enough understanding of this very complex and difficult period. 

There was no complexity for Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper titles across the world when it came to backing the Iraq War; all but one of the 175 editors came to the same conclusion of their own accord: They were 100% behind the action. Robert Thomson, now chief executive of News Corp, was then editor of The Times; his pro-war PR efforts were noted approvingly by John Williams, head of the Foreign Office’s news department, in an 11 March 2003 memo which appeared as evidence in the Chilcot Report:

… the process of preparing media and public opinion for possible action on Iraq is under way. 

On 10 April 2003, The Times headline read:

Victory in the 21-day war

Stephen Farrell wrote from Baghdad:

It was a momentous day, reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the communist empire in 1989. And no image of it will be more enduring than the toppling of that 20ft Saddam statue by a US tank egged on by a cheering, excited mob which then stamped with undisguised glee on the fallen idol.

The paper had been laying the ground for war for some time; in December 2002, Michael Gove, then the paper’s assistant editor, sneered:

… the British and American Governments have chosen to put a discredited means above a valuable end. Seeking the approval of the United Nations for any action to deal with Iraq is the equivalent of asking a Mafia conclave for permission to tackle the Corleone family.

What was the UK doing there then? And on the Security Council no less.

Token dissent was allowed from Matthew Parris and Simon Jenkins, who wrote in January 2003:

Britain’s national security or political stability is not realistically in danger, however much Downing Street may try to scare us witless each week. Iraq is a nasty place and military planners must have contingencies. 

But to no one can Iraq be said to pose a sovereign threat sufficient to require a pre-emptive war…

… There is no cause for Britain to go to war with Iraq.

On the twentieth anniversary of the ground invasion, The Times leader column is headlined Historic Mistake and concludes:

The Iraq war was a hubristic act of overreach, a reckless product of the American “unipolar moment” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those responsible, including in Britain, the verdict of history grows only more damning with the passage of time. Perhaps the gravest consequence of the war was to distract western attention from far greater risks to its long-term security from China and Russia. We all now live with its legacy: a less stable, more dangerous world than at any time since the Second World War.

Curiously, the paper offers no apology to its readers, nor does it include itself or its proprietor in the list of “those responsible”.

The Sun doesn’t even get as far as reflections; preferring instead to pump out ‘inspiring’ stories of soldiers and sub-Bravo Two Zero doggerel. In 2003, its editor was Rebekah Brooks — recently promoted from The News of the World — who is now the chief executive of News UK. Under her direction, it roared that…

… a swift and successful war that proves to the world just what a deadly menace Saddam has been for years will cement Blair’s place in history. 

When Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dem leader, opposed the war, The Sun put his picture on the front page with a snake behind him and the caption:

Spot the difference. One is a spineless reptile. The other is a poisonous snake. 

The paper denounced anyone who opposed the war; drooling at the prospect of the battles and bloodshed to come. Since 2008, it has been running The Sun Military Awards (aka The Millies), handing out grotesque awards while the governments it has supported have left veterans to rot.

The Telegraph supported the war in 2003. Nick Cohen — moonlighting from The Observer and taking time off a busy schedule at the photocopier — wrote in January 2003, under the headline The Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war, that:

When I put this programme to my democratic and secular comrades, they turn nasty. I hear that the peoples of Iraq will slaughter each other if Saddam goes; that any US-sponsored replacement will be worse. They may be right, although the second prediction will be hard to meet. What is repulsive is the sneaking feeling that they want the war to be long and a post-Saddam Iraq to be a bloody disaster. They would rather see millions suffer than be forced to reconsider their prejudices.

In 2013, he wrote in The Observer that Ten years on, the case for invading Iraq is still valid. He has ‘retired’ from The Observer now — perhaps with a very localised form of RSI — so I can only assume his next complete lack of contrition will appear on his Substack.

As for The Telegraph today, Tim Stanley — who was still at university (like me⁴) when the invasion began — cuts-and-shuts a column about Ukraine onto the rusted relic of Iraq. He writes:

Territorial borders are defined by geography and culture, and culture by history, which I think helps explain Britain’s enthusiasm for the Ukrainian resistance. It reminds us of the Blitz. Iraq was a morally ambiguous, imperial adventure that involved “going over there”. In February 2022, the hostile force “came to” Ukraine, only to be driven back again by a people’s army. Socialists, fox hunters, eco-loons and gammons might argue about everything else, but when the homeland is invaded, it is a totally apolitical instinct to stand one’s ground and fight.

This weekend, Tony Blair told a collection of European news agencies that there is no comparison between the war in Ukraine and the invasion of Iraq. It’s this ‘rare intervention’ from Blair that gave Stanley his hook and throughline. But the comparison is valid if your moral universe and approach to international law are consistent: Putin has prosecuted a war of aggression and Bush, Blair and the ‘coalition of the willing’ did too.

The sixth Nürnberg Principle names the first “[category of the crimes] punishable as crimes under international law” as “crimes against peace” and the first of those is “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances”.

In the previous edition, I looked at how the UK government’s own legal advice was that the invasion of Iraq was not justified in international law and would, in fact, be illegal. Iraq was not, as Stanley, blithely suggests “a morally ambiguous imperial adventure that involved ‘going over there’” but a crime that kicked aside any notion of national sovereignty and resulted in (literally) countless deaths.

Iraq is not just poisoned politically by the aftermath of the war but literally. A long read by the journalism non-profit Undark explains:

As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, it is easy to find soil and water polluted by depleted uranium, dioxin and other hazardous materials, and extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau — one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.

When Coalition forces took control of Iraq, they pretended they were changing it for the better through a process of De-Ba'athification (removing members of Saddam’s party from all jobs, including civil servants, doctors, professors and teachers). Civil society in Iraq was instantly hollowed out and stripped of experience; to do most of those jobs in the Saddam era you had to be a party member regardless of your beliefs.

There has been no De-Blairification or De-Bushification in the UK and US. Blair is still called upon for his view often and his advisors are now Keir Starmer’s advisors. Rishi Sunak’s administration is stuffed full of those who eagerly welcomed the war.

As the 20th anniversary of the invasion hits us, Gordon Brown — who kept misgivings about war in Iraq to a low mumble as Chancellor — writes in The Guardian that Putin and his “henchmen” must face the International Criminal Court (ICC):

… the most obvious parallel is the decision made by nine European allies that met in London in 1942 and drafted a resolution on German aggression, which led, at the war’s end, and with American support, to the creation of the international military tribunal and the trials of Nazi war criminals. The trial of Japanese war criminals followed.

In a previous statement on his website, he demanded action over the “manifestly illegal war”. It is an illegal war. So was Iraq. Brown writes…

If proven in court, these acts of aggression could constitute what the Nuremberg trials termed the “supreme international crime”. For it is the crime of aggression from which most other international crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide – often flow.

… with no trace of irony. In 2020, the ICC published a 180-page report which concluded that hundreds of Iraqi detainees were abused by British soldiers between 2003 and 2009. The ICC conveniently couldn’t determine whether the UK had acted to shield its soldiers from prosecution and there will be no further action. The “international rules-based system” has a lot of cheat codes.

Condoleezza Rice, one of George W Bush’s henchpeople — his national security adviser — was asked on Fox News (in relation to Russia): “When you invade a sovereign nation, [is] that a war crime?”

She replied:

It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order. 

Her comment brings to mind the chorus of MF Doom’s Rap Snitch Knishes:

Rap snitches, telling all their business
Sit in the court and be their own star witness
"Do you see the perpetrator?" 
Yeah, I'm right here

The seventh Nürnberg principle is:

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity…

Rice and Brown were complicit. As George Monbiot writes in The Guardian:

Both… would clearly qualify as complicit. Rice was one of the architects of the war. Brown, as a cabinet member, was party to the decision. As chancellor of the exchequer, he financed the war.

He also rightly notes that until the warrant for the arrest of Putin and one of his officials, there had only been 31 cases brought before the international court: Every one of the defendants in those cases comes from the African continent. Is Africa where all crimes against humanity take place? No. It’s just that its nations have less clout to keep their presidents, prime ministers, and generals out of the dock. Blair, Bush and the rest benefited from victor’s justice and the fact that none of their successors wants the risk of being slung in the dock themselves.

In 2016, after Chilcot, John Rentoul wrote for Middle East Eye that:

…calling the war “illegal” is an opinion rather than a fact. International law is complicated and a lot of it is not definite. The invasion of Iraq wasn’t explicitly authorised by the UN, although the original disarmament resolutions were reinforced by a unanimous resolution, 1441, in November 2002, giving Saddam a “final opportunity” to comply or face “serious consequences”. Those who disagree with the invasion can hardly say, therefore, that it was contrary to the will of the UN Security Council.

… The idea that Blair is a war criminal has no foundation. Most people who make the allegation fail to distinguish between war crimes (crimes in the conduct of war, such as the deliberate killing of civilians) and the crime of aggression (waging a war in “manifest violation” of the UN Charter). I do not believe that anyone has seriously suggested that Blair ordered crimes in the conduct of war to be carried out.

Rentoul is a Blair fanboy. He teaches a course on him at King’s College London. He cannot conceive of a situation where his hero shares responsibility for horrors and for the war crimes of British troops, even if he didn’t explicitly talk them through the whys and wherefores of waterboarding. If only they had been given John Rentoul’s strawmen to torture rather than living, breathing people.

British military operations in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 were named Op Telic. Unlike US deployments which are given deliberate branding (its Iraq ‘plan’ was named Operation Iraqi Freedom), the Ministry of Defence says it uses a name generator to “avoid overtly political connotations”. But fate was at work here: Telic means “purposeful or defined action” in Greek. To troops, it became the backronym, Tell Everyone Leave Is Cancelled. The ‘operation’ cost more than £9 billion and the lives of 179 British service people.

Twenty years on, the “purposeful action” of starting the Iraq War is smudged and obscured by the press and wider media’s excuses and selective memories.

The crime is softened to a “mistake”; those who get most of the focus in the features and retrospectives are the politicians who decided on war; the soldiers who went to fight it; the reporters who were embedded with them; and the columnists who offered rhetorical covering fire. Iraqi voices are in there but they are given far less amplification; relegated to the small speakers like some local support band; the noisemakers who happened to be around when the big show came into town.

In 2013 — just over 10 years after the war in Iraq began — the late academic and writer Mark Fisher wrote a blog post about solidarity that has been fiercely debated ever since (‘Exiting The Vampire’s Castle’). Unfortunately, it centres on Russell Brand whose later journey into the heart of the conspiratorial right (he maintains he’s just asking questions), Fisher did not predict.

In the post/essay, Fisher defines the Vampires’ Castle as:

… specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.

… the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements.

Reading the evasions and equivocations of writers like Rentoul — who is often compared/is an undead creature — made me realise I was witnessing another phenomenon: The Vampire’s Arsehole.

The ongoing coverage and analysis of the Iraq War and its aftermath is about dissipating guilt and ensuring that the guilty men and women are not condemned or excommunicated. The Vampire’s Arsehole shits on us all and then claims we all have to accept the stench has always been there.

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