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Oh dear. And I always thought that William would have been so much better to have in No 10 after 9-11 than Blair.

There are some politicians who are better at illuminating figures from the past through the biographies that they write than illuminating the present and directing a path for the future.

Roy Jenkins and William Hague are both excellent biographers. As analysts of their own times and as men seeking to plot a course for the country, they seem less sure-footed.

It was a revealing slip where, speaking of the Conservative front bench, Tim wrote, "A party preparing for opposition..."

Oops. I've changed that JT!

Brilliant. There is always a danger that the Foreign Office neuters its ministers. William Hague has neutered himself before he even becomes Foreign Secretary.

It's a pity the front bench can't recognise what the rest of us can see: that Iraq is a total disaster and the actions of the Americans or our troops will have little effect on containing the violence.

How we get out and what we leave behind is what needs to be focused on.

Well done Hague! At least he has learned something from the events of the past few years. It seems that many of the neo con persuasion have learned nothing. How long do you think we should wait for an effective non sectarian Iraqi Army to emerge?5 years?10 years? More likely forever.
Getting the job done is easy to say but it does seem that we are as far away now as we ever were.

Iraq is a running sore.

Nothing can be achieved there now. Better to pull out with as much dignity as can be managed.

Robert McIlveen wrote @ 20:15 "How we get out and what we leave behind is what needs to be focused on."

This is so true. Most of the advocates of a surge think that at least 30,000 troops and probably 50,000 extra soldiers are needed to execute the clear-and-control operations that are necessary to bring order to Baghdad and hunt down the insurgents that operate from the Anbar province.

Personally, I think the UK was wrong to engage in Iraq on the basis of Blair's lies to Parliament and the British people. However, our British troops are there, with all the disadvantages that have been reported since they arrived in Iraq.

The UK cannot provide additional troops, and indeed I share the views of the Chief of the General Staff (past and present) that our presence in Iraq is heightening the problem, not solving it.

If this situation is to be solved militarily, leading (hopefully) to a political solution and eventual withdrawal, the USA needs to deploy a minimum of 50,000 additional well trained troops. To this extent, President George Bush's present policy is inadequate.

You've got to admire Bush's determination. He has put in all the troops he can. The World will hold its breath.

Even after this "surge", there will only be a few thousand more troops in Iraq than a year ago. It's also interesting to note that Petraeus' own counter-insurgency manuals call for 1 soldier per 40-50 population, which is about 150,000 troops in Baghdad alone.

Bush has essentially given up on Iraq - he has no more ideas, and is just hoping to maintain the situation until he can foist it on the next administration.

Why should any more men die? Best to pull out now.

William Hague's new job: whatever David Cameron says. It's not making him look very good.

Sarah, Ian and Robert McIlveen are, I am afraid, wrong. Leaving Iraq is morally reprehensible and would cause even greater chaos than is the case right now.

President Bush is right to send more troops - in fact if he can be criticised at all, it is for not sending enough new troops. It cannot be forgotten that the President has kept America safe from attack for over five years. He has been bold in standing up to the real challenge of today - militant Islamism - and those who lack moral fibre and look for the quick fix of cutting and running exhibit the same level of cowardice of Neville Chamberlain and the pre-WW2 appeasers.

It is right to stand up to the Islamists in Iraq, Iran and around the world. It is right to stand up to nuclear proliferation in N Korea. It is right to stand up morally bankrupt nations such as China and Russia and to point to the lack of international leadership from the UN, France and Germany.

Good to see that neo-conservatism is on the retreat in the Conservative party; I'm fully with Hague on this one and glad to see that he understands what is in our national interest. Foreign policy that is based on ideology and not on pragmatism will always be dangerous.

For too long we have been the US administration's unthinking twin, we are not the US and long may that continue!

Actually, to my surprise in view of some of his past utterances, I think William Hague is absolutely right on this one.

Donal, although I agree with your sentiments expressed in the last paragraph of your post, I must disagree with your comments about Bush deploying more troops.
"President Bush is right to send more troops - in fact if he can be criticised at all, it is for not sending enough new troops."
I think the guests on Question time between them did a very good job of explaining why, this was a totally useless and ineffective thing to do.
British and American soldiers are now fuelling the insurgency in Iraq and they and the Iraqi's are paying the price.
He has done too little too late, and had he listened to both his own and the British military commanders before, during and immediately after the invasion, the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan could have been so different for everyone.
And as someone with family in the military I, like them accept the role and danger they are put in on a daily basis.
But I do not accept the risk to them and others now at a time when the insurgents are in such large numbers and so embedded, just for political rhetoric and some sort of desperate attempt at closure or a legacy.
We can't cope with the present level of deployments, and we can't give our troops vital basic protection leaving them with substandard equipment which is putting them in greater danger.
Until we can sort our priorities in that department no politician should be forming a foreign policy which allows our soldiers to become an ill equipped sitting target, fighting a war on a different game plan to the enemy.
Bush and Rumsfeld's strategy in Iraq has been totally discredited, if you are going to seriously implement a foreign policy which is going to take on the present day threats facing the world, you can't do it on a budget or half heartedly, but also know when to go in and when to withdraw to fight another day. That is exactly what the insurgents are doing, unfortunately we are not. Beat them at their own strategy, that was something the Americans never learned in Vietnam.

Donal Blaney @ 23.25 wrote "President Bush is right to send more troops - in fact if he can be criticised at all, it is for not sending enough new troops."

This is so true Donal! Although I am a committed Atlanticist, GWB, whilst he is clearly a muppet, has not been as bold on this as he should have been. I suspect the massive shift in the Congress & Senate has rattled his cage.

We mustn't forget that this is the man who said, "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." As with almost all members of the British Government, he has no personal experience of service in the Armed Services. Good manners prevent me saying what he actually was when the question was posed.

Some of the senior US commanders have advised that the so called surge of an additional 20,000 US troops is wholly inadequate. I support that view.

If this situation is to be solved initially militarily, leading (hopefully) to a political solution and an early withdrawal of UK and other troops, the USA needs to deploy a minimum of 50,000 additional well trained troops.

"If this situation is to be solved initially militarily, leading (hopefully) to a political solution and an early withdrawal of UK and other troops, the USA needs to deploy a minimum of 50,000 additional well trained troops."
Another SHOCK AND AWE campaign which is more akin to another invasion, so long after the originally and when you have clearly lost the battle for HEARTS AND MINDS!
The people who would be most delighted with that strategy would be the insurgents. And the ordinary Iraqi, what of them in this last attempt to force a political solution to a country on the brink of a sectarian civil war?

There's very little evidence that the 'terrorism' in Iraq is largely caused by 'insurgents'. It's a sectarian civil war in which the state (and quite probably the government itself) is a protagonist. The new Bush 'plan' is predicated upon support from the Iraqi government, support which will not be forthcoming. The plan is therefore doomed to inevitable failure which all but the hubsristic Bush White House can see only too clearly.

I wonder if this discussion will turn out to be wholly acedemic.Having seen the strength of opposition to these plans in the US from both the Democrats, the Republicans and the military can Bush still push this plan through?
Donal, it must be remembered that whilst there have been no further terrorist attacks within the USA in the last five years Bush has failed or is failing on every single one of the objectives you list.Had the fight against Al-queda been prosecuted properly and the Iraq war not happened it is likely that we would not be in the desperate situation we are in in Afghanistan nor would Iran be so powerful.

It would surely have been of benefit to this country for us to tell Mr Bush to add 7,000 more of his troops to his list because we were bringing our own troops home.Four years in Iraq for us is four years too long.Let us all stand up, and be truthfull,it is a shamefull fact,that,without Conservatives supporting Blair and his Labour Government on going to war in Iraq,there could never have been a war there.To my thinking we made a huge mistake in backing Blair and Labour and we are being punished for it at the ballot box,as is Labour.Without our backing Mr Blair,how many of the 675,000 suggested deaths in Iraq would not have happened?How many of our 129 troops would still be alive,and what will our final tally be for British troop deaths in this illegal Iraq war we started?Maybe another thread should be opened on our ongoing second war in Afganistan?Also,do we need to start mobilising more of our troops for the upcoming Somalia offensives?Deeper and deeper and......

Hague's comments strike me as for purely domestic consumption. They indicate that any future Tory Government would cut and run from Iraq and Afghanistan; and they are designed to woo the anti-American Lib Dem vote. I am sure that this has all been carefully noted in Washington where not even the Democrats are advocating a simple cut-and-run option.

I have absolutely no idea what Cardinal Pirelli's alternative UK foreign policy would be. Hubristic posturing it would seem.....especially given the parlous state of our armed forces.

How long do you think we should wait for an effective non sectarian Iraqi Army

We did not have one when we left in 1932 - it was Sunni controlled. When we invaded in 1941 and occupied to stop the Iraqis allying to the Nazis it did not matter.

When they murdered the Crown Prince and his relatives in 1948 it was Sunni.

The area is violent like much of the world. Obviously no place for Conservatives who are too genteel for rough games and somewhat effete nowadays.

The Anglo-Americans were not ruthless enough going in, and did not destroy enough of the Iraqi Army to have a core to rebuild. We did not create our own Secret Police nor our own Iraqi units. the most effective Iraqi soldiers are Peshmerga.

The population trust the Iraqi Army much more than they trust the Interior Ministry police and death squads.......that's no surprise, in Britain we trust the Army more than the Home Office or the Police.

Life is messy once you get off the Bakerloo Line and outside Canary Wharf life is a jungle where men with guns decide how the world turns...........there is nowhere to hide nowadays because the war is ongoing - if you don't want to rise to the challenge, surrender.......and no doubt there are many Conservatives who would do just that. They almost did so 70 years ago but one man despised by his own party saved their honour

I was chatting to a Polish friend (served in Iraq with the Polish army) about Iraq and what was going on... One name....Vietnam. RThis war will destroy British foreign credibility for a generation. Hague and Cameron need to recognise this and look again at their policy.

Tom Tom - The usual high standard. I cannot add any more really. I suppose electorally Hague is appealing to Lib Dems, and with previous attacks on Israel to appeal to anti-Semites.

I just wonder where the Tory party of Thatcher and Churchill has gone - you'll recall that's the party that used to win and make us feel good about ourselves. It was also the one that stood with America against really evil groups that would like to kill us.

I have posted eleswhere that 40,000 troops are needed for a minimum of two years.

Order needs to be restored. It has been done in other parts of the country and they are now peaceful. The commander responsible is one of the architects of the "surge" policy and we have to hope it is succesful.

Malcolm is right, we should have gone after Al Queda more ruthlessly post Afghanistan, but we are where we are and abandonning Iraq would be the Sudetenland/Abysinia moment in the war against Islamism.

Of course, anybody who doesn't think we are in a war and that Afghanistan and Iraq are just little local difficulties, will not see this and from their perspective, cut and run is entirley justified.

Personally, I think they're wrong. The Islamists want to achieve at least what Hitler wanted, namely, dominaton and control of the lives of all the peoples of the Eurasian land mass. See these skirmishes in that light and it is easier to understand how Iraq could be a decisive turning point if it is seen through, irrespective of where we are today.

I said in the monthly survey that more troops could be the answer. America has 145,000 active troops there already. Another 20,000 is nowhere near enough. They had 250,000 during the initial invasion for gods sake!

By the time the next Administration admits they need more troops they will need to increase it by even more than we need to now.

This was America's last chance to scrape a victory and Bush has screwed it up just as he's screwed up everything else - the biggest screw-up being invading in the first place. The Neocons have turned Iraq from a dictatorship that was no threat to us at all into a shining example of the West being defeated by Islamists.

We might as well partition the country and pull out, and hope that they will concentrate on fighting each other.

I would respectfully suggest to "Frank"that the present Tory Party,linked to Thatcher and Churchill,now has a David Cameron as its Leader and he is no way a Statesman as Thatcher and Churchill is/was.

Living in the political past is mainly for dreamers,Frank may be such,but Mr Cameron,does not have a plan,solid Policies or the usual confident and smug support for us to get behind,therefore,perhaps,he is the next Conservative to lose the Leadership title without firing a single shot at the enemy.US,COSYING UP TO BLAIR AND LABOUR FOOLED NOBODY AND IS A MISTAKE ON A HUMONGEST SCALE.

This deployment is a disaster. It shows that Bush is utterly unwilling to countenance the 'grand bargain' hinted at in Baker-Hamilton with Iran and Syria. And yet, the so-called 'surge' is too small to create a window in which the Iraqi state can be properly rebuilt. Besides their doesn't seem to be any plan to do this anyway.

The Americans are simply unwilling to face the reality of the situation. The failure to impose martial law, keep the Iraqi army and state institutions intact after the invasion have created a lawless quagmire in which Islamism and sectarian violence thrives. This has handed Iran the region on a plate, and there is really very little we can do about it.

Even by your standards an unbearably pompous post Tom Tom. Your comment about the Iraqi Army 'not having destroyed enough of the Iraqi Army...' is rubbish too.

I wonder if this discussion will turn out to be wholly acedemic.Having seen the strength of opposition to these plans in the US from both the Democrats, the Republicans and the military can Bush still push this plan through?

Bush doesn't need anything from Congress to push this through. Congress can do precisely three things to fight it:
1. Remove Bush from office - which they don't have the votes to do and would paralyse the Congress if they tried.
2. Cut off funds for the war - which they don't have the votes to do and explicitly promised not to do during the election.
3. Pass Teddy Kennedy's new anti-reinforcements legislation - which they may not have the votes for and which Bush would veto (and they certainly don't have the votes for an override).

All this is a consequence of the nature of the Democrats' majority. Most of the newly elected Democrats who unseated Republicans in November are conservatives. Some of them are more conservative than the Republicans they replaced. San Fran Nan's leadership team are hardcore liberals, but while they can control the agenda they can't control what actually passes into law.

So, what you will see on that front is a whole bunch of bluster and 'non-binding resolutions', which will get headlines but change nothing.

Malcolm:
"Well done Hague! At least he has learned something from the events of the past few years. It seems that many of the neo con persuasion have learned nothing. "

I agree - it's rare these days that politicians learn anything. Personally I'm as warlike as anyone, but you need to know what wars are worth fighting, and the Iraq project is long-lost. Even the 500,000 or so troops that might have been sufficient in the beginning would not win it now that all consent & respect is lost.

As far as those much-vaunted demonstrations of will go, when the liberal Democrat senator Barbara Boxer recently retracted an award for CAIR (Saudi-funded US Islamist 'civil rights' outfit) because of their terrorist affiliations, she showed more guts and achieved more than Bush ever did in the entire four years of the Iraq war. The enemy is not in Iraq, the enemy is here, and many of them are in suits, not turbans.

"There are lots of good reasons to restart the MEPP but William Hague is wrong to link the Iraq situation to it."

Actually I don't see any good reason to restart the MEPP, since only one party, Israel, has any desire for peace. The other side has amply demonstrated that it doesn't want peace if peace means the continued existence of Israel; while Israel is not going to give the Palestinians a political path to victory the way the UK govt did with Sinn Fein/IRA.

So the only measures that work to lessen the violence involve separation of the combatants, like withdrawal of the Settlers and building the peace wall.

OTOH I entirely agree that William Hague is wrong to link the Iraq situation to it.

Gildas:
"Most of the newly elected Democrats who unseated Republicans in November are conservatives..."

While this is true, "conservative" doesn't mean "pro Iraq war". Men with military experience like Senator James Webb are strongly against the war and seem far more inclined to stand up to Bush than are most mainstream liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who feel they have to prove their toughness by backing the war.

Jon Gale:
"We might as well partition the country and pull out, and hope that they will concentrate on fighting each other."

That would be my preference - pull troops out, offer reconstruction funds to stable areas (Kurdistan, any others that emerge), be supportive of any stabilisation efforts, but if the Shia and Sunni insist on fighting it out, they need to get it over with and establish defensible borders. If al Qaeda starts using Anbar as a base against us (relatively unlikely, aQ forces in Iraq would more likely be attacking Shi'ites) then we deal with that as a specific threat. The violence would initially flare up, but the current death rate seems to be around 200,000/year, so this strategy would save lives within a few years at most.

John Moss:
"Of course, anybody who doesn't think we are in a war and that Afghanistan and Iraq are just little local difficulties, will not see this and from their perspective, cut and run is entirley justified. "

We are in a struggle for the survival of our civilisation, but it won't be won or lost in Iraq or even Afghanistan. The real battle is being played out in London, Madrid, Rome, Bradford, Michigan, all over the western world. Every local council that removes toy pigs from its offices, every canteen that goes halal-only, every prison that bans the St George's cross, every school forced to change its uniform code, these are losses for our side.

Even by your standards an unbearably pompous post Tom Tom. Your comment about the Iraqi Army 'not having destroyed enough of the Iraqi Army...' is rubbish too.

Posted by: malcolm | January 12, 2007 at 15:42

Thanks Malcolm - i even mentioned people like you in my posting didn't I ? It is the Bakerloo Line isn't it where your circumscribed office life takes you ?

Donal wrote:
"It cannot be forgotten that the President has kept America safe from attack for over five years."

Mm, not really. There have been lots of little terror attacks in the USA since 9/11 - remember the Washington sniper? There haven't been any big Al Qaeda 'spectaculars'; not because Al Qaeda could not have carried out an attack but because their strategy requires that the next big post-9/11 attack be significantly bigger than 9/11 in order not to generate an "ok, that wasn't so bad" reaction. They had an operational plan to attack the New York subway in late 2002 which would probably have killed hundreds, according to later CIA intelligence it was aborted for precisely this reason (qv Ron Suskind: The One Percent Doctrine). If the measure of Bush's success is that there hasn't been a nuclear attack yet, Clinton did even better.

Gildas:
"Most of the newly elected Democrats who unseated Republicans in November are conservatives..."

While this is true, "conservative" doesn't mean "pro Iraq war".

True (and I should have made it clearer in my post that I was talking more generally of the problems Pelosi has with her caucus).

However it does mean 'won't vote to cut off funds for troops in action, and won't vote to constrain the Commander in Chief's power to control the Armed Forces'. Newly elected Congresswoman Nancy Boyda (D-KS) made that precise point last week.

I note your mention of James Webb. He is a classic example of the wider point. While he is a perfect example of the isolationist antiwar conservative viewpoint which is gaining ground here, he is far to the right of many GOP senators, and will cause the Democrats no end of trouble in the long run.

I've said it before on Conhome and I'll say it again now; Hague has completely lost the plot and should not remain Shadow Foreign Secretary. As party leader I was a major admirer of his and still feel that he should not have stood down when he did, but on foreign affairs at present he has less idea of what he is doing and saying than one of those talking Barbie dolls does.I am also becoming very sick of pronouncements like his that are purely designed to play well with the LibDem leadership in the vain hope of a Con/Lib coalition after the next GE.

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