Richard Dawkins wrote a 'mea culpa' style of lament as to why an advanced civilisation could allow itself to be run by bullies. Bush is a member of the 'Skull and Crossbones' society while Blair is a lawyer with messianic tendencies; the Robespierre of the Third Way.
The 'Compassionate Bombing' of Kosovo and Serbia was perceived as a symphony in the Concert of Great Powers. The absence of major peace treaties since Gulf War One and The Collapse of Communism shows that the a 'concert of great powers' is a very discredited notion. What you got was an impromptu 'Jazz Band' of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. At that time the French president Chirac was willing to host the party.
Richard Dawkins titles his article "Bin Laden's Victory". He asks how a civilisation which produces Nobel prizes and science can be so miserable when chosing those in power. This is the same lament heard about a civilisation which produced Goethe and Mach going on to pledge allegience to Kaiser Wilhelm and then Hitler.
Bush and Blair both make public shows of Christianity. So did Bill Clinton. Richard Dawkins makes this clear in his article.
Politically Western Civilisation has suffered a sort of moral implosion. 'Third Way' doctrines have become vogue amongst power brokers who want to allow their cronies in business unrivalled power to manipulate and exploit people. Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, with Calvinist notions of a single God who helps those who help themselves, has become a dominant ideology. Calvin's burning of Servetus showed great human vigour may be needed to enforce the supposed supremacy of God.
Enlightened Christian Europe tempered the force of the military by creating the nobility of the robe: intellectuals such as Cranmer and Fermat became important in state affairs, as a counterbalance to the bloodthirsty barons. Nowadays we see the nobility of the guitar with the idolisation of pop singers. Karaoke has taken over. World leaders mime their songs to tunes written by other people.
Press reports of the time show the results of missile bombardment of the capital cities, Baghdad and Teheran, along with pictures of trench warfare on the Al-Fao peninsula. Both sides tried to interfere with the oil exports of the other. Kharg Island and Kuwait Port were both subject to repeated rocket attack.
The war was ended in 1988, following a decision by the Ayetollah Khomeini and other Iranian leaders to halt the bloodshed and renounce Khomeini's personal war aim of achiving regime change in Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. Hussein and Khomeini had become personal enemies after Saddam had put an end to Khomeini's exile in Kerbala, from where Khomeini had been launching tirades, via audio cassette, at the American backed Pahlavi regime in Iran.
Khomeini was a legal expert. He made much of the fact that an American living in Iran might be able to run over a man's wife and escape punishment while an Iranian who ran over the dog of an American would most likely be prosecuted and punished. He also wrote popular books on halal sex including temporary marriage. To this day Islam has many converts from all races because of its liberal attitudes.
After the end of the First Gulf War there were attempts to send a UN force to the border areas of Iran and Iraq to monitor the ceasefire and oversee disarmament, but these attempts were opposed by the USA.
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had backed the Iraqi regime during the first Gulf War with extensive subsidies. There seems to have been major disagreements as to whether these subsidies were gifts or loans.
Saddam claimed that oil was an important cause of Gulf War Two. He claimed that the Kuwaitis were drilling oil wells in Kuwait which slanted away from vertical, and into underground reservoirs below Iraqi territory.
America, with the backing of France and the UK, and token help from Syria, managed to destroy Saddam's armies around Kuwait, and force Saddam to abrogate his claim to the territory. The Americans stopped fighting in March 1991 and observed the massacres of Iraqi rebels who had wanted to oust Saddam and the Ba'ath party.
In America and Europe the Second Gulf War was treated as a TV spectacle carefully managed by a league of military spokesmen, far right businessmen, and media corporations. The suppression of Shiites in the river delta area continued anabated during the 1990s while the Kurds to the North achieved some degree of autonomy, marred by the tribal infighting of their patriarchic clan leaders who seemed to love provoking allies and neighbouring governments by their constant treachery to each other and their own supporters. For sheer bloody mindedness you have to think of the way generations of Scottish chieftains tried to play off Denmark and France against England.
About the same time that the Second Gulf War ended the Jugoslavian civil war started. The first shots were fired in Slovenia where the majority of energetic young people recognised Slobodan Milosevic as a leader from the same mould as Saddam Hussein, and his wife as a combination of Qiang Qing, Imelda Marcos and Margaret Thatcher, with ideas of racial purity. Small arms fire brought down a couple of army helicopters in Ljubljana, and Milosevic voluntarily gave up the most prosperous and advanced province of the former Kingdom of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes.
International diplomacy refused to countenance a peace treaty with Iraq. The regime was caged, to serve some as yet unknown future purpose. In the meantime there was a series of political detonations in Georgia, Chechenya, Croatia, and Bosnia, and the post Gulf War Two peace initiative in Israel and the occupied territories claimed by both the Zionist state and its military, and also the Palestinian people who have been trying to live there ever since the British war cabinet signed up to Zionism during the First World War.
Most diplomacy of the 1990s was dominated by attempts to play down serious conflagrations and massacres: Najibullah in Afghanistan, Muslims in Srebenica, victims of the militarized cocaine wars of Latin America, the mauling of Angolan, Eritrean and Ethiopian youth by expensive modern weapons, and the massacre of even more Africans with machetes and spears, especially in the Congo river basin.
Mountain ranges and watersheds have also seen bitter and long lasting conflicts including the the Caucuses, the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas. The Kashmir conflict threatens confrontation between two nuclear powers.
Opponents of socialism cite Trotsky's running of the Russian civil war after 1918 as a defect of socialism, rather than necessary defence of the gains made by the workers in overthrowing a corrupt and inefficient empire.
In fact the measures taken by Trotsky including the direction of labour and military conscription were and are quite normal in any modern state. David Lloyd George [1], the British wartime leader, had been quite prepared to sacrifice political ideals, including his own Liberal Party, in order to save the state from military defeat at the hands of the Germans. Lloyd George's program included military conscription, the direction of labour, and curtailment of the availability of strong liquor. What's more, all of these things were achieved in a democracy.
Trotsky left power in the 1920s. His personal rivalry with Stalin lead to Trotsky's death at the hands of an assassin in 1941. In the meantime the Germans were getting a surprise when so many people in Russia seemed so willing to defend the odious Stalin regime.
Much real opposition to the war comes from the American people themselves. Opposition has made itself known on the streets of Washington, New York and San Francisco. Communications technology has failed to be a milk cow for greedy capitalists, but it has empowered drug dealers, prostitutes, and guerrilla publishers. Global competition in satellite TV is exposing the blunders of the leaders in real time. Reports of suicide bombing in Israel and Sri Lanka expose the futility of violence and the dangers of oppression. School children in developed countries across the world have demonstrated against US Imperialism. Large demonstrations have taken place in Europe and East Asia. The Arab world has seen heavy handed repression of rather smaller demonstrations except in countries such as Syria and Jordan where activists have the option of going back to Iraq to fight there.
Lloyd George described what were essentially battles against old fashioned and racist ideas amomgst the top military and in particular Lord Kitchener. To him the multi-cultural empire of World Capitalism would replace a more narrow minded old order. War was a generally a moronic lottery game played by fools. Justice would not always prevail in war: even men who love justice can behave like idiots and lose battles.
David Lloyd George gives graphic descriptions of the terrible conditions of the sick and wounded in the Nixon-Townshend campaign of 1915-16, but he is even more scathing about the burocracy of the Indian colonial office. He devotes several pages to a description of the processing of a military requisition. Of course India was slightly better than Tsarist Russia. The latter country had a system of military requisitions where most goods were creamed off by corrupt administration before anything actually reached the soldiers on whom the outcome of the war actually depended.
Descriptions of the horrid plight of the sick and wounded outraged Lloyd George. In 2003 we see the hospitals being looted by angry mobs.
The Americans won because they adapted a plan based on unstoppable momentum, and overwhelming firepower delivered via advanced military technology including satellite based target finding systems. The Iraqi soldiers were no more than chaff in a threshing machine. Like many Arab soldiers they were unable to fight for freedom. The word 'freedom' is suspect in most Arab societies, and some young British muslims have been imprisoned and tortured in Egypt merely for belonging to the Hez'b al-tahrir, or 'Freedom Party'.
Just as the Americans were 'locked in' to a war process since the summer of 2002, so their leaders, and Tony Blair in the UK, are now locked into a diplomacy of overwhelming force. The next confrontation with North Korea looks likely to invoke nuclear threats from both sides. We could say that the Iraq war started to see 'smart bombs' deployed by dumb leaders.
99.98-0.02 Modern war. Ratio of percent civilian casualties to professional military casualties from enemy action.
99.98-0.02 Election results in typical Arab state.
1-3 Typical ratio of deaths in battle to death by sickness in military campaigns. Modern diseases are more insideous. Post traumatic stress disorder sounds soft and cuddly, but delayed psychosis is the blowback. Wasn't it a Gulf War Two veteran that blew up the Murrow Government building in Oklahoma? Was the Beltway tarot card serial killer a military veteran? Are CIA psy-ops trying to win Iraqi hearts and minds by occult techniques ?
The US military distributing a card deck with Iraq's most wanted war criminals (copies at $5.99). This bit of creative thinking deserves a prize for chutzpah.
Other commentators compare occupied Iraq to Bosnia, or Kosovo. If these people are right, then we will see more and more Iraqi women working as prostitutes world wide.
Britain's troops have had good learning experiences in Ulster. Assassination was outsourced to the so called 'loyalist' paramilitaries such as the UDA, or Ulster Defence Association. The secretive structure of military intelligence has allowed the British government to sponsor the assasination of awkward lawyers. Innocent people have also been assassinated to help the intelligence services protect their assets.
Britain's Irish province has had fortified police stations and court houses for decades. The Bush-Blair summit in Hillsborough Castle attracted ire on both sides of the sectarian divide. The people of Ulster know from direct experience just how long it takes to sort out the problems of occupation.
The coalition which attacked Iraq consists of the two world powers who have done the most to serve the cause of WMD, or weapons of mass destruction. America invented the atom bomb. Britain tried out poison gas in Iraq and Somalia.
America has had colonial rule in Cuba, the Philippines, and Panama. In 1945, America was keen to dismantle the colonial rule of everyone else. In 2001 they succeeded in changing the government of Afghanistan and setting up military garrisons there. The British helped.