Questions over unity after US withdrawal overshadow Iraqi poll

hen Iraqis go the polls today they will be hoping to consolidate their fledgling democracy despite signs that the uneasy national unity pact between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds may not last beyond planned US withdrawal by 2011.
Gordon Brown was certainly upbeat about Iraqi prospects when he told the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday that it had taken [...]

Brown: Iraq war not about WMDs

Gordon Brown today gave the Chilcot Inquiry his own reason why Britain went to war in Iraq – and it was not because he believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
He said Britain’s original intention in preparing for war had been to show potential aggressor states that the “international community” was determined to act [...]

US general links Chalabi to Iran

Ahmed Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile whom the Bush administration once hoped would replace Saddam Hussein under its “regime change” policy, has been openly branded an Iranian collaborator by the top commander of US forces in Iraq.
General Ray Odierno told an audience at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington that Chalabi and another [...]

Jack Straw: Iran ‘not bogeyman of Middle East’

Jack Straw distanced himself from Tony Blair yesterday when he told the Iraq Inquiry that it would be “simplistic” to think that Iran was the “bogeyman” of the Middle East.
The justice secretary, who was foreign secretary in 2003, told the inquiry in his second appearance that Iran had not invaded any country and he did [...]

First WMDs, then regime change, now 9/11: Blair’s story shifts again

For Tony Blair, reality is whatever he believes it to be, at whatever moment he chooses to believe it. One has to sift through a plethora of self-justifications, half-truths and finger-pointing to get to the truth, but it is there, if you look for it.
However, his performance at the Chilcot Inquiry today was that [...]

What Dubya’s neo-cons did next

For Robert Kagan, the world is never going to be a safe place. The American journalist and historian, who was one of a coterie of neo-conservatives who helped shape the Bush administration’s disastrous foreign policy, believes that opposing forces of liberalism and autocracy are about to engage in a struggle that may make the geopolitical [...]

Iraq inquiry reveals collective ‘unconscious’

“Sometimes we do a thing in order to find a reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.” – Magnus Pym in John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy
One by one those responsible for the fiasco that was the invasion of Iraq have been beguiling us with articulate, at times eloquent, tales of how [...]