Children of a Lesser God

Children of a Lesser God

All men may well be born equal but their deaths certainly betray huge inequalities. A month or so ago (24 June, to be precise), Michael Tomasky, GuardianAmerica’s editor at large, wrote that the chances were that Obama’s military strategy in Afghanistan was likely to work but that a lot of people “will die along the way”. But, he noted, at least America was doing “something decent” there, so the sacrifice – in Western lives - would not be in vain. Just yesterday (29 July), Maureen Dowd, in the International Herald Tribune, noted how America always ends up with egg on its face, and a knife in its back, despite trying to do “the right thing”, the decent thing. Dowd was referring to attempts to train a national army in that tragic land.

How easily are such sentiments expressed. Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed in the past decade of the ‘war on terror’, waged in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. So what are a few thousand more? They’re just Afghans, after all, and who’s really counting their casualties anyway? There are plenty more where they came from. And this from Tomasky, a liberal critic.

Around about 1983, the eminent Marxist scholar, EP Thompson, wrote an article in The Guardian about the relative worth of lives according to race and ethnicity. I don’t recall the details but its import was that if you are black or brown or, at least, NOT white, casualty numbers and deaths hardly matter, because such lives are cheap. He was employing irony and wit, long gone from the pens of ‘serious’ columnists on foreign affairs today.

And America always does the “decent” thing? In Afghanistan? Iraq? Guantanamo Bay? Backing an illegitimate and corrupt warlord like Karzai who stole the last election and still managed to get less than the constitutionally-required 50% of the vote? This is evidence of amnesia on a stupendous scale, standard fare in the media, however. The release of over 90,000 documents via Wikileaks, it is said, is “damaging” to the American effort in Afghanistan, particularly the ‘revelation’ that innocent people have been killed and that Pakistani intelligence services have been backing elements in the Taleban insurgency. This is news? In the realm of myth, weaved by media spin, Wikileaks’ ‘expose’ really shakes the world. For the rest of us, who read the very newspapers that so loudly proclaim THIS news, the leaked material was already well known.

Some neo-conservatives (remember them?) argue that the 1990s were a holiday from history – responsible leaders just weren’t taking seriously the threats that were emerging in the post-Cold War World, especially Islamic fundamentalism. What they failed to recognise then, and what liberal commentators fail to recognise today, is that those threats resulted from America’s history of doing the ‘decent thing’ in backing the Mujaheddin against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, paying the Pakistani military regime to fund, arm and train Osama bin Laden, stationing a garrison in Saudi Arabia, and steadfastly supporting Israel against the Palestinians, incubating long-term resentment and outright hatred of American double standards in the Middle East. Is it too much to expect Great Powers to learn the lessons of the past?

Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Michael Gove: Proud of the British Empire

Michael Gove, Britain's school's secretary, recently asked pro-British empire historians, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, to recast the history curriculum to provide a "narrative" centred around Britain's imperial glories in the context of the global domination of the West over the past 500 years. As Seumas Milne argues in his excellent column in The Guardian (10 June, 2010), this merely revives the imperial project that became popular among Anglo-American elites after 1989, and found enthusiastic support from New Labour.

New Labour leadership contest front-runner, David Miliband, is quoted in The Guardian today as saying "George Bush was the worst thing that happened to Tony Blair." Not for the first time, USBlog wonders what Miliband meant by that remark. Could it be that Miliband is suggesting that Blair was duped into following Bush into the global war on terror, into Afghanistan and Iraq? That, had it not been for Bush, Blair's approach to world politics would have been significantly different?

As Seumas Milne says, Gordon Brown once remarked that "Britain was not about to apologise for the Empire", and Blair's principal foreign policy adviser, Robert Cooper, published articles and books calling for a "new liberal imperialism" by "post-modern/modern states" against "pre-modern states" that lived by the laws of the jungle. Cooper's view was that, in dealings with pre-modern states, Britain, the US and EU need not concern themselves with truth, international law and diplomacy, as cruelty and deception was all that such states understood.

Tony Blair, on the advice of his former FCO 'minder' and future chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, had wanted to tell a Manchester audience in 1997, just ahead of the general election, that he, Blair, was "proud of the British empire". Blair drew back at the last minute and did not deliver that particular line of his speech. But Blair's liberal imperialism was not extinguished; it found new outlets as time wore on.

Blair told an American audience in 1999, ‘If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights, and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer’. Blair, who was comfortable being compared with President Woodrow Wilson – who famously waged a war to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, was on a mission to re-make the world. His arguments for military intervention for halting humanitarian crises and promoting democracy despite the inevitable violation of national sovereignty this necessitated were central to his imperial outlook.

Summed up, an imperial tendency emerged as a powerful force in Anglo-American foreign affairs, reminiscent of an earlier age. 'Democratic peace theory' (whose central claim is that democracies don't fight wars against each other) was its ideological higher truth, Britain and America the powers chosen by destiny to impose it on selected parts of the world. This is a twenty-first century version of the imperial civilising mission and of manifest destiny, welcomed by some and rejected by others as hubris. American-style political and economic capitalist democracy is declared suitable for export in a globalising world, another self-evident truth. The mission relies on the former colonial world forgetting Britain’s record of imperial domination, and amnesia about America’s post-1945 record of military interventions against leftist-nationalist governments and installation of right-wing military juntas.

Blair's Christianity was central to his sense of mission. Such belief has its radical, critical side - it questions the way things are, demands change and improvement. As Blair wrote in an article in the Daily Telegraph in 1996, being a Christian means ‘you see the need for change around you and accept your duty to do something.’ To Blair, Christianity is also ‘a very tough religion… It places a duty, an imperative on us to reach our better self and to care about creating a better community to live in…. It is judgemental. There is right and wrong. There is good and bad…[although] it has become fashionable to be uncomfortable about such language. But when we look at our world today and how much needs to be done, we should not hesitate to make such judgements. And then follow them with determined action. That would be Christian socialism.' Blair's references to the utility of Jesus in every day life suggest something of the southern US evangelical protestant.

There is also, of course, a strong strain of Gladstonian moralism in Blair’s global outlook. That combined well with the rising centre-left sentiment favouring humanitarian interventionism during the 1990s, especially with reference to events in the Balkans. Activist writers like David Rieff and the International Commission on Interventionism and State Sovereignty – of which the-now Harvard scholar, Michael Ignatieff, was a member, championed the cause of people suffering from the brutal excesses within states, beyond the reach of international law and the United Nations. According to Rieff, such tendencies, however, were appropriated by political forces – such as the American neo-conservatives in the Bush administration and by Tony Blair - that were far more imperialistic in their outlook and used the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention in a range of cases – such as Kosovo and Iraq – that fell beyond the original thinking behind the strategy.

The foreign policy of (late 19th-early 20th century) 'New Liberals' that Tony Blair admired so much back in the 1990s- such as almost the entire leadership of the imperialist Round Table movement and of its offspring, Chatham House - was to strengthen the bonds of the British Empire through imperial reform and alliance (and even federation) with the United States. The underlying rationale was founded on a racialised world-view based on Anglo-Saxon biological and cultural superiority. By the Second World War, the desire among some sections of British and American elite opinion was for a Federal Union between Britain and its Dominions and the United States, and the Scandinavian democracies. This was proposed on the basis that Anglo-Saxons, and one or two Nordic nations, were uniquely suited to good government, economic development, and to protection of the rights of the individual. The missionary zeal that inspired domestic reform had its overseas counterpart in imperial reform and Anglo-Saxonism.

The point here relating to Tony Blair is that such ideas, in an evolved and more 'sophisticated' form, came back into circulation in the 1990s and remain significant in leading policy circles in Britain and the United States.

And this is where David Miliband comes in with his remark that George W Bush was the worst thing that happened to Blair. He should look at Blair's history: at the Lord Mayor's banquet in November 1997, when the White House was not even a twinkle in Bush's eye, Blair set out his vision – ‘the big picture’ - for Britain and the world, so that its ‘standing in the world … [would] grow and prosper.’ Britain's principal strength is/was its ability to use its historical alliances so that ‘others listen.’ ‘I value and honour our history enormously,’ Blair emphasised. The fact that we had an Empire - about which ‘a lot of rubbish [is] talked’ - should be cause of neither apology nor hand wringing; rather it must be used to further Britain's global influence - through the Commonwealth and through the power of the English language. Britain must look outward - we are the world's second largest importer and exporter of foreign investment. What goes on in the rest of the world is, therefore, of vital importance. Britain must rebuild the special relationship with the United States, which the Major government had wrecked, Blair argued. ‘When Britain and America work together on the international scene there is little we cannot achieve.’ ‘We must never forget the historic or continuing US role in defending the political and economic freedoms we take for granted…. they are a force for good in the world. They can always be relied on when the chips are down. The same should always be true of Britain’.

9-11 was, then, a perfect opportunity for Blairites to size the moment. As former Blair ally, Mark Leonard, noted, 9-11 offered a golden chance to rebuild the world order, to further the concept of international community and to promote "security".

Although the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the economic-financial crsis, have dampened imperial ardour, they have yet to extinguish it. Not for nothing was the 'war on terror' re-named the 'long war' or the 'generational war': Anglo-American imperial hubris remains at large; and an imperial narrative in the school history curriculum, contested though it would be, would keep alive the flame of the British empire.

Obama's National Security Strategy: Israel

Without trying to be ironic, President Barack Obama's administration issued a helpful factsheet alongside the NSS, released at the end of May 2010. In the wake of Israel's recent illegal attack on civilian ships carrying aid to the people of Gaza, whose misery resulting from Israel's war on them of 2008-09, and the subsequent and continuing blocakade, a collective punishment also in violation of international law, I reproduce below, in full, the Middle east and Israel sections of the helpful factsheet.

The excerpts highlight little other than Obama's continuation of support for Israel - regardless of the claims of various neo-cons - Israeli, American and other - that Obama is at war with the Jewish state.

Here are the excerpts:

"Efforts to bring about Middle East Peace: Against a difficult backdrop – recent war, no prospect of negotiations, and facing Israeli elections – the President began his term by immediately appointing Senator George Mitchell as full time Special Envoy to the Middle East [who has yet to set foot in Gaza; USBlog]. As the result of the concerted efforts of Special Envoy Mitchell and our diplomatic team, we have successfully completed two rounds of proximity talks, where Senator Mitchell conducted meetings with both Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Abbas and discussed serious and substantive core issues. We have also convinced both parties about the importance of a return to direct negotiations. The Administration continues to support the improvement of Palestinian security efforts and institutional reforms under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, and continues to secure increased Arab financial support for the Palestinian Authority.

"Continued Commitment to Israel’s Security: Our commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable and our defense relationship is stronger than ever, to the mutual benefit of both nations. In a signal of just how strong our commitment is to Israeli security, the President has asked Congress to authorize $205 million to support the production of an Israeli-developed short range rocket defense system called Iron Dome. This funding will allow Israel to expand and accelerate Iron Dome production and deployment to provide timely improvements to their multi-tiered defense, to protect against the rockets used by Hamas and Hizballah. This step is one in a series – which includes our annual $3 billion military assistance package, extensive consultations with Israel to ensure its qualitative military edge, and joint exercise on missile defense, that demonstrates the strength of our mutual defense relationship."

Obama's National Security Strategy: Made at Princeton

President Obama's National Security Strategy may echo that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, but it is also almost identical to that suggested by a large group of elite academics, military officials, businessmen, and former Clinton administration insiders brought together as the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS) back in 2004-2006. The Princeton Project was led by Princeton academics Anne-Marie Slaughter and G. John Ikenberry, featured Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, and Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, as co-chairs. Francis Fukuyama, erstwhile neo-con, sat on the steering committee and was co-author of the Project's working paper on grand strategy. Henry Kissinger acted as adviser, as did Harvard's Joseph Nye, author of the concept of Soft Power, morphing more recently into Smart Power. PPNS represented a new cross-party consensus on how to 'correct' the excesses and reckless enthusiasm for American power of the Bush administration.

Several PPNS-ers were appointed to the Obama administration: Jim Steinberg to the state department, Michael McFaul and Samantha Power to the national security council, for example. Anne-Marie Slaughter heads up the state department's policy planning staff - the department's in-house think tank, the first director of which was Princeton's George F. Kennan, author of the concept that defined US policy in the cold war era: containment. PPNS was a self-conscious attempt to replicate Kennan's work and impact in the post-Bush era, in the wake of the 'war of choice' (then supported by numerous current Obama administration members) against Iraq.

So what?

The similarities of Obama's NSS to those of Bush and Princeton suggests that it will be 'business as usual', in the main. The main lines of US global behaviour - Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel - remain the same, with tactical and stylistic differences. Undoubtedly, Obama's rhetoric is less bellicose and less inflammatory than Bush's, but that was beginning in the final months of the previous administration in any case. The military surge in Afghanistan, the identification of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as the focus of the war on terror, the military 'draw-down' in Iraq, were also processes begun under Bush. The attempts to close Guantanamo began under Bush, and continue, without success, today.

But Obama continues to back rendition, and is actively trying to prevent the extension of constitutional protections to inmates at Bagram and other lawless prisons holding uncharged terror suspects. He may be accused by some of declaring war on Israel, but you wouldn't know it from his total silence on Israel's war on Gaza or its recent illegal attack on a ship carrying aid for Israel's million-and-a-half victims in Gaza, not to mention the billions of dollars of US military and other aid to Israel.

Obama's mission - US leadership, military superiority, global reach, shaping the international order, making and enforcing global rules, spreading freedom and democracy, lauding postwar international institution-building under President Harry Truman (the golden age to both Bush and Obama, and PPNS-ers) - is of a piece with all post-1945 American administrations. The rhetoric and tactics vary with conditions within the US and in the world at large but the goals remain the same.

At this point in time, therefore, the US is suffering from military overstretch and economic crisis: it cannot physically fight, or financially afford, two wars at the levels of intensity required, and remains committed to a professional military rather than a conscripted one (which proved problematic during the Vietnam War). At home, there are rumblings about America's internal problems of unemployment and other social issues, as well as increasing scepticism about the nature and costs - financial and moral - of America's global interventionism. Hence, Obama has adopted a policy similar to British PM Cameron's 'big society': building alliances with non-governmental groups, think tanks, and foundations better to intervene in world affairs, especially in the governance of other societies designated as threats or potential threats to America's 'security'.

Subtle shifts in policy and rhetoric help in times such as these: and Obama's 'face' and 'voice' has worked wonders, up to now at least, across the world, just as Jimmy Carter's did in the wake of Vietnam (and Watergate). But the impacts of such insubstantial changes are usually temporary: the Muslim world never fully bought the Obama story; and Europeans are beginning to learn that Obama is no soft touch either as he presses them to send more troops to Afghanistan and be ready to support principles for which they claim to stand.

The things that do not change are the American foreign policy elite's strategic role in defining 'national' interests or the policies that flow from their definition: those are 'vital' interests the benefits of which are unequally distributed within the United States, maintaining social and economic inequality. And Obama's appointments to high office were drawn from the ranks of the American elite - Wall St. lawyers and bankers, ivy league university academics, and the ranks of the Bush and Clinton administrations.

Millionaires Control British Foreign Policy

Does it matter that the new Conservative-Liberal government is dominated by millionaires, including premier David Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg? The Sunday Times counted 18 millionaires in the "austerity cabinet" (ST, 23.5.10).

Does it matter that the foreign and national security policy of this Con-Dem administration is in the hands of a group predominantly educated at exclusive public schools and Oxbridge, with previous careers in the City of London and big business? The Sunday Times calls them the "New Establishment...a new elite... pulling the strings in Britain".

Does it matter that the New 'Labour' administration of Gordon Brown also featured several millionaires, businessmen, and had cosied up to the City since the mid-1990s, and fetishised the 'market' to such a degree that it brought the 'market' itself into disrepute?

And, does it matter that New Labour's leadership race is set to be dominated by those, almost to a 'man', drawn from backgrounds far from the 'soul' of the labour movement?

Of course, USBlog believes that background matters, to a degree: social origins are important in so many ways but tend to get discounted as a key factor in political attitudes, behaviour and ideas. Years ago, American political scientist, Thomas Dye, showed that social background determined how large Americans thought a 'quarter' (25 cent coin) was, let alone how strongly it determined life expectancy, level of education and income, general welfare, and world-view.

Ironically, it was a man called (Ralph) Miliband who made this argument most cogently when David (Miliband) was still wearing short trousers, and Ed was yet to be born. In his classic study, The State in Capitalist Society (1969), Miliband argued that British (and Western) political systems were dominated by big business and their supporters who also determined the character of the 'national' interest in such a way that it enshrined the interest of big business into its very heart. Consequently, political philosophies and arguments could not be brooked that failed to take into account their impact on 'business confidence' and the 'markets', international or national.

Analysing the rest of the state, Miliband argued that the civil service, military, judiciary, BBC, among others, were led by (mainly) men drawn from the same elitist social backgrounds as the political elite, further reinforcing the 'conservative' character of the British state, and acting as a brake on radical political agendas.

Labour governments in the postwar era were structurally constrained by the character of the British state as well as the generalised power of big business over economic affairs and policy, not to mention 'popular' culture and thinking. But Miliband also emphasised that the Labour party was no vehicle for revolutionary transformation but a symptom of the development of capitalist industrialism, seeking concessions from big business and some measure of social protection for workers. In the main, Labour governments managed capitalism rather than damaging or undermining it.

Furthermore, Labour leaders were hardly revolutionary, even in the nationalising phase of 1945-50: Clement Attlee was educated at Haileybury College, an elite public school established by the East India Company to train its servants for service in the empire. Attlee's foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who had headed the massive Transport and General Workers' Union since the 1920s, was authentically working class, of course, and offers an excellent example of how such individuals rise to the top of the greasy pole of British politics. He was deeply anti-communist and, like the majority of his party, an imperialist. Where the likes of Churchill openly declared Britain superior to all other races and nations and therefore justified in exploiting and dominating the colonies, Bevin et al wanted to 'develop' the 'backward' countries for the 'betterment' of their peoples. The old imperial ties and connections were maintained, despite (or because of) 'de-colonisation', along with Britain's large, but diminishing, global role.

While the benefits of a welfare state, inaugurated in 1945-50, are undoubted, it remained the case that at a fundamental level, the Labour project was at heart an ameliorative one of reforming capitalism and offering workers social protection from 1930s-style economic crises and deprivations. It did not fundamentally challenge 'market supremacy' in economic policy and the distribution of income and wealth.

Hence, we now have a situation where the government and opposition are dominated by rich and exclusively educated individuals, market-oriented in 'philosophy', and unrepresentative of the broad mass of British people. They claim to champion 'new politics' but are mired in the British aristocracy and the mindsets of the City of London. Like its American counterpart, British politics now features just one ideology - focused on free market economics and regular elections between parties that manage capitalism. There is a Centre, a Right but no Left in British politics.

Background matters: the outlooks at the heart of government today are more congenial to the City than ever; even the opposition is drawn from diluted versions of the same. Those backgrounds will shield the government from the social impact of the savage cuts in public spending that are to come and allow them all the more to enshrine market philosophy as the sole criterion of value.

Those backgrounds - focused so much around globalised finance and global markets as the basis of British national interests - will also strongly determine the character of Britain's foreign and national security policies. Global flows and networks, as the Ministry of Defence noted, under the previous government, are fundamental to the British state, and any threats to those flows are the object of Anglo-American power.

And the promised Tory-Liberal diminuition of Britain's "slavish devotion" to the United States, (amid recent talk of building a new special relationship with India and greater attention to China), seems to have disappeared with several other election promises. The Obama administration, refocusing on India and China itself, will be very pleased with the 'new politics' in Britain.

Cameron's Foreign Policy: Neoconservatism in Disguise?

Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal coalition government’s foreign and national security policy team may be inexperienced, but their ideological record is not unclear: the team is made up of a mixture that may prove quite lethal in terms of overseas interventions behind a ‘renewed’ and ‘re-balanced’ ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

David Cameron has denied being a ‘neo-conservative’ in foreign policy terms; he claims to be a ‘liberal-conservative’. Interestingly, this was well before he’d ever dreamed of a coalition with one he once described as the best joke he’d ever heard (Nick Clegg). On those grounds, Cameron had supported the Iraq War and, in 2010, restated his commitment to that course of action. He had also, showing poor judgement, wrongly criticised Russian “aggression” against Georgia in 2008, calling for robust US/NATO responses. Nick Clegg (and his party), on the other hand, opposed the Iraq War (while in opposition and with no inkling that it would ever get into 10 Downing Street), is a convinced ‘liberal interventionist’ who believes that Britain should stay the course in Afghanistan and be ready to intervene again in future similar situations. Both had previously condemned Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s “slavish” devotion to the United States, with Clegg accused by Brown (somewhat gratuitously during the second election debate) of ‘anti-Americanism’.

Since then, of course, Clegg has dropped the scrapping of the Trident nuclear missile system from the core policies of his party, the price of coalition government; Cameron has received ‘warm’ endorsement and a personal invitation to visit Washington, DC, from President Obama, and (last week) dispatched William Hague to pay homage to his American counter-part, Hillary Clinton.

Cameron outlined his interventionist plans at a speech at the influential think tank, Chatham House, back in January 2010. There is nothing original in his national security ‘strategy’s’ goals: he wants Britain to intervene before potential threats become actual threats: “we need to do much better at stopping wars from ever starting and that means really focussing on the causes of conflicts and then joining all that together to make sure that DfiD and the Foreign Office deliver a really tight, tied-up, progressive approach.” I think he may want “joined-up” government that is tough on conflict and the causes of conflict – sounds familiar. Cameron promises to restore “trust” in national security strategy and provide a “guarantee against dodgy dossiers” on the road to opening a wider front against terrorists, pandemics, energy crises, water stoppages, and cyber-attacks.

In 2006, Cameron told an audience at the British-American Project that 9-11 style attacks represented a kind of “terrorism [that] cannot be appeased – it has to be defeated”, and called for increasing the size of the security services. He wanted to take elements that were best in the British neo-conservative approach (i.e., what Cameron attributes to Tony Blair’s approach) – appreciation of the scale of the terrorist threat, the centrality of “the leadership of the United States, supported by Britain… to the struggle”, the correctness of “extending freedom…[as] an essential objective of Western foreign policy”, and commitment to the use of military force, including “pre-emptive force” and for “humanitarian purposes”.

As a liberal, Cameron supports “spreading freedom and democracy,” but as a conservative he remains sceptical of “grand schemes to remake the world”. Cameron’s is a call for ‘realism’ in light of what’s happened since 2003 in Iraq and Afghanistan: greater multilateralism, exploring military and non-military options, including winning “hearts and minds”, development aid, public diplomacy and strategic communications.

At the same time as calling for multilateralism, Cameron argued that the United Nations may not always be the best vehicle for decisive international intervention; “So we may need to fashion alliances which can act faster than the machinery of formal international institutions.” This sounds suspiciously like ‘coalitions of the willing’ assembled ahead of the Iraq war.

In the struggle to defend “civilisation”, Cameron told the British-American Project that Britain would be “moral”, that its foreign policy (quoting Victorian era prime minister, WE Gladstone), “should always be inspired by a love of freedom”, and that its methods match the morality of its goals.

This may not be full-blooded neo-conservatism, hubristic before the chastening experience of Iraq. It may not be full-blooded conservatism, eschewing grand schemes and ideas on a global scale. Cameron’s views, which are now central to his coalition government, merely serve to remind us that the post-9-11 Anglo-American story was not a neo-con hijacking: it was the fusion of several tendencies that had previously been in tactical disagreement – liberal interventionism combining Gladstonian and Wilsonian morality, with a wounded (American) conservative nationalism, in a language and terminology so skilfully developed by groups of neo-cons previously known as ‘the Crazies’.

That post-9-11 fusion was institutionalised in the US by the passing of power from Republican George W. Bush to the Democratic Obama; and now in Britain by its passing from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour to the Conservative-Liberal Cameron.

"You've punished us enough for the Iraq War"

Despite being absolutely hooked on the unsubtle manouevering for power in the UK capturing most attention at the moment, something David Miliband said a couple of weeks ago in an "exclusive" interview with The Guardian has continued to distract: he said, in a throwaway line, that "You've punished us enough for the Iraq War", a remark not followed up by the intrepid reporter.

What did Miliband mean by that? Who has punished him or the Labour Party and how have they been punished? Who has punished Tony Blair? Miliband clearly conforms to a school of punishment straight from the American school. His remark brings to mind what President Jimmy Carter said when the matter was raised about compensating Vietnam for the devastation caused by American aggression there and the deaths, according to conservative estimates, of over 1 million people. Carter replied that America owed Vietnam nothing as "the damage was mutual". I assume the loss of ca 55,000 American GIs was considered by President Carter to make up for one million Vietnamese lives.

Back to Miliband's remark: of what has Tony Blair's punishment consisted? He is Middle East Peace envoy; in the employ as adviser of JP Morgan Chase earning hundreds of thousands of dollars; making large sums on the international lecture circuit; lecturing to young minds at Yale University on its Faith and Globalisation programme; and enjoying the massive advance for writing his memoirs. And, oh yes, he's set up his own philanthropic foundation to promote interfaith dialogue and world peace. Philanthropy - meaning love of all mankind. No marks awarded for knowing which of his enterprises is yet to produce any tangible results.

Gordon Brown has denied that Britain did anything wrong in going to war in Iraq. He was punished by almost 3 years in 10 Downing Street. And David Miliband might be the next leader of the Labour Party.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, some facts (according to the Brookings Institution, USA):

Journalists killed - 140, 93 by murder and 47 by acts of war

Journalists killed by US Forces - 14

Iraqi Police and Soldiers Killed - 9,431

Iraqi Civilians Killed, Estimated - A UN issued report dated Sept 20, 2006 stating that Iraqi civilian casualties have been significantly under-reported. Casualties are reported at 50,000 to over 100,000, but may be much higher. Some informed estimates place Iraqi civilian casualities at over 600,000.

Iraqi Insurgents Killed, Roughly Estimated - 55,000

QUALITY OF LIFE INDICATORS

Iraqis Displaced Inside Iraq, by Iraq War, as of May 2007 - 2,255,000

Iraqi Refugees in Syria & Jordan - 2.1 million to 2.25 million

Iraqi Unemployment Rate - 27 to 60%, where curfew not in effect

Consumer Price Inflation in 2006 - 50%

Iraqi Children Suffering from Chronic Malnutrition - 28% in June 2007 (Per CNN.com, July 30, 2007)

Percent of professionals who have left Iraq since 2003 - 40%

Iraqi Physicians Before 2003 Invasion - 34,000

Iraqi Physicians Who Have Left Iraq Since 2005 Invasion - 12,000

Iraqi Physicians Murdered Since 2003 Invasion - 2,000

Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity - 1 to 2 hours, per Ryan Crocker, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (Per Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2007)

Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity - 10.9 in May 2007

Average Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity - 5.6 in May 2007

Pre-War Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity - 16 to 24

Number of Iraqi Homes Connected to Sewer Systems - 37%

Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies - 70% (Per CNN.com, July 30, 2007)

Water Treatment Plants Rehabilitated - 22%

British casualties up to July 31st 2009, when MoD stopped releasing data:
UK military fatalities: 179
Reported UK military casualties: 5,970
Total UK casualties: not released by MoD

U.S. Troop Casualties - 4,390 US troops killed; 98% male. 91% non-officers; 82% active duty, 11% National Guard; 74% Caucasian, 9% African-American, 11% Latino. 19% killed by non-hostile causes. 54% of US casualties were under 25 years old. 72% were from the US Army.

The concentration of punishment, as ever, is within Iraq, among Iraqis, and the soldiers deployed by Britain and the United States who, upon return, suffer mental illness and disability.

I still wonder what David Miliband meant by that remark - "You've punished us enough about the Iraq War".