Poison Gas? Positively Churchillian!

This is hilarious. Here's Israel-loving court historian,* Andrew Roberts (of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 fame), a bloke who just can't reconcile himself to the decline of that colonial flight of fancy, the Anglosphere, getting stuck into Syria's Bashar al-Asad for allegedly "deploying chemical weapons against opponents of his regime":

"Only 4% of all battlefield deaths in the Great War had been caused by [mustard] gas, yet the foul nature of those deaths meant that gas held a particular terror in the public imagination. Since 1925, it has only been countries that are recognised to be outside the bounds of civilisation that have taken recourse to it. The latest outlaw to do so is Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who deployed chemical weapons against opponents of his regime in the suburbs of Damascus last Wednesday... The first was Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy, which unleashed mustard gas on the Ethiopian subjects of Emperor Haile Selassie in the Abyssinian campaign of 1935-41.** The gas dropped by the Italian airforce was known by the Ethiopians as 'the terrible rain that burned and killed'." (Time for Obama to step in on Syria's gas attack on civilisation, The Australian/The Wall Street Journal, 27/8/13)

Note the two-word sleight of hand here: "since 1925." Fascinating! Why 1925?

While the crafty Roberts doesn't say, there can only be one answer. That was when his Chosen People,  the Britz, had finally finished 'pacifying' those Iraqis who'd had the gall to reject British control over their particular patch of God's green earth.

From 1920-1925, the Britz forced colonial rule on rebellious Iraqis by means of the Royal Air Force. As a British colonial official candidly admitted at the time:

"If the aeroplanes were removed tomorrow the whole structure [of British colonial domination] would inevitably fall to pieces." (Britain in Iraq: 1914-1932, Peter Sluglett, 1976, p 91)

No, the Britz weren't showering Iraqis with leaflets on the need to swap their particular brand of native 'barbarity' for the virtues of British 'civilisation'.

As you'd expect of the jolly old RAF, they were showering bombs on these surly sandniggers. And not just your kosher common and garden bombs either - you know, the ones that merely tear their human targets limb from limb.

Oh, no, your paragons of civilization, the political ancestors of David Cameron and William Hague, were dropping - wait for it - mustard gas.

Hey - and this is where the hilarity of Roberts' insufferable sanctimoniousness kicks in - those political ancestors I speak of weren't just your common and garden political ancestors either. The greatest of all modern Britz; the one who took on Hitler in World War II and delivered us - those of us who really matter anyway - from the horrors of Nazism; the most civilised of the civilised; the subject of many a tome by the adoring Robertz, the Grand Poobah himself, Winston Bloody Churchill, gave the orders to unleash "the terrible rain that burned and killed" 15 years before Mussolini:

"One of the main features of British forces in the area would be increased use of the Royal Air Force. In a letter to Sir Hugh Trenchard of 29 August [1920], Churchill made a decision which has now become notorious, mentioned in virtually every television documentary in recent years, but never published in full. This is the complete letter: 'I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which should inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.' One can look at this infamous request in two ways. Yes, Churchill wanted to gas the rebels. No, Churchill did not want them killed, just put out of action. In fact, it would have been hard to drop mustard gas on Arab rebels without 'inflicting grave injury upon them,' and this proved to be the case, since many hundreds of Iraqi rebels died in the attacks." (Winston's Folly: Imperialism & the Creation of Modern Iraq, Christopher Catherwood, 2004, p 85)

Since 1925, eh? What a phony!

[*For a look at the work of another British partisan court historian click on the Niall Ferguson label below; ** Roberts can't even get his dates right. This particular war went from 1935-1936.]

Israel's Useful Fool

"Responding to international demands, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday appointed a commission to investigate the naval interdiction of a Gaza-bound humanitarian convoy two weeks ago that left 9 dead. In addition to three Israeli members, the commission will include two foreigners as official observers - David Trimble, a Northern Island Unionist leader who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1998, and retired general Ken Watkin of Canada, a former judge advocate-general. It is the first time Israel has given foreign experts a place in an official probe, reflecting the political sensitivity of the issue, which has stirred anti-Israel sentiment worldwide." (Israel appoints flotilla inquiry, Abraham Rabinovich, The Australian, 15/6/10)

So why Trimble? Well, he's just crazy about Israel:

"Initiated and led by Spain's former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, a group of international leaders is to meet in Paris on Monday night to launch the 'Friends of Israel Initiative', a new project in defense of Israel's right to exist. The leaders - who include the Nobel Peace Prize laureate David Trimble, Peru's former president Alejandro Toledo, Italian philosopher Marcelo Pear, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and British historian Andrew Roberts - say they seek to counter the attempts to deligitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders." (Anzar, Trimble to launch new pro-Israel project 'Friends of Israel', Jerusalem Post, 31/5/10)

And Trimble's got form. You know in advance he's not that big on justice and he's not going to do a Goldstone on you:

"The long-awaited report into the Bloody Sunday massacre [Derry, January 1972] will conclude that a number of the fatal shootings of civilians by British soldiers were unlawful killings, the Guardian has learned. Lord Saville's 12-year inquiry into the deaths, the longest public inquiry in British legal history, will conclude with a report published next Tuesday, putting severe pressure on the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland to prosecute soldiers. Lord Trimble, the former leader of the Ulster Unionists and one of the architects of the Good Friday agreement, revealed to the Guardian that when Tony Blair agreed to the inquiry in 1998, he warned the then prime minister that any conclusion that departed 'one millimetre' from the earlier 1972 Widgery report into the killings would lead to 'soldiers in the dock'." (Bloody Sunday killings to be ruled unlawful, guardian.co.uk, 10/6/10)

Bush's Taxi to the Dark Side

After winning an OSCAR for her documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, a film about the US Government's use of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Australian filmaker, Eva Orner branded the Bush administration "a bunch of war criminals, " who "needed to be stopped." (Oscar winner Eva Orner: US are war criminals, Herald Sun, 26/2/08)

Earlier still, on 14/2/08, Australia's Defence minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, "denounced the handling of the war in Afghanistan and [said] the allies are disunited, lack a clear plan and have failed to deal with the drug trade." He went on to warn that "a new strategy was required to ensure the Australian contribution was not for 'nil'." (Afghan war being botched: minister, Jonathan Pearlman, SMH, 15/2/08)

A look at the machinations leading up to the US (and Australian) attack on Afghanistan in 2001, bears out the truth of Orner's remarks and raises the question that Fitzgibbon really needs to be asking: Why are we aiding and abetting?

In his 2004 book, Destroying World Order: US Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11, leading American expert in international law, Francis A Boyle, guides us through these murky waters:-

Boyle portrays the Bush government as a warmongering cabal that shamelessly exploited the 9/11 tragedy to wage "an illegal armed aggression [against Afghanistan] that has created a hunanitarian catastrophe for the 22 million people of [that country] and is promoting terrible regional instability." He points out that "there is not and may never be conclusive proof as to who was behind the terrible bombings in New York and Washington DC, on September 11, 2001," and describes how the Bush administration, "deliberately invoking the rhetoric of Pearl Harbour," misrepresented an act of terrorism against the US as an act of war, which is defined by international law and practice as "a military attack by one nation state upon another nation state." Boyle writes, "The implication was that if this is an act of war, then you do not deal with it by means of international treaties and negotiations: You deal with an act of war by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made...to ignore and abandon the entire framework of international treaties that had been established under the auspices of the United Nations Organization for the past 25 years in order to deal with acts of terrorism and instead go to war against Afghanistan, a UN member state. In order to prevent the momentum towards war from being impeded, Bush Jr issued an impossible ultimatum, refusing all negotiations with the Taliban government, as well as all the extensive due process protections that are required between sovereign states related to extraditions, etc. The Taliban government's requests for proof and offers to surrender bin Laden to a third party, similar to those which ultimately brought the Libyan Lockerbie suspects to trial, were all peremptorily ignored."

Bush failed to get either the UN Security Council or the US Congress to authorize war. Boyle writes that he "went to the US Congress and exploited the raw emotions of this national tragedy to ram through a congressional authorization to use force....[however], Congress failed to give Bush Jr [a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got from Congress after Pearl Harbour] and for a very good reason...it would have made Bush Jr a 'consitutional dictator' insofar as that, basically, Americans would now all be living under martial law. Congress might have just as well closed up and gone home for the rest of the duration of the Bush Jr war against terrorism for all the difference they would have made."

"Instead of a formal declaration of war, the US Congress gave Bush Jr what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization [which] basically gives [him] a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges - by means of his own ipse dixit - was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11, or else harboured those who were," despite the fact that the UN Charter expressly forbids an armed agression against a UN member state.

Two further attempts to get the Security Council's authorization to use military force failed, leading to the US invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter and informing the Security Council that "the US reserved its right to use force in self-defense against any state that the Bush Jr administration felt the need to victimize in order to fight their holy war against international terrorism as determined by themselves" - the same defense asserted by the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945.

Boyle's conclusion: "The Bush Jr war against Afghanistan, in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the UN Charter of 1945 [both requiring contracting parties to resolve international disputes peacefully], constitutes a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace." Orner knows this. Fitzgibbon & Co don't want to.

Postscript (4/3/08): In his Sydney Morning Herald opinion column, Harry puts the prince in principle (4/3/08), radical neocon pundit (and self-confessed republican) Gerard Henderson, in telling us how impressed he was by "Prince Harry putting his life on the line in Afghanistan" (a bit of palace PR if ever there was one), went on to misrepresent Eva Orner's accusation that the Bush administration were "war criminals" as a "far left" position. It speaks volumes about the kind of world we are now living in, that support for the principles of international law can be dismissed in this way. The sine qua non of the neocon, of course, is a massive contempt for international law and a belief that it should be replaced by the law of the jungle, which Henderson dresses up as (quoting from Andrew Roberts' A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900): "[T]he English-speaking peoples unmistakably demonstrat[ing] to the rest of the world that they still enjoy global hegemony," or, in his own words, "[T]he moral imperative of the West to intervene in the world, sometimes militarily, to help spread democracy."