xD.

I can understand why the situation might be different for current or recent atrocities, where the denunciation of a crime as a genocide might spur the action, say, of something like ICT-Y or ICT-R, but I do not see the advantage at all in raking over history. We have quite enough of the nightmarish weight of history fouling the relations between states. If this resolution passes, would it not be logical to expect similar condemnations of the Holodomor, or the killing of Native Americans, or every other entry in the long catalogue of human brutality.

House Resolution 252 (of the 111th Congress) has been passed 23-22 by the Foreign Affairs Committee. Introduced by Rep Schiff, a Democrat from California, its title is “Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution”. It has soured relations between the US and Turkey and has led to the Turkish ambassador to the US being recalled for consultations.

Just over two years ago, I wrote about House Resolution 106 (of the 110th Congress), titled “Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution“.

Similar resolutions were introduced in the 106th and 109th Congresses, both by Rep. George Radanovich, a GOPer from California’s 19th district.

It was introduced by the same Rep. Schiff. The resolution was passed by the Foreign Affairs Committee 27-21 to the House, where no action was taken. It did have some effects, though; as my interlocutor Ewan Watt pointed out, it soured relations between Turkey and the US, leading to the Turkish ambassador to the US being recalled for ‘a week or ten days of consultations’.

I reiterate the points made at the time made by myself and an interlocutor, Ewan Watt, at the time: this resolution is the result of special interest lobbying, damaging to relations between the US and Turkey and, most of all, I do not feel that is the role of the government to be an official arbiter of history.

The texts of the two resolutions are identical. The first resolution was not debated on the floor of the House, as I understand it, because of pressure from George W. Bush. I can only presume that the reintroduction of HR.106 is with the intention of having it debate and passed on the floor of the House. Rep. Schiff believes he has as many as eighty thousand constituents of Armenian descent in his district. Why so many other representatives support the resolution, I don’t know, but I wonder if the primacy in the White House’s mind of the healthcare debate means it will be unwilling to spend political capital on stopping this motion.

I see this resolution as unnecessary and irresponsible; I hope it does not reach the floor of the House.

xD.

10 troops died and ‘only 150 Afghans voted’

Note the quotation marks. What’s inside them is never referenced to anyone.

The ‘story’ is that only 150 people voted in Babaji. A second story is that ten British soldiers died in Operation Panther’s Claw. The new, positive London Evening Standard forgets to mention that

• it is not comparing like with like (votes in one part of Helmand against British deaths across the whole of Helmand)
• does not say where or what Babaji is (are we talking about the area or the village, and what are their populations?)
• it does not have confirmed figures (because they’re not available yet)
• it doesn’t say that enabling people to vote was not the main aim of Operation Panther’s Claw (which was to secure a permanent ISAF presence in Helmand)
• it doesn’t say that one of the results of Operation Panther’s Claw was to enable an extra eighty thousand Afghans in Helmand to vote against a campaign of violence and intimidation

Just thought I’d mention. It’s not as if the Evening Standard hasn’t changed from being a negative, mendacious rag of inferior quality.

xD.

PS you’re right, reading the ES is bad for my blood pressure.

The nine withdrawals in favour of Karzai, all relatively recent, suggest people know which side their bread is buttered, either because they suspect Karzai will win or because there has been some horse-trading. Polling is difficult in Afghanistan, but the three I have seen give the lead to Karzai. However, the number of undecideds is high. Assuming Karzai does not receive a majority, the second round will be him against either Abdullah Abdullah or Ashraf Ghani. Abdullah is more likely to beat Karzai; if anyone is to beat him, the west would probably prefer Ghani. Karzai remains the man to beat.

Elections for the thirty-four provincial councils will also take place tomorrow.

More at afghanelections.org.

xD.

PS – I draw your attention to the disclaimer on the sidebar.

H/T The Wardman Wire.

xD.

The NHS has its problems; no-one would say that it is perfect. However, it does a pretty damned good job and it does so regardless of someone’s ability to pay. While we don’t see the faces of private healthcare – or those who can’t afford it – it strikes me that there are some missing faces in the video; those who are happy with the NHS. There’s rather a lot of us.

The first face is Kate Spall, who says ‘if you have cancer in the UK today, you are going to die quicker than any other country in Europe’. The largest, pan-European, cohort-based study on cancer survival is EUROCARE. EUROCARE runs into the same problem that any other systematic review of cancer survival rates in Europe is going to; there are different recording systems between (and sometimes within) countries and some countries don’t keep records at all (the UK is pretty good; adult coverage in Germany is about 1.4%).

Nevertheless, the EUROCARE research suggests that Ms Spall is wrong.

Tables to show life expectancy of fatal cancer cases against % cured patients for country, age and date of diagnosis

While we are towards the bottom of the table, we are not at the bottom. In any case, this study does not take account of factors such as smoking, drinking, diet and so on. More information is on the latest results page.

A brief search on BBC News shows Ms Spall’s interest in cancer; her mother died from a rare form of kidney cancer. She managed to have Nexavar provided, even though “the drug, which can cost up to £40,000, is not a cure, but can help some patients”. Now, while my greatest sympathies are with Ms Spall, £40,000 is a lot to spend on a non-cure. Perhaps, in terms of QALYs, it was worth it; however, part of her objection was that the drug was available in some English health trusts. While I would certainly agree that there is not enough democratic involvement in NHS trusts, one of the effects of choice is, necessarily, variation. This seems like a poor choice – if you’ll excuse the pun – of ‘face of government healthcare’.

Next up is Katie Brickell. Despite asking for one at 23, Ms Brickell wasn’t given a smear test; by that time, she had contract cancer of the cervix. Again, my heart goes out to Ms Brickell, but this was a fluke. The evidence suggests that the smear test provides no benefit before about 25. If everyone were going in for a test whenever they were worried and there was no consideration about whether the test was appropriate, a lot of money would be needlessly spent on a lot of needless procedures.

Angela French says that it’s hard to get hold of new, expensive drugs on the NHS. Quite why this isn’t the case in the USA at the moment or, indeed, in any system that doesn’t have an unlimited budget is beyond me. Dr Karol Sikora makes the same point; quite why it is any less heartbreaking when a poor person in the US with insufficient insurance cannot afford a given drug is, again, beyond me.

The rest of the people featured are Canadian; I’ll leave them to one side as I don’t know enough to comment on the situation there. I would just note that no-one in the US is proposing a UK-style health service; rather, they’re going for different ways of amending insurance-based policies. The only system that exists like that at the moment is healthcare for the armed services which is, er, pretty good.

xD.

Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?

Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well?

The loudest opposition to the nature of the inquiry has largely come from the grouping around the Stop the War Coalition (a trading name of the Socialist Workers’ Party ¹ ). It is worth remembering that this grouping was not only opposed to the war ² , not only opposed to the Labour government, but opposed to the entire system of government and nature of the state. That suggests that they would be opposed to the inquiry on some basis no matter what as, in their view, the government is necessarily corrupt and serving of capitalist interests.

The more reasoned problems come under three heads; timing, secrecy and outputs.

Timing

The ‘why now’ question is easily answered; British troops there have largely withdrawn. Conducting an honest inquiry would have been impossible if witnesses thought they were kicking the stool from underneath troops in the field.

The ‘how long’ question can only be answered in reference to other inquiries.

The Fingerprint Inquiry; announced 14 March 2008. Yet to report.
The Fraser Inquiry into the Holyrood building; announced July 8th 2003. Report published 15 September 2004.
The Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly; opened 1 August 2003. Report published 28 January 2004
The Cullen Inquiry into the Dunblane massacre; announced 21 March 1996. Report published 30 September 1996
The Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié; announced 20 April 2001. Report published 28 January 2003.
The Cullen Inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster; announced 8 October 1999. Report published 17 April 2001
The Davies Inquiry into the Aberfan disaster; announced 26 October 1966. Report published 3 August 1967
The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday; announced 29 January 1998. Yet to report.
The Butler Review into WMD in Iraq; announced 3 February 2004. Report published 14 July 2004.
The Redfern Report into the Alder Hey organs scandal; announced 3 December 1999. Report published 7 November 2000
The Scott Report into the Matrix Churchill affair; announced November 1992. Published 27 April 2004.

This will of necessity be a painstaking process. Setting an artificial limit of twelve months will not help anyone. I would reply to anyone who says it is being put back till after the election for political reasons that desiring it to report early, half-cock, so that it can be used to hit the Labour party is also a political reason.

Secrecy

Much of the criticism has been on the issue of secrecy.

For one thing, I understand and agree with the logic of certain things being secret. Beyond the obvious issues of national security, I would make two points.

Firstly, we did not cover ourselves in glory. I’m guessing that there are plenty of people who will want to tell their part of the story but will not, for various reasons, want to do it in public. Their own conduct or that of ‘brother officers’ might have been wanting, or they might be concerned about leaving interpreters and other locally employed civilians in the lurch again.

Equally, an honest investigation will have to take information from people who we cannot compel to appear – from the USA, for instance – and who are unlikely to appear if they feel they would compromise confidences. Similarly, would (say) a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government be likely to appear to discuss oil if their words were ferried direct to Washington and Baghdad?

Outputs

The inquiry has many issues to consider. Off the top of my head, they could include the lead up to the war, WMD, intelligence qua intelligence, use of intelligence, lack of embassy, use of intelligence from allies, the march on Baghdad, de-baathification, troop numbers, mission objectives in Basra, relations with civilians, the Awakening, civil-military co-operation, troop equipment and so on and so forth.

Quite beyond the simple questions of ‘were there WMD’ and ‘was the dodgy dossier sexed up’, there are questions about everything that happened in Iraq. There is a general understanding that we didn’t cover ourselves with glory, but after any operation of the size of Iraq, there is a need for a ‘lessons learned’ exercise. There are going to be two outputs, one public, one secret. As with the Dunblane inquiry, parts of the secret version may be declassified before the time limit to aid that process.

The ouput is not ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ but a whole range of comments, recommendations and criticisms. Those looking for an answer along the lines of ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ are missing the point and, ultimately, will make it harder for us to see where we went wrong, what lessons we can learn and how that affects and constrains future military conduct.

Ultimately, going to war in Iraq was a political decision. While an inquiry may do much, it cannot decide whether a policy was right or wrong. That is reserved for the electorate.

For the record, I opposed the Iraq war.

xD.

This post also appeared at Common Endeavour and in a shortened version at Liberal Conspiracy.

1 – they’re not socialists, they’re not workers and they don’t know how to party
2 – even though it had no problems with declaring “we are all Hezbollah now”

Quite what this will mean I don’t know; it breaks the hold of the PNV, who have provided the Lehendakari for three decades since democratisation, but puts the PSOE into alliance with the PP, the main opposition at the federal level, even though they receive confidence and supply from the PNV. The nearest equivalent in British terms would be the Tories supporting Labour in Holyrood to keep the SNP out while Labour needed SNP support at Westminster to stay in power.

xD.

The victory of the PP is not unexpected. In the previous elections of 2005, The major reason for their loss of four seats and the PSOE’s gain of eight seats was the perceived inadequacy of the response to the Prestige disaster in 2002, but Galicia is a traditionally PP area. From 1990 to 2005, an interesting cove called Manuel Fraga e Iribarne of the PP ran Galicia. Fraga was a member of the Francoist regime, including a spell as ambassador to London. It’s fair to say that he was one of the aperturistas and eased censorship during the latter part of Franco’s rule; he was later one of the authors of the 1978 Constitution and founded the Popular Alliance, which in turn became the Popular Party. He is now a PP Senator for Galicia.

The narrowness of the PP’s victory, particularly given that one would expect the PSOE-PSdeG to be affected by being the government at Madrid during the current financial crisis, perhaps suggests that Galicia might be more competitive in future.

xD.