Discontented Soul

A reputable alien anthropologist orbiting the Earth in order to observe the shenanigans of the ape-descended species that dominates the planet would often find cause for puzzlement.

I imagine that one of the salient observations our alien would make is that, whether they are involved in a small or a large enterprise, businesspeople are always hypocritical whingers. When they have their employees on the mat signing a ‘workplace agreement’ (“Accept MY conditions or keep looking and maybe face the wrath of Social Security”), receive a favourable decision from the Courts, or, having made billions of dollars in profit, put their hands out for more billions from the public purse, they crow loud ‘n’ long about fairness and the Justice of the Marketplace. Yet when their employees mange to wrangle a pay rise or an improvement in conditions out of them, or they are asked to contribute to the public purse by way of a tax, they scream as if their throats are being cut and run to the nearest capitalist Government for help.

Being a good scientist, our alien would search for an explanation and might even come to the conclusion that this whingeing hypocrisy is a genetically inheritable trait, since an inordinate number of entrepreneurs seem to follow in their parents’ footsteps — or else become politicians and work out the angst they have picked up around the family dinner table by pursuing a lifelong vendetta against ‘the workers,’ a class which is somehow different from ‘the battlers.’

UK/US lied about pre-war Iraq air strikes
by Michael Smith
11 August

Britain and America's reasons for stepping up bombing of Iraq in the ten months leading up to the war in Iraq was a sham, official figures released by the British Ministry of Defence show.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Geoff Hoon, his UK counterpart, said the stepped-up attacks by US and Royal Air Force aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were a response to increased attacks by Iraqi air defences.
The minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's Iraq war cabinet on 23/07/2003, leaked to the London Sunday Times, record Hoon as saying "the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime."
UK ministers have since insisted that the stepped up attacks, which began in May 2002, were a direct result of Iraqi attempts to shoot down allied aircraft and were not, as Hoon suggested, an attempt to provoke a response that would give the allies an excuse for war.
But figures released last month by the British Ministry of Defence show that in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, with American officials predicting moves to oust Saddam Hussein, Iraq dramatically scaled back its attacks on allied aircraft.
During the first seven months of 2001 the allies recorded 370 "provocations" by the Iraqi military against allied aircraft. But in the seven months between October 2001 and May 2002 when the allies stepped up their attacks, there were just 32. The complete figures are available on the parliament's website.
The number of recorded threats dropped markedly in October 2001, the first full month after the Sept. 11 attacks, from 24 in September to just eight in October.
With US officials openly predicting that an attack on Afghanistan would be followed by an invasion of Iraq, the number of recorded threats kept dropping.
By February 2002, there were just two, in March none and in April again two. Such was the reduction in the number of Iraqi threats that in the six months leading up to the "spikes of activity" British aircraft did not at any point need to respond in self-defence.
In May, after Rumsfeld ordered the allied attacks be stepped up, the Iraqi responses rose to 20, leading to yet further allied attacks.
Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman, who obtained the British data using written parliamentary questions, said it reinforced the need for an inquiry into the conduct of ministers in the run-up to the war.
"Taken together with the leaked minutes of the July 23rd meeting, these figures simply destroy the Government's case," he said. "None of the inquiries have ever properly focused on the conduct of ministers. It is high time that we had an inquiry which did."
The stepped-up attacks on Iraq's air defences are now widely seen by military analysts as the start of the air war, exposing both Blair and President George W Bush to allegations that they acted illegally.
The "spikes of activity" began just weeks after Blair and Bush agreed to use military action to bring about regime change in Iraq, something that at the time was illegal under British interpretation of international law.
A Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July 23 meeting, which was also leaked to the Sunday Times, stated that at a summit with Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, Blair said "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change."
Lord Goldsmith, Attorney-General, did not advise that military action against Iraq was legal until 7 Mar, 2003 ten months after the allies stepped up their attacks on the Iraqi air defences.
Congress, which under the US constitution has to give its backing before the President can order military action, did not do so until October 2002. The war officially began
21/07/2003.

Michael Smith writes for the London Sunday Times. He broke the Downing Street Memo story.

No Sympathy for the Neocons: Mick Jagger runs with the 'neocon' meme
by Justin Raimondo
August 10, 2005

The news that the Rolling Stones are coming out with a song called "Sweet Neocon" that takes the administration to task for its Iraq war policy is … music to my ears:
You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/ You call yourself a patriot. Well, I think your are full of sh*t!... How come you're so wrong, my sweet neo-con.
Wrong? Neocons? They'll never admit it, although the whole world knows it. That's a defining characteristic of these ex-lefties-turned-rightists – they're so blinded by ideology and their own hubris that even the massive failure of their policies in practice leads not to reconsideration, but to a drunken triumphalism:
What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals who, coming from a very different place, have joined and reshaped the neoconservative camp and are carrying the neoconservative idea throughout the world. As a result, the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown even more vast than liberals could imagine. And even as the tent has enlarged, the great schisms and splits in conservative foreign policy – so widely predicted just a year ago, so eagerly sought and amplified by outside analysts – have not occurred. Indeed, differences have, if anything, narrowed.
That's Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist and easily the most arrogant of the neocons, hailing the great "victory" of neoconservatism as it marks its emergence as the "governing ideology" of this administration...