Archive for the ‘Iraq’ Category

Iraq War catastrophe still looms large over Tony Blair’s achievements as former prime minister turns 70 – Sky News

Tony Blair turns 70 on Saturday. Plans to celebrate the former prime minister's biblical milestone of three score years and ten are muted - and not only because Blair's big birthday on 6 May falls on the same day as the coronation of King Charles III.

The 26th anniversary of Blair's, genuinely historic, first, "New Dawn has broken", general election victory on May Day 1997 also passed without comment. To many Sir Tony Blair is a pariah.

In spite of Blair's achievements, his name is often greeted with embarrassed shuffling. It took the current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer well over a year before he found the courage to utter the word "Blair" in public.

The Downing Street chronicler Sir Anthony Seldon declined to include him in his list of 10 best prime ministers, only Attlee and Thatcher get his nod in modern times.

The gentle comedian Harry Hill co-authored Tony! - The Rock Opera, now touring theatres.

In a short notice in the usually Labour-leaning Guardian, the reviewer wrote off the play's subject without hesitation as a "monster", "gormless", giving "Gordon Brown a raw deal". He regrets that in a death-bed scene the depiction of Blair's "dotage, sadly never transpires".

It is 16 years since Tony Blair left office and active politics. True, memories fade. The section of the electorate under 35 will have no memories to go.

It is important to take this opportunity to look at his record, especially because, for the first time since Blair's last victory in 2005, there is a live prospect of Labour forming a government after the next election. The idea of Tony Blair still casts a long shadow over his party and British politics more widely.

What explains the indifference or malice directed at a significant national leader, who is now often caricatured as "Tony B. Liar" and "a war criminal"?

If they are remembered at all, prime ministers are remembered for a single thing. In Blair's case it is Iraq.

Blair propelled the nation into the military invasion in 2003, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of US and UK troops and more than a 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

He made the case for war on what turned out to be an inaccurate premise - that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. Once the Iraqi despot was overthrown, the region plunged into chaos and civil war from which it has still not recovered.

Britain's stance led to a significant rupture with some allies in the European Union, led by President Chirac of France, and arguably set the country on the road to Brexit.

At home the Blair government's aggressive campaign to make the case for military action precipitated the suicide of a British expert, Dr David Kelly, and the dismissal of the director general and the chairman of the BBC.

With hindsight most of Blair's closest supporters, but not the man himself, concede that his decision to "stand shoulder to shoulder" with US President George W. Bush turned out to be a catastrophic error.

Blair's insistence that he "acted in good faith" doing what he thought was right, survived numerous public inquiries, including by Robin Butler, Lord Hutton and Sir John Chilcot. The US would have invaded without British forces in any case.

No evidence emerged that Blair ever deliberately lied about the Iraq threat. He secured a democratic vote at Westminster for the invasion. Public opinion at the time was roughly split down the middle even as over million took to the streets for Stop the War demonstrations.

Iraq has blotted out Blair's other achievements.

In electoral terms, Tony Blair remains the most successful Labour leader ever. He is the only Labour, or indeed non-Conservative leader to have led his party to victory for full terms in three successive general elections.

He was prime minister for a decade. A period of continuous economic growth in this country during which increased public investment resulted in qualitative improvements in state education and the National Health Service.

As even his severe critic, the former Tory MP Matthew Parris, acknowledges, social reforms, including the introduction of civil partnerships, left a nation much more at ease with itself.

With his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern and the American Senator George Mitchell, Blair secured the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998, which brought an end to Northern Ireland's murderous Troubles.

Blair's political success was built on his Big Tent political philosophy of reaching out beyond his natural supporters.

"You can either A: Hold on to your core vote, basically, you know, say, 'look let's not break out because if we break out we might lose what we've got, and at least we've got what we've got, so let's keep it'," he explained, "or B: You say 'let's accept the world is changing, and let us work out how we can lead the change and actually reach out'."

This ambidextrous key to success ultimately antagonised both Labour loyalists and Tory opponents, who felt he was annexing their natural territory.

In retirement, as an elder statesman, Blair has been available to offer private counsel to his Conservative successors as prime minister.

He made common cause with John Major to warn publicly and perceptively of the dangers posed by Brexit to the Good Friday Agreement. At the same time he remained a Labour Party partisan, although, until Starmer, he was cold shouldered by successive Labour leaders, including the resentful Gordon Brown.

Starmer is now moving Labour back towards the centre, having shaken off his past allegiance to Jeremy Corbyn. His parliamentary career began in 2010, years after Tony Blair left politics and after the defeat of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Now some of the old TB/GB, Blair/Brown tensions are becoming evident in the Leader of the Opposition's office. Starmer would like to win like a Blairite but so far he has looked more Brownite in his calculated caution.

His leadership team features prominent Brownites such as Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband and Deborah Mattison as well as those more closely associated with Blair's New Labour, including Peter Hyman, Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle.

As Rishi Sunak steadies the Conservative government, Labour faces a bigger challenge than previously. While few want a return of Blair's tarnished charismatic leadership style, worried Labour campaigners would welcome dashes of his classlessness, daring and vision.

Blair's departure from office in 2006 was bitter, including an attack on the "feral beasts" in the media.

He did not enhance his reputation as he set about money making to secure the financial security of his family, largely from foreign sources. He talked about moving to America. Estimates of his net worth start at around 50m. His four children are all property rich.

In common with Major and Brown, Tony Blair did not take a peerage in the House of Lords.

After a surprisingly long gap for an ex-prime minister, he was installed as a Knight Companion of the Garter last year at what would be the Queen's last investiture service at St George's Chapel in Windsor.

Blair's eldest son Euan, 39, has surpassed his father in wealth. He founded White Hat, which encourages white collar students to take apprenticeships with businesses rather than go to university.

Now rebranded Metaverse with backing from the US Walmart dynasty, Euan's stock holding is valued in hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nicky Blair, 37, is a footballer's agent after a brief career as a teacher. Kathryn, 35, is a barrister. Tony and Cherie's annual Christmas card now regularly features their growing brood of grandchildren.

Cherie Blair KC co-founded Omnia Strategy, a firm of "global dispute and arbitration" lawyers.

Leo, the youngest son born while the family were in Number 10, seems the child most likely to go into politics. Now 22, he joined Labour aged 16 and accompanied his mother to celebrations for the party's 120th anniversary.

Tony's 70th birthday celebrations will be a private family affair.

He cut back on his personal commercial activities in 2016 and now largely uses his earnings to support the family's foundations for sport, religion and government, which employ several hundred people around the world.

Work by his umbrella Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has ranged from ideas to deal with COVID to the Africa Governance Initiative and calls to counter Russian influence in the region.

The UK now has an unprecedented roster of seven living ex-prime ministers - Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss - all still active. Tony Blair is the enigma.

His reputation is not yet settled with the public. As he looks on at the coronation from his pew in Westminster Abbey, the restless Sir Tony Blair is unlikely to miss the irony that the career of his life was over at the age of 53, while King Charles III, who is four years older, is only just embarking on his starring role.

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Iraq War catastrophe still looms large over Tony Blair's achievements as former prime minister turns 70 - Sky News

Iraq Aims To Halt Natural Gas Imports Within 3 Years – OilPrice.com

One of Iraq's main priorities is to improve the country's energy sector, and recently signed agreements will help Iraq cut the cord on the importation of natural gas, Rudaw shared on Thursday.

Iraqi Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani, reaffirmed on Thursday at the 2023 Iraq Forum in Baghdad his commitment to shoring up the country's rich energy sector-addressing in particular the country's reliance on imported natural gas. Other natural gas-related issues that the Prime Minister vowed would be a priority is achieving gas self-sufficiency, preserving its environment, and reducing natural gas flaring.

"We are burning money," al-Sudani said, referring to the 1200 cubic meters of natural gas that is flared every day and 1000 cubic meters of natural gas that the country imports from Iran every day. This "costs us no less than 4 billion dollars a year," al-Sudani explained.

Iraq relies on Iran for about 40% of its power supplies-in large part due to the import of natural gas. This dynamic has frustrated the United States, which has sanctioned Iran. Iraq continues to maintain that it is moving away from this geopolitically contentious relationship with Iran, but so far, it has failed to wean itself off the Iranian teet.

It is conceivable that Iraq is sitting on enough gas to utilize this associated gas for power generation, instead of burning it off in the atmosphere. Late last year, Iraq's oil ministry approved an increase in associated gas production in the Zubair oilfield.

Iraq previously agreed to be part of the United Nations and World Bank's Zero Routine Flaring initiative, which is to end by 2030 the routine flaring of produced gas during the oil drilling process.

When Iraq signed onto the Flaring initiative, the country flared the second-largest quantity of gas in the world, after Russia.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

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Iraq Aims To Halt Natural Gas Imports Within 3 Years - OilPrice.com

As US gets drawn deeper into the Ukraine conflict, it should remember the lessons of the Iraq War – Scroll.in

Leaked Pentagon papers showed in early April that the United States is allegedly following the inner workings of Russias intelligence operations and is also spying on Ukraine, adding a new dimension to the US involvement in the Ukraine war.

While the US has not actually declared war against Russia, the documents show that it continues to support Ukraine with military intelligence as well as money and weapons against the Russian invasion.

There is no end in sight to the war between Ukraine and Russia nor to US involvement. While it is far from the first time that the US became a third party to war, this scenario brings the Iraq War, in particular, to mind.

I am a scholar of international relations and an expert on international conflicts. A comparison with the Iraq War, I believe, offers a useful way to look at the case of Ukraine.

The Iraq and Ukraine wars have notable differences from a US foreign policy perspective chiefly, thousands of American soldiers died fighting in Iraq, while the US does not have any ground troops in Ukraine. But assessing the Iraq War, and its long aftermath, can still help articulate concerns about the United States getting involved in intense violence in another faraway place.

Here are three key points to understand.

Around the time former President George W Bush announced the US would invade Iraq in 2003, Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi Arabian Islamist who orchestrated the September 11, 2001, attacks, remained at large. While not obviously connected, the fact that bin Laden continued to evade the US contributed to a general sense of anger at hostile regimes. In particular, Saddam Hussein defied the US and its allies.

The Iraqi dictator continued to evade inspections by the United Nations watchdog group the International Atomic Energy Agency, giving the impression that he had weapons of mass destruction. This proved maddening to the US and its allies as the cat and mouse game dragged on.

Bush reportedly had intense concerns about whether Saddam could use alleged weapons of mass destruction to attack the US, causing even more harm than 9/11 did.

A US-led coalition of countries that included the United Kingdom and Australia invaded Iraq in March 2003. The coalition of the willing, as it became known, won a quick victory and toppled Saddams regime.

Bush initially enjoyed a spike in public support immediately after the invasion, but his polls shortly after experienced a downward trajectory as the war dragged on.

However, the US showed very little understanding of the politics, society and other important aspects of the country that it had taken the lead in occupying and then trying to rebuild.

Many decisions, most notably disbanding of the Iraqi Army in May 2003, revealed poor judgment and even outright ignorance because, with the sudden removal of Iraqi security forces, intense civil disorder ensued.

Disbanding the army caused insurgent militant forces to come out into the open. The fighting intensified among different Iraqi groups and escalated into a civil war, which ended in 2017.

Today, Iraq continues to be politically unstable and is not any closer to becoming a democracy than it was before the invasion.

During his 24-year regime, Saddam lived an extravagant lifestyle coupled with oppression of civilians and political opponents. He engaged in genocide of Kurdish people in Iraq. Saddam was finally executed by his own people in 2006, after US forces captured him.

Putin is equally notorious and even more dangerous. He has a long track record of violent oppression against his people and has benefited from leading one of the worlds most corrupt governments.

He also actually possesses weapons of mass destruction and has threatened multiple times to use them on foreign countries. Saddam and Putin have also both been the direct targets of US political leaders, who displayed a fixation on toppling these foreign adversaries, which was evident long before the US actually became involved in the Iraq and Ukraine wars.

The United States support for Ukraine is understandable because that country is fighting a defensive war with horrific civilian casualties. Backing Ukraine also makes sense from the standpoint of US national security it helps push back against an expansionist Russia that increasingly is aligned with China.

At the same time, I believe that it is important to keep US involvement in this war within limits that reflect national interests.

The Iraq War resulted in a rise in intense partisanship in the US over foreign policy. In addition, recent opinion polls about the Iraq War show that most Americans do not think that the invasion made the US any safer.

Now, the U.S. faces rising public skepticism about getting involved in the Ukraine war, another expensive overseas commitment.

Polls released in January 2023 show that the percentage of Americans who think the US is providing too much aid to Ukraine has grown in recent months. About 26% of American adults said in late 2022 that the U.S. is giving too much to the Ukraine war, according to Pew Research Group. But three-fourths of those polled still supported the U.S. engagement.

The average American knows little to nothing about Iraq or Ukraine. Patience obviously can grow thin when US.support for foreign wars becomes ever more expensive and the threat of retaliation, even by way of tactical nuclear weapons, remains in the realm of possibility. Aid to Ukraine is likely to become embroiled in the rapidly escalating conflict in Washington over the debt ceiling.

On the flip side, if the US does not offer sufficient support for Ukraine to fend of Russian attacks and maintain its independence, adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran may feel encouraged to be aggressive in other places.

I believe that the comparison between the wars in Iraq and Ukraine makes it clear that US leadership should clearly identify the underlying goals of its national security to the American public while determining the amount and type of support that it will give to Ukraine.

While many people believe that Ukraine deserves support against Russian aggression, current policy should not ignore past experience, and the Iraq War tells a cautionary tale.

Patrick James is Dornsife Deans Professor of International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

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As US gets drawn deeper into the Ukraine conflict, it should remember the lessons of the Iraq War - Scroll.in

Turkish drones bombard northern Iraq – Iraqi News

Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Iraqi media outlets reported on Saturday that Turkish drones bombarded villages in Matin Mountain in Dohuk governorate in northern Iraq.

A security source said Turkish drones targeted the villages of Matin Mountain near Amedi town in Dohuk governorate, Baghdad Today reported.

The source added that the Turkish bombardment targeted sites belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), with no casualties reported, indicating that the bombardment only resulted in fires in forests.

Last month, the Turkish Ministry of Defense announced that six militants from the PKK were killed in operations targeting their positions in northern Iraq.

The Turkish Defense Ministry mentioned in a statement that the Turkish armed forces will continue to fight the terrorist group, in reference to PKK, Anadolu Agency (AA) reported.

Several areas in the Kurdistan region of Iraq are repeatedly bombed by Turkey, and Ankara justifies this by the need to combat the PKK.

Turkey recently launched several military operations inside Iraq against militants belonging to the Kurdish party. Baghdad rejected the Turkish military action and considered it a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

Turkey controls several areas in northern Syria, and frequently launches operations against the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units, which it classifies as a terrorist group.

The Peoples Protection Units is a mainly Kurdish group in Syria and the primary component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

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Turkish drones bombard northern Iraq - Iraqi News

Iraq’s oil minister expects northern exports to resume within two weeks – Reuters

May 3 (Reuters) - Iraq expects to reach an agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to restart oil export flows from the country's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region within two weeks, Oil Minister Hayan Abdel-Ghani said at a conference in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Turkey halted Iraq's 450,000 barrels per day (bpd) of northern exports through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline on March 25 after an arbitration ruling by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). The 40 days of stoppage are estimated to have cost the KRG more than $1 billion.

The ICC ordered Turkey to pay Baghdad damages of $1.5 billion for unauthorised exports by the KRG between 2014 and 2018. The Iraq-Turkey pipeline had been exporting about 75,000 bpd of federal crude, with the remainder from the KRG.

Baghdad and the KRG signed a temporary agreement on April 4 to restart northern oil exports.

But efforts to restart flows face further setbacks as the two governments iron out several aspects of the deal.

"We haven't reached an agreement with the Kurdish side," the Iraqi minister said on Wednesday.

The KRG had agreed for Iraq's state-owned crude marketing company SOMO to market its crude and, under the agreement on April 4, KRG oil revenues will be deposited in a bank account under control of the KRG, which Baghdad can access to audit, sources previously said.

Disagreements persist surrounding the logistics of the bank account.

Iraq's central bank has approved use of a KRG bank account with Citi in the United Arab Emirates for the SOMO oil sales, as well as sale of KRG oil, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

However, politicians in Baghdad are raising questions about the account, whose location has drawn opposition from some members of the Coordination Framework, an alliance of Iran-aligned factions, one of those sources - and two others - said.

No bank account has been opened, Abdel-Ghani said on Wednesday.

Citi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"The issue (of reaching an agreement) is not technical it's political," an industry source said.

Iraq and the KRG have made progress in other areas.

Traders buying crude from the Kurdistan region have received contracts from SOMO for a proposed period of up to three months, according to two industry sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

But the mechanism to repay trader debts has yet to be resolved, those sources added.

The KRG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There is further uncertainty surrounding the reaction of the Turkish government, which needs to open its side of the pipeline in order for Iraq's exports to resume.

Previously, sources told Reuters Turkey was seeking in-person negotiations with Baghdad relating to damages it was ordered to pay in the arbitration case.

Turkey also wants to resolve a second arbitration case regarding unauthorised flows since 2018 before it restarts them, the sources said. Turkey's presidential elections on May 14 may cause further delays, two sources said on Wednesday.

The Turkish Energy Ministry did not immediately respond to a comment request.

Lost revenue from the halt for the KRG stands at over $1 billion, according to Reuters estimates based on exports of 375,000 barrels per day, the KRG's historic discount against Brent crude and 40 days of outages.

"The loss of this critical source of income is inflicting immeasurable damage on the Kurdistan economy and its oil and gas industry," the Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR) said in a statement on Wednesday.

APIKUR's members include international oil and gas companies that have a direct or indirect interest in upstream oil or gas contracts in Iraq's Kurdistan region.

Many of these firms have been forced to stop production in the region as a result of the pipeline closure.

(This story has been refiled to correct the abbreviation to APIKUR's, from AKIPUR's, in the penultimate paragraph)

Reporting by Amina Ismail and Timour Azhari in BaghdadEditing by David Goodman

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Iraq's oil minister expects northern exports to resume within two weeks - Reuters