Posts by Snowblog:
Returning home from the horror of Iraq
December 12th, 2011Such a simple idea: invade Iraq, remove the tyrant and unleash democracy. Nearly ten years and a trillion dollars later, Western forces, now reduced to a sizable rump of American troops, are coming home. They will all be gone from Iraq in 19 days.
What are they leaving behind? A vast number of Western ‘mercenaries’ employed by assorted security companies; a country more divided, more insecure, and more uncertain in its destiny, and an Iran that holds a regional sway greater than at any time since the Persian Empire ruled supreme a century ago.
One senses that there will be few celebrating; indeed one wonders whether Messrs Bush and Blair will even notice the moment. History is unlikely to be generous about the Iraq adventure; the word oil is unlikely to be far from its evaluation.
I have never been more frightened in any theatre of war. To be on the ground was to be adorned in a flak jacket and to feel very personally threatened at all times. I was there perhaps a dozen times. I heard the car bombs, saw the tell tale plumes of black smoke rising into the sky.
I was there before, when the odious Saddam ruled supreme. After he’d gone, I saw the severed limbs, the blood, and the corpses of some who died. From Amman and Damascus to Glasgow and Birmingham, I met some of the millions displaced, and tried and failed to remain the objective journalist that I am paid to be.
And beyond, what of the four and half thousand American families, the hundreds of British, Dutch, Canadian, Nepalese families who lost a loved one, or the thousands who have lost a limb and their mental well being? What will history say to them?
The oil is flowing; regional defence sales are rising. But is the region a better place?
We must move on, we have new wars to fight, inside the eurozone, in the trading rooms, of Shanghai, New York and London. Oh, and there is Afghanistan still flaming, Pakistan besides; the Arab Spring still raging and uncertain.
What a time for leadership, unity, and purpose. We, the first generation in a hundred years to live life without a World War are blessed. But will history judge that we used our blessing well?
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Can capitalism survive without tax avoidance?
November 22nd, 2011I am indebted to the Sunday Times for their introduction, last Sunday, to the contents of Number One Hyde Park – London’s most expensive and unoccupied address.
All in a day…
July 12th, 2011The Queen’s phone number reportedly sold by one of Her loyal Royal protection officers. The Prime Minister of the day’s phone, family medical records and bank account allegedly raided. Well, that’s only the start.
Scratch the news surface, and what do we find? Italy’s economy under siege as a Greek debt default moves from “if” to “when”. Massive implications for the entire global economy, not least ours. UK names vastly exposed mainly on reinsurance.
Scratch further and I’m looking for packaging to wrap a mobile phone in for the post. Not one I have hacked but one I found in the deepest West Berkshire countryside. Rare to be walking along an earth track glimpsing bind weed, rough stones, and assorted wild flowers beneath trees, and to spot a basic, somewhat dirty, mobile phone lying there.
The thump of a rave in a cornfield high above the house in which we had been staying had alerted us overnight to what is now a summer phenomenon – a kind of flash concert, illegal, involving hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand – transported in old bangers from all over the UK and beyond. Ramshackled tents, old blankets, boots, and a band – plenty of cider too.
The phone must have been dropped by a meandering raver. I picked it up – and being of an inquisitive mind, I fiddled until numbers and names came up on the grubby screen. The top one, “cuddly cakes”, I divined, was either a confectioner or a lover. I had a flash of Murdochery.. was I hacking? I think not. But I called. A tired young voice answered – yes, it was her partner’s phone but she was running out of credit – she would text me. The rave seemed to have left her not only tired but penniless.
She found the pennies to call back. I imagined her, and him, in the corn field. But she wasn’t, she was far away in Stratford-upon-Avon. No picking the thing up then. So I offered to post.
I found loo paper to wrap around the dusty phone in, slipped it into an envelope and into the mail. “Cuddly cakes” and her lover are connected again, and I am left to return to more immediate matters of telephony.
Britain’s Watergate? Mea Culpa!
July 11th, 2011The shock is less the content of the News International disclosures, than the fact that finally any of it has now been disclosed. The Twittersphere is littered with questions today: “Why didn’t you do more? Why didn’t you tell us”. They are questions I ask myself.
It was under Mrs Thatcher’s Premiership that standing in Downing Street, covering another story altogether, I spotted Rupert Murdoch going in by the front door. I saw him again going through the door under John Major and again under Tony Blair. I did not think nothing of it, but I was doing something else. I did not see him going through David Cameron’s front door, because by last year the entrance was more commonly through the back entrance.
OBL: Pakistan’s convenient ignorance
May 4th, 2011Sure, Osama seems to have been shot dead. The doubts surround the question of Pakistani complicity. Last night professor Akbar Ahmed, formerly a commissioner in Abbottabad, a former High Commissioner to the UK, and a respected authority on Pakistan and on Islam, suggested on Channel 4 News that the Pakistanis had known of Osama’s whereabouts and effectively held him as a “last throw of the dice” in the event that relations with the US deteriorated… deteriorate they did. And the attack was triggered.
It is surely not credible that “the most wanted man in the world” lived undisguised in a middle class neighbourhood 35 miles from Islamabad unknown to anyone… we now know that children came and went to play with Osama’s own children for example. His kidney doctor came and went to give Osama dialysis. The nature of the compound has been well rehearsed.
You then have the “cover” of denial by the Pakistani authorities. “We never knew he was there” said President Zardari. How convenient… so that when America struck, no mud would stick that would ignite the fires of fundamentalist hatred within the country. Suited America too, so heroic, an attack in the face of potential hostility. Save that from Pakistan itself, there was none.
So US forces were “in country” for more than an hour, airborne for some thirty minutes of that time. The US UK trained Pakistani forces failed to scramble a single military boot, let alone a plane or helicopter.
I have always been taught as a reporter never to bank on conspiracy, never to underestimate incompetence. I am trying, heaven knows, I’m trying. But a seasoned nose, tutored in all sorts of trouble spots from El Salvador to Iran, suspects this doesn’t stack up.
I know this is a more than usually speculative Snowblog, but I thought I’d share it, in case it stirs someone else’s knowledge/experience/thoughts.
Japan: loss of life, devastation of homes, unimaginable grief
March 13th, 2011I’m writing this from Sendai in Japan, in the aftermath of one of the biggest earthquakes in the country’s history.
Amid rising fears about the quake’s impact on Japan’s nuclear power plants, the death toll from Friday’s quake is now feared to run beyond 10,000. Alex Thomson has become one of the first foreign journalists to get right into Minamisanriku – a fishing port of 17,000 people where up to 10,000 are missing.
He encountered terrible scenes of loss of life, devastation of homes, and grief on an unimaginable scale. I saw his team return to our hotel here in Sendai – shocked to the core by what they had seen.
I and my team have been out around this significant port city (pop one million), much of it surprisingly undamaged. The rest of it, almost beyond recognition.
The tsunami swept across farmland eight miles from the sea, sweeping splintered wooden houses, shower cabinets, washing up basins, clothes, and of course cars in which many people died. The city’s ring road provided a raised trap against which all this detritus piled.
The wave from a tsunami crashes over a street in Miyako City, Iwate Prefecture in northeastern Japan
We have watched the highly efficient search for the dead. Beyond the remarkable survival of the man found floating on his roof, 10 miles out to sea, few people have been pulled alive from all this.
But it is the nuclear threat that is paramount. The authorities are engaged in a desperate battle to prevent another explosion, after the roof of a building blew off at a Fukushima nuclear plant on Saturday.
A second reactor at Fukushima appears to be in meltdown, a second plant in the same region is also in trouble, and yet another nuclear station is facing exactly the same problem with cooling system failure. The authorities are pumping sea water in to cool the reactors, and fortunately the wind is in a good direction, but the Japanese Government is already being accused of downplaying the scale of what is happening.
But this also needs to be balanced against the amazing dedication of Japanese rescue services, who are rapidly moving in on the worst of the devastation.
Channel 4 News is specially extended and starting at 6 tonight, Julian Rush has a highly informed take on the nuclear crisis, Alex and I will be live in Sendai. Krishnan is handling the debate on the nuclear issues – including the question of whether this will affect the world’s attitude to nuclear power in the future – and the rest of the day’s news.
Earthquake: Japan’s difference over Haiti
March 12th, 2011Have flown to Shanghai and on to Osaka and I’m now on bullet train to Tokyo.
We shall then proceed by car to Sendai which is the worst affected city (One million souls).
The death toll is still clarifying. Amazing arriving in the south of Japan to find sublime normality yet people obsessively reading newspapers, listening to the radio and watching television on their mobile phones. And yet and awareness of what we have seen on our own mobiles of devastating scenes and devastating power. Trying to work out whether one of us should go to the nuclear plant. We hope to transmit tonight from Sendai.
The contrast with Haiti where infrastructure was so crude and here where it is so sophisticated, is acute. The death toll will reflect it.
Egypt’s joy amid the dawning, daunting challenge
February 12th, 2011Late last night I walked through the crowds thronging Tahrir Square and the streets beyond.
It’s rare to move so seamlessly through such vast swathes of humanity and experience such individual pools of joy. Whole families with babes in arms, children on shoulders; exuberant young men dashing around in flag waving ‘congas’; mothers and daughters in headscarves talking animatedly. And though I and my small team seemed to be almost the only Westerners present, we experienced no sense of threat.
So where are those baton wielding thugs? Where are the secret police who have beaten the occasional demonstrator down the years and killed as many as 300 in these past 19 days? At home waiting? For what? Read the rest of this entry “
Student protests: the view from a reformed protester
December 9th, 2010It’s no secret that I was sent down from University for my involvement in a student protest. So today inevitably conjures a whiff of nostalgia, even tear gas.
The late 1960s, early 1970s, were heady times. We were on full local authority grants. We worked in the holidays to amass spending money and the world beyond was changing rapidly about us. America was losing the war in Vietnam; the apartheid government in South Africa was killing to stay in power; and we were the liberated post “pill” generation. Clapton, the stones, the Animals, and the Who, were all regulars on a Saturday evening at the union. Read the rest of this entry “
