The Guardian view on war in Iraq: a country that we helped to ruin
OP: The following is an editorial from the UK paper 'The Guardian'. It mentions some of the issues which underlie the horror of the recent bombing in Iraq.
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The Guardian view on war in Iraq: a country that we helped to ruin
The cycle of corruption and atrocity continues. But there is a distant end in sight
Baghdad’s Karada district on on Monday, the day after one of Iraq’s bloodiest suicide-bomb attacks. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images
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We remember the Battle of the Somme as a futile and bloody disaster: around 300,000 men were killed over a period of six months. Casualties were almost evenly divided: 165,000 Germans may have died, and 145,000 English and French troops; all to shift the frontline six miles across the mud. The news of the latest car bomb in Baghdad, where at least 150 people were killed as they filled the evening steets for an Iftar meal in the middle of Ramadan, is reminder that the 13 years’ war that followed our invasion there has killed as many people - most of them civilians - as died on the allied side at the Somme.
This is not to relitigate the decision to go to war. There will be plenty of that later in the week. The point is that mistaken decisions to go to war have a more terrible cost than almost any other sort of mistake, and to remember the price that the people of Iraq have paid. The years of war pile on their heads like lime. The bomb in Baghdad appears to be a retaliation by Islamic State (Isis) for the loss of the third battle of Falluja. First it was taken by the Americans; then they were expelled by a Sunni uprising. Then they fought their way back in; then it was handed over to the Iraqi government. Two years ago, Isis recaptured it. Now the Iraqi forces, assisted by Shia militias, have recaptured the unhappy city again, but the surviving inhabitants are scattered into refugee camps in the surrounding desert.
In Baghdad, it was announced that the completely worthless fake bomb detectors sold to the security forces by a British businessman in 2012 - and based on a novelty golf ball detector - will no longer be used after this atrocity. But the same announcement was first made in 2013.
As both tragedy and farce repeat in an apparently unending cycle, it is tempting to ask whether the deaths in Iraq have led to any greater progress than did the slaughter on the Somme. In purely military terms, the answer is unpromising. Falluja was a victory of sorts, but it is only one part of a wider attempt to dislodge Isis from the cities that it overran two years ago, when the Iraqi army, supposedly trained and equipped at incredible expense, simply ran away as the enemy approached. The expense had been real enough, but it had all been translated into foreign bank accounts rather than training or equipment.
The decisive battle will come when an attempt is made to recapture Mosul. This was meant to have been started last year, and then again this spring. Now it seems to have been postponed again in the face of great military difficulties and dissension between the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, who are both fighting Isis together and manoeuvring against each other for position in the scarcely imaginable peacetime Iraq that must eventually emerge from all this horror.
The only consolation, and it is consolation of a very grim sort, is that there is now a clear war aim. Whatever else happens, the military defeat of Isis, and the annihilation of its self-declared caliphate, is a precondition for peace in the ruins. In the meantime, what Britain can do is to continue to supply aid, and see that it reaches the neediest. The war, along with sectarian cleansing, has made refugees of three million people. At a time when our discussion of Iraq, as of everything else, threatens to collapse into solipsism, we need to remember our obligations to a country that we have helped to ruin.
SOURCE 1.
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OP: I think the second article is a useful reminder that war is very profitable to some. As the editorial above mentions (i.e. "The expense had been real enough, but it had all been translated into foreign bank accounts rather than training or equipment.") what the article below describes is probably not an isolated incident.
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Earnings from fake bomb detectors to be confiscated, judge orders
Jim McCormick from Somerset was jailed in May over fraud that included the sale of £55m-worth of devices to Iraq and Syria
Jim McCormick. The judge described the scam as ‘a callous confidence trick’. Photograph: Gavin Rodgers/Rex
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A judge at the Old Bailey has ordered the confiscation of £8m fraudulently earned by a British businessman who risked lives selling fake bomb detectors to war-torn Iraq.
Jim McCormick, who was jailed for fraud in May 2013, will have to pay £2.5m to the Iraqi government in compensation for selling what was little more than a repackaged novelty golf ball detector. McCormick earned more than £21m from the bogus trade worldwide.
The 60-year-old married father of two from Langport, Somerset, is serving 10 years in jail following a scam that included the sale of £55m-worth of devices based on a novelty golf ball finder to Iraq, Niger, Syria, Mexico and other countries including Lebanon where a United Nations agency was a client.
McCormick appeared by video link from Dartmoor prison and Judge Richard Hone QC told him he had lived a “criminal lifestyle”. He said McCormick had realisable assets of £7.9m that he must hand over within three months or face another 10 years in jail.
The court heard he had sold his Bath home for £4m and he must also pay 50% of the proceeds from the sale of a property he owns with his wife Paula in Somerset, estimated to be worth about £162,000. Other assets included a fleet of vehicles and a £345,000 Sunseeker Portofino cruiser he named Aesthete. He also bought a £200,000 holiday home in Florida and a £320,000 villa in Cyprus. McCormick will be forced to sell a £320,000 flat in Bath he gave to his daughter on her 18th birthday.
McCormick’s devices were used at checkpoints in Baghdad through which car bombs and suicide bombers passed, killing hundreds of civilians.
At sentencing, the judge called McCormick’s trade “a callous confidence trick” that “in all probability materially contributed to causing death and injury to innocent individuals”.
The handheld devices were useless. Their antennae, which purported to detect explosives, and in other cases narcotics, were not connected to anything, they had no power source and one of the devices was simply the golf ball finder with a different sticker on it. Yet McCormick claimed they could detect explosives at long range, deep underground, through lead-lined rooms and multiple buildings. The devices were marketed at international trade fairs that were backed by UK government departments. It was also alleged that McCormick paid millions of pounds in bribes to senior Iraqis to secure the deals.
Judge Hone also ordered compensation be paid to McCormick’s former clients in Bahrain and the United Nations forces in Lebanon, Niger, Iraq and Georgia.
Outside court, Det Insp Ed Heath, of Avon and Somerset police, said: “I’m pleased with the judgment today. Our asset confiscation and enforcement team have worked tirelessly to ensure McCormick has not been able to benefit financially from his massive fraud. It just shows that we will go after criminals and their money to ensure they do not live a luxury lifestyle. Some of the countries, particularly the Republic of Niger, are very poor countries and were duped into buying these devices .”
In 2010, Pakistan’s airport security force continued to use McCormick’s ADE-651 fake bomb detector. In 2013, after McCormick’s conviction, it was reported that security guards in Lebanon were still using similar detectors.
The fraudster sold about 6,000 detectors to Iraq for as much as £10,000 each while the production cost for the device was as low as £15. He bought a mansion in Bath previously owned by the Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, a holiday home in Cyprus and a Sunseeker yacht as part of assets worth £7m identified by police.
The handheld devices came equipped with an antenna that McCormick claimed pointed to explosives or narcotics depending on how it was “programmed”. A card reader device could be loaded with a laminated card - orange to look for explosives, blue for narcotics. Expert witnesses described the kit as “completely ineffectual” and an “affront” to science.
SOURCE 2.
OP: Shitstain.
-----------------
The Guardian view on war in Iraq: a country that we helped to ruin
The cycle of corruption and atrocity continues. But there is a distant end in sight
Baghdad’s Karada district on on Monday, the day after one of Iraq’s bloodiest suicide-bomb attacks. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images
--------------------
We remember the Battle of the Somme as a futile and bloody disaster: around 300,000 men were killed over a period of six months. Casualties were almost evenly divided: 165,000 Germans may have died, and 145,000 English and French troops; all to shift the frontline six miles across the mud. The news of the latest car bomb in Baghdad, where at least 150 people were killed as they filled the evening steets for an Iftar meal in the middle of Ramadan, is reminder that the 13 years’ war that followed our invasion there has killed as many people - most of them civilians - as died on the allied side at the Somme.
This is not to relitigate the decision to go to war. There will be plenty of that later in the week. The point is that mistaken decisions to go to war have a more terrible cost than almost any other sort of mistake, and to remember the price that the people of Iraq have paid. The years of war pile on their heads like lime. The bomb in Baghdad appears to be a retaliation by Islamic State (Isis) for the loss of the third battle of Falluja. First it was taken by the Americans; then they were expelled by a Sunni uprising. Then they fought their way back in; then it was handed over to the Iraqi government. Two years ago, Isis recaptured it. Now the Iraqi forces, assisted by Shia militias, have recaptured the unhappy city again, but the surviving inhabitants are scattered into refugee camps in the surrounding desert.
In Baghdad, it was announced that the completely worthless fake bomb detectors sold to the security forces by a British businessman in 2012 - and based on a novelty golf ball detector - will no longer be used after this atrocity. But the same announcement was first made in 2013.
As both tragedy and farce repeat in an apparently unending cycle, it is tempting to ask whether the deaths in Iraq have led to any greater progress than did the slaughter on the Somme. In purely military terms, the answer is unpromising. Falluja was a victory of sorts, but it is only one part of a wider attempt to dislodge Isis from the cities that it overran two years ago, when the Iraqi army, supposedly trained and equipped at incredible expense, simply ran away as the enemy approached. The expense had been real enough, but it had all been translated into foreign bank accounts rather than training or equipment.
The decisive battle will come when an attempt is made to recapture Mosul. This was meant to have been started last year, and then again this spring. Now it seems to have been postponed again in the face of great military difficulties and dissension between the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, who are both fighting Isis together and manoeuvring against each other for position in the scarcely imaginable peacetime Iraq that must eventually emerge from all this horror.
The only consolation, and it is consolation of a very grim sort, is that there is now a clear war aim. Whatever else happens, the military defeat of Isis, and the annihilation of its self-declared caliphate, is a precondition for peace in the ruins. In the meantime, what Britain can do is to continue to supply aid, and see that it reaches the neediest. The war, along with sectarian cleansing, has made refugees of three million people. At a time when our discussion of Iraq, as of everything else, threatens to collapse into solipsism, we need to remember our obligations to a country that we have helped to ruin.
SOURCE 1.
---------------------
OP: I think the second article is a useful reminder that war is very profitable to some. As the editorial above mentions (i.e. "The expense had been real enough, but it had all been translated into foreign bank accounts rather than training or equipment.") what the article below describes is probably not an isolated incident.
---------------------
Earnings from fake bomb detectors to be confiscated, judge orders
Jim McCormick from Somerset was jailed in May over fraud that included the sale of £55m-worth of devices to Iraq and Syria
Jim McCormick. The judge described the scam as ‘a callous confidence trick’. Photograph: Gavin Rodgers/Rex
---------------
A judge at the Old Bailey has ordered the confiscation of £8m fraudulently earned by a British businessman who risked lives selling fake bomb detectors to war-torn Iraq.
Jim McCormick, who was jailed for fraud in May 2013, will have to pay £2.5m to the Iraqi government in compensation for selling what was little more than a repackaged novelty golf ball detector. McCormick earned more than £21m from the bogus trade worldwide.
The 60-year-old married father of two from Langport, Somerset, is serving 10 years in jail following a scam that included the sale of £55m-worth of devices based on a novelty golf ball finder to Iraq, Niger, Syria, Mexico and other countries including Lebanon where a United Nations agency was a client.
McCormick appeared by video link from Dartmoor prison and Judge Richard Hone QC told him he had lived a “criminal lifestyle”. He said McCormick had realisable assets of £7.9m that he must hand over within three months or face another 10 years in jail.
The court heard he had sold his Bath home for £4m and he must also pay 50% of the proceeds from the sale of a property he owns with his wife Paula in Somerset, estimated to be worth about £162,000. Other assets included a fleet of vehicles and a £345,000 Sunseeker Portofino cruiser he named Aesthete. He also bought a £200,000 holiday home in Florida and a £320,000 villa in Cyprus. McCormick will be forced to sell a £320,000 flat in Bath he gave to his daughter on her 18th birthday.
McCormick’s devices were used at checkpoints in Baghdad through which car bombs and suicide bombers passed, killing hundreds of civilians.
At sentencing, the judge called McCormick’s trade “a callous confidence trick” that “in all probability materially contributed to causing death and injury to innocent individuals”.
The handheld devices were useless. Their antennae, which purported to detect explosives, and in other cases narcotics, were not connected to anything, they had no power source and one of the devices was simply the golf ball finder with a different sticker on it. Yet McCormick claimed they could detect explosives at long range, deep underground, through lead-lined rooms and multiple buildings. The devices were marketed at international trade fairs that were backed by UK government departments. It was also alleged that McCormick paid millions of pounds in bribes to senior Iraqis to secure the deals.
Judge Hone also ordered compensation be paid to McCormick’s former clients in Bahrain and the United Nations forces in Lebanon, Niger, Iraq and Georgia.
Outside court, Det Insp Ed Heath, of Avon and Somerset police, said: “I’m pleased with the judgment today. Our asset confiscation and enforcement team have worked tirelessly to ensure McCormick has not been able to benefit financially from his massive fraud. It just shows that we will go after criminals and their money to ensure they do not live a luxury lifestyle. Some of the countries, particularly the Republic of Niger, are very poor countries and were duped into buying these devices .”
In 2010, Pakistan’s airport security force continued to use McCormick’s ADE-651 fake bomb detector. In 2013, after McCormick’s conviction, it was reported that security guards in Lebanon were still using similar detectors.
The fraudster sold about 6,000 detectors to Iraq for as much as £10,000 each while the production cost for the device was as low as £15. He bought a mansion in Bath previously owned by the Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, a holiday home in Cyprus and a Sunseeker yacht as part of assets worth £7m identified by police.
The handheld devices came equipped with an antenna that McCormick claimed pointed to explosives or narcotics depending on how it was “programmed”. A card reader device could be loaded with a laminated card - orange to look for explosives, blue for narcotics. Expert witnesses described the kit as “completely ineffectual” and an “affront” to science.
SOURCE 2.
OP: Shitstain.