Man of straw

Bob Latchford

I wonder what the Nazi's put the 'official' death total of the Jews at during the second world war? And I wonder how low someone would have had to be to quote those figures as facts? Taking the American figures for the dead in Iraq is as laughable as it is lamentable. The journal of the British Medical Association, and the John Hopkins university put the figure over 1 million. Melanie talks about 'useful idiots' a lot in the blog, but by parroting 'offical' figures, especially when those doing the counting are famous for saying 'we dont do body counts', Ms Phillips is proving herself to be the most useful of all

Clive Marcus

Completely agree!
John Humphreys is the worst of pomposity, bigotry & bias. And Straw was very weak in response.
Blair would have wiped the floor with John. Straw was just wet. Maybe he hadn't had his coffee yet?

Alcuin

Straw vs Humphrys, a shame they can't both lose. I can stand about 10 minutes a week of the Humpty and Numpty show before I want to throw the radio out of the window.

Straw is a typical example of a modern politician. Born into a political family, common room lawyer, student's union and then straight into Parliament. Head full of specious Marxist theory, no real experience of how the world works, how ordinary people earn their crust or how the system screws them. God help us.

Thad

It must be depressing still trying to counter the Beeb's lying by rote. I grew up watching them lying through their teeth every night from Belfast - Gerry Adams once called them "the propaganda wing of the British Army", and he was right. My English friends finally got the message when the Beeb broadcast the sequence of events at Orgreave backwards. I understand the World Service had a decent reputation at one time, but the rest of the organisation has always been a lying gang of arrogant Oxbridge idiots.
However I suppose it's worth trying to call them for what they are occassionally, in case there's a few innocents out there who haven't got it yet.

BJ

I think John Humphreys was actually suggesting that more Iraqis have died since the invasion and occupation than would have died if the the Saddam regime had remained in place. This is probably true but not really the point.
It is unarguable however, that the war has been a hell disaster which gave Al-Queda a presence in Iraq where none existed before. Con Coughlin also conveniently forgets that Saddam was backed by the West in the Iran/Iraq war, the source of most of the Saddam era casualties.

Howard

Humphrys made one mistake that has been blown out of all proportion. Iraq did not have WMD when we went to war and even Blair is now on record as admitting that. Iraq was no threat to the UK when the war started and the reasons given for starting it was false.

Everyone apart from you can see that we went to war not only on a falsehood but absolute lies. Never mind that it was illegal and the justification in the published documents was fabricated. Just watch tonight's Newsnight!

Frank Pulley

Taffy the Humph has now become a wizened little joke. He even slips snide political innuendos into his Mastermind quiz-meister gig now. He would have enjoyed the Newsnight Special tonight about an Iraqi deep-throat, designated ‘curveball. The warring 'intelligence agencies' involved in yet another flaky and risible 'expose' (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_4670000/newsid_4679900/4679986.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm&news=1&bbcws=1) of an alleged conspiracy to cover up the 'spurious' and 'illegal' reasons why the allies decided to liberate Iraq from the clutches of Stalin II. It was probably timed by the government’s agents within the Beeb to minimise the impact of the news that MPs are trying to seek an injunction to prevent their second-home fiddles from being made public; that eye-popping scandal of arrogant venality got about two minutes as an afterthought. How much longer can Our Great Leader, the Govan Gargoyle, cling on? His fingernails are like the Emperor's clothes - he has none!

bmat

Lot of daft talk about this. The facts get very obscured by whatever political point you want to make.
In the end it comes down to a really despotic dictator with territorial ambitions, who gassed his own people and paid $25K to families of suicide bombers. It used to be that this kind of guy was what wars were about. All other talk is speculative crap. We are in Iraq, and thats that, now what do we do? Do you reheat the past kettle of history, or do you get off your butt and do something good. Make your case to stay or get out, but stop trying to invent a history for your political agenda. Bush and Blair will be right by history (or wrong), but we won't know until we get there. In the meantime, instead of this repetitive, indecisive nonsense, try a vision to get us out and get the Iraqis a country they can manage. Or perhaps its in your political interest to lose the action to Islamofascists and get lots of Iraqis killed just so you can get someone elected or score political points. If that is you, you're some sick SOB.

Austin Barry

Alcuin, spot on about Straw. The last forty years have been unpleasantly punctuated by his gloomy equine visage, bovine intellect and endless commonplaces. He seems, paradoxically, to have combined ubiquity with obscurity much in the manner of those character actors in English films of the 1960s. Such are our masters.

David

Humphrey's has pushed the limit of his remit for years.I thought NO BBC employee was supposed to actually express an opinion on any subject as it goes against the whole ethos of BBC neutrality.We know they tell lies on every level about Israel but Humphrey seems to be goading the BBC into sacking him......I SAY SACK HIM.He's a pompous old queen with a bully for an employer.

Greg

Humphreys's interviews are usually the weakest part of the Today programme, regardless of whom he is interviewing. He is far too confrontational and appears to be under the impression that the audience what to hear his voice more than the interviewee's...

BWilliamson

Whatever the real figure of Iraqi deaths is, we'll never really know. For political reasons one side will decrease, the other, inflate. What we do know is that figure increased enormously after Bush had declared 'victory'. In other words insurgents, Al Qaeda and factional elements slaughtered far more of their fellow countrymen than the coalition. So the figure of deaths at western hands is at the least dubious. Iraq descended basically into a proxy war between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi. I wonder if either of those nations is agonising as we do?

John

This is the John Humphries who took a whole page of the Mail to moan about NHS treatment of his grandson. I wish we could all get such leverage in our complaints. In respect of Iraq I believe we made a big mistake there both going in and not having an exit strategy. I don't think Saddam was much of a threat to the west, I think Iran is more of that and Saddam kept them in line.

EyeSee

Bob. Thing is, when you choose to criticise, you have to have a solid case. Saying that Melanie quoting the American figures (ie the vested interest) is wrong, when in fact she quoted Con Coughlin quoting Iraqi figures, doesn't put you in front. Then, to nail your own coffin closed you quote the figures from the BMJ which even they now know were wildly inaccurate and basically a guess, by an anti-war vested interest. Just because our government tell obvious lies, doesn't mean it is a good tactic. Try reading 'Intellectual Morons', 'Scared to Death' and 'The Rise of Political Lying'.

Huw Thornton

I think that John Humphreys sees himself as being in the entertainment industry, and where he cannot find good points to make simply rams ignorant, inconsistent comments down his interviewees' throats. I just wish that Jack Straw had said "That's easy for you to say" when John Humphreys made a comment about our soldiers in Iraq being out of the front line. Commentators who make light of danger for others to make a political point really get my goat.

J. Isaacs

Just heard a speech, the best political speech I have ever heard, by someone who is no man of straw. He is a man of steel. It was in French and it was by Nicolas Sarkozy to the two Houses of Parliament. Please can we have him for our Prime Minister (and US President combined) instead of all the English-speaking candidates.

Bart Roozendaal

It never ceases to amaze me how critics of any war the West has waged on blood soaked tyrants, whether Saddam Hussein, Ho Chi Minh or Galtieri, seem to imply that there is somehow something immoral about the undertaking.
Had Saddam Hussein been in power today, the Iraqi death toll would probably have stood at 2 million.
A succesful Western intervention in 1918 against the Bolshevik coup d'état in Russia would have saved 20 million lives, a similar move against Mao Tse Tung in China in 1946 approximately 60 million.
We can question the political or strategic wisdom of the Iraq war, but never its morality.

Clive Marcus

I commited the grave crime of posting a link to Melanie Phillips excelent article on a BBC MB yesterday. It was very prompyly deleted.
Never knew the BBC could move so fast!
All this perhaps proves Ms Phillips point
I don't care if John Humphreys hugs third world dictators & loathes Israel, the US, Blair & Democracy.
But when he is presenting the news on BBC Radio, he has a duty to pretend towards impartiality

field

Straw is suffering from T W A T syndrome (victims of which are Treasonably Weak, Appeasing Totalitarianism).

He proved an unmitigated disaster vis a vis Iran - being completely bamboozled by the Wily Mullahs. He is the Mr. Magoo of British politics forever mistaking terrorists with bulging ammunition jackets for voluptuously appealing democrats.

As for Mr. Latchford - the John Hopkins/Lancet studies were long ago discredited. It would take several pages to explain why. But in brief: if their totals were true that would mean that about 900,000 had died without a death certificate being issued and had been buried secretly, having not appeared in any morgues (because they have to account for the fact that all these death certificates are "missing"). Also all these 900,000 deaths would have to be absent from media reports.

Of course when you read the studies in detail they claim in each case they were SHOWN death certificates (although no details were supplied). So these CAN'T be part of the 900,000.

Of course all becomes clear when you discover the surveys were actually carried out by beneficiaries of the old Saddam system (but not people with any training in polling).

Janet

Ha, ha, Clive! Don't think you'll get away with posting links to this site on the BBC site. Too many home truths going on here for them to let you do that. As for Jack Straw on Today, here is the entry from 'Ephraim Hardcastle' (foreign readers should note this is a nom de plume used by diarists in one of our newspapers) last Friday: "Major General Barney White-Spunner, 50, our commander at Basra Airport, tersely informed Radio 4's James Naughtie after they'd listened to a deeply pessimistic report about the five-year occupation: 'I wonder how much of the BBC pension fund will be invested in Iraqi stocks in ten years time. I'd be prepared to bet with you it will be quite high.' Mentioning the pension fund took the wind out of Jim." The piece goes on a few lines longer, but you get the gist. Perhaps the entire BBC and Channel 4 News will give an undertaking that neither of their staff pension funds will have anything to do with Iraq?

Barry Larking

It is certain that very large numbers of Iraqis have died since the US led invention in 2003. Who has killed the majority of these unfortunate people? It is a question always left begging.

Taking a deep breath ... There were seventeen (some claim eighteen) UN resolutions passed against Saddam's regime (the one Mr Galloway eulogised and Mr Benn appeased). The UN had enforced sanctions against the regime though allowed an 'oil for food' waiver, subsequently shown to have been systematically milked by fraudsters. The longest bombing campaign in the RAF's history had been waged against daily infringements of the 'No Fly Zones' established by the international coalition following Iraq's eviction form Kuwait. (Large numbers of Kuwaits and others who 'disappeared' at that time have not, as far as I am aware, ever been seen again.)

A monster has been overthrown and the reaction of the far left and anti-democratic forces in the west is to cry over his corpse. What they can never answer is "What if Saddam were still there?" Don't know, don't care.

A 'free world' where the USA and western Europe are the villains and the Iranians and their surrogates are the 'heroes' is not simply insane but doomed.

Ted Tedford

Barry Larkin: Great post.

Bob Latchford: Leaving aside the fact that Miss Phillips is quoting Iraqi statristics. GEN Tommy ranks comment 'we don't do body counts' is now as abused and mis-represented as Lady Thatcher's 'there's no such thing as society'. He was talking in Bagram in Afghanistan in 2002 in response to attempts by journalists to get him to measure success in Op ENDURING FREEDOM by saying how many enemy combatants the Coalition had killed. His point was that measures of effectiveness in such operations need to be far more nuanced and cannot be boiled down to simple casualties ratios, however much the simpletons in the mainstream media might wish it were otherwise. It is simply ignorant (not to say paradoxical) to use GEN Franks' statement in the context of this thread.